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.