Omkar had not been allowed to date. His parents were afraid of him marrying a girl from another culture and they had not been the kind to hope that he would meet a nice Indian girl at college. Because they no longer lived in India, the pool of suitable matches for Omkar was small. They were looking for a girl who came from the same religion, caste and subculture. They wanted her physical appearance and her educational and/or professional accolades to be impressive.
Being in America, they had no large community of girls whose parents they knew well. They also had no matchmaker. As a result, they had toyed with the idea of taking Omkar back to India to try to find him a wife, before deciding first to turn to computers to serve the role that a matchmaker might have served before. Their plan, the minute that Omkar graduated from college and secured his first salary, was to put him on the market.
Neeraj and Jarminder had persuaded Omkar to cooperate in helping them to create a Bio Data profile on him. They were doctoring it and tempering their impatience by sending it to a few people they knew in the hopes that the day wouldn’t come where he would graduate and they would have to cast it out to a wider audience of families they didn’t know.
A Bio Data was rather like a job application, except it contained all kinds of details about the color of Omkar’s skin tone, his star sign, religion, caste, hobbies, education, achievements and the details of what kind of female the family would prefer. His mother had designed it like the menu of an Indian restaurant, complete with a peacock feather and a reddish orange backdrop. He had just managed to squeak by without putting a turban on for the picture of himself on the upper right side.
Omkar had done with Aria what most Indian boys did when they found themselves in love with a white girl: he had said nothing to anyone about her. He had snuck her into the folds of his life. He had hidden their romance under the disguise of late-night study groups and errands he needed to run for the sake of maintaining the upstanding reputation that he held in his parents’ eyes. But all that was about to come crashing down around Omkar’s feet.
Neeraj walked from his bed to the bathroom, leaving Jarminder asleep under twisted covers. Not yet awake, his aging body felt stiff. There was so much less energy there to motivate his movement than there had been years before. His grogginess dulled the crispness of the way things looked. When he went to sit down on the rim of the toilet seat, he pushed his hair out of his face. It fell to the middle of his back. He scoffed with irritation, noticing that only remnants of toilet paper were stuck to the cardboard roll. Jarminder had finished the roll of toilet paper and not replaced it. It was one of those petty irritations that he had learned, over the many years he had been married, to let slide instead of confronting her about it. He stood back up and searched the cupboards for another roll. Another wave of frustration hit him and he muttered to himself, realizing that he would have to go downstairs to the storeroom to get another roll. He put his bathroom robe on and made heavy footsteps walking past Jarminder. It was a passive-aggressive attempt to make her feel guilty for the fact that he would have to go all the way downstairs because of what she had failed to do. But the sound did not wake her.
He walked down the stairs the same as he did every day. The stale air in the shop was still. He made a quick survey of a shelf whose presentation filled him with dissatisfaction before opening the door of the storeroom.
The sound of the door opening jolted Aria awake. Both Neeraj and Aria jumped, startled by one another. A deep freeze of shame washed over Aria’s surprise while his was replaced immediately by anger. He swore in Punjabi and then switched to English. “What are you doing here? Why are you here? I recognize you. Did you steal something? I’m going to call the police.”
Giving her no time to answer, he walked toward the phone. Aria shot to her knees and started packing her few things into her backpack. Adrenaline coursed through her veins. She felt terrible that because she had stayed there, she and Omkar’s father had started off on such a vile foot. But she couldn’t afford to stay around to try to fix it. In case the police showed up, she decided to run.
Neeraj was in the middle of dialing on the archaic landline phone that he had insisted on keeping in the store when Aria walked past him. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean anything, I’m sorry,” she said, her eyes lowered in shame.
“Don’t you go anywhere. Stop. Stop where you are!” Neeraj yelled, hanging up the phone and picking up a magazine to follow her out.
The clang of the bell on the shop door when she unlocked it woke Omkar from his sleep. At first, he thought he had dreamed the sound. The wave of terror did
