Chapter 6: The Complications

Three weeks of dates. Three weeks of Sangeetha Brew on Saturdays and Coffee Loft on weekdays and the slow, careful, exhilarating process of two people learning each other's edges. Meera learned that Arjun read poetry — not the romance-novel kind, the real kind: Adiga, Kambar, the Kannada vachana tradition that his mother had read to him in Dharwad. He kept a notebook of lines he liked, written in Kannada script that was small and precise and that Meera could not read but that she found beautiful in the way that calligraphy was beautiful regardless of comprehension.

Arjun learned that Meera's data-analyst precision was not coldness but armour. That behind the colour-coded bookshelves and the exactly-seven-forty-five arrivals was a woman who had been so frightened by a neem tree at seven that she had spent the next nineteen years building systems — schedules, routines, plans — to ensure that nothing ever surprised her again. The Coffee Loft was a system. Table three was a system. The terrible romance novels were a system — predictable stories where the outcome was guaranteed, where the hero always loved the heroine, where the jasmine metaphors were excessive but the ending was safe.

"You read romance because you're scared of surprise," Arjun said. They were at the Coffee Loft, after hours, the shop closed, Kaveri gone home. Arjun was experimenting with a new drink — a jaggery-and-ginger cold brew that Meera suspected was going to be either brilliant or terrible. He was measuring jaggery with a jeweller's precision.

"I read romance because I enjoy it."

"You enjoy the safety. The formula. Boy meets girl, obstacle appears, obstacle is overcome, happily ever after. No lightning strikes. No neem trees."

"That's reductive."

"That's data analysis. Isn't that what you do? Find patterns?"

"I find patterns in consumer purchasing behaviour. Not in my own psychology."

"Maybe you should."

She was annoyed. The specific, sharp annoyance of a person who had been accurately diagnosed by a barista with a poetry notebook. The annoyance was also — and she was honest enough with herself to admit this — tinged with something else. Recognition. The uncomfortable recognition that Arjun Hegde, dropout, coffee-maker, son of a Dharwad tailor, had seen something in three weeks that Dr. Kamala had circled around for eighteen months.

"Don't analyse me," she said.

"I'm not analysing you. I'm paying attention."

"Same thing."

"It's not. Analysis keeps distance. Attention closes it."

The jaggery cold brew was brilliant. She would never tell him that.

*

The complication arrived on a Wednesday. Not a storm — a person. Meera's mother. Lakshmi Iyer. A woman who had retired from her headmistress position at a convent school in Mysore and who now occupied herself with two activities: attending Bharatanatyam recitals at the Mysore Palace and managing her daughter's marriage prospects with the efficiency of a military campaign.

"Meera, the Subramanian boy's family called. They want to meet you. This Saturday."

"I'm busy Saturday."

"Busy doing what?"

"I have plans."

"Plans with whom?"

"With — a friend."

"Which friend? Priya? I spoke to Priya's mother last week. Priya is available Saturday. She said so."

"Amma, I'm twenty-six. I can have plans that don't involve people whose mothers you've interrogated."

"Twenty-six is exactly the age at which plans should involve the Subramanian boy. His family has property in Jayanagar. He works at Google. He makes—"

"I don't care what he makes."

"You should care. You live in a rented one-BHK with a roommate. The Subramanian boy has a three-BHK in Koramangala."

"I'm not marrying a three-BHK, Amma. I'm not marrying anyone right now."

"Then when? After thirty? After thirty-five? After the entire Iyer community has decided that my daughter is too choosy?"

The conversation continued in the specific, circular, gravity-well pattern of all conversations between South Indian mothers and their unmarried daughters. Meera said she was happy. Her mother said happiness was temporary and property was permanent. Meera said she was seeing someone. Her mother asked who. Meera said it was new. Her mother asked his name, his family, his job, his community, his salary, his horoscope, and his mother's maiden name, in that order. Meera hung up.

She told Arjun that night. On the phone — they had progressed to phone calls, the nightly kind, the kind where you lay in bed and talked about nothing until one person fell asleep and the other listened to the breathing and felt the specific, painful, beautiful ache of missing someone who lived three kilometres away.

"My mother wants me to meet a Google engineer from Koramangala."

"Do you want to?"

"No."

"Then don't."

"It's not that simple. She'll keep calling. She'll escalate. She'll involve aunties. The aunty network in Mysore is more effective than the CIA."

"What does she want?"

"She wants me to marry someone safe. Someone with a plan. Someone whose career makes sense."

"And I don't make sense."

"You're a barista, Arjun. You dropped out of engineering. You live in a rented room above a provision store in Malleshwaram. My mother's criteria for a son-in-law do not include 'makes excellent cold brew.'"

"Then we have a problem."

"We have my mother. Which is the same thing."