Winds of hope. Winds of fertility. Where would Sulo reap that alien corn? In what distant field? Her mother grew more anxious every day. When could she proudly announce that they, too, had made a good match for Sulo? If love and romance had not played their destined role in her life, the professional matchmakers must. Business was thriving in the city of Colombo at the moment. Rosie Aunty’s business was flourishing. Herself elderly, her children all comfortably settled and living abroad, she found that matchmaking was indeed an exciting and lucrative pastime. It gave her a respectable standing in society. It also gave her an insight into much else as she got to know all the personal details of other people’s lives to be dossiered in her mind. Each life had its fictions, its plot, its characters, but the main theme was the marriage of young couples who entered into the contract which several parties had to arrange. Family secrets, skeletons in the cupboard, desirable and undesirable features were all laid bare. There were all the young men who wanted wives from their own country, ethnic group, religion. So the go-betweens were necessary. There were, of course, the advertisements which appeared in the marriage columns, but some of those proposals were questionable, especially where they said that wealth, religion, caste, age, etc., were immaterial. It made even desperate parents suspicious—‘There must be a snag somewhere,’ they would think.

So, they would all go to Rosie Aunty.