“It’s not too late, beta. If you make marriage before Yash does, everyone will forget how sad they feel for you. Your Navdeep Mamu in Cincinnati called me yesterday. Our family is being so much supportive. They’re all coming together with rishtas. Now that we’re in forties with age criteria, mostly it’s divorcés and widowers. But I put foot down. No men with children.” Naina’s mother never paused when she talked. It was as though she had to quickly deliver her speeches before she was interrupted and dismissed.

So, Naina had developed a mechanism for putting pauses in for her and tuning out the parts of the monologue that weren’t relevant. Her mother said a few more entirely ridiculous things about marriage criteria.

The only marriage criterion I have is to never be in one, Mummy. Thanks for helping me keep it simple.

“. . . Navdeep Mamu said there is surgeon who just joined his practice. Newly widowed. Very handsome. No children. Most dedicated to medicine and only medicine. No interest in politics and news and all those type things. Your mamu showed him your picture and he’s very much flipped for you.”

Oh, how Naina wished her mother had developed some skill for knowing what someone flipping for you actually involved. Then again, love was a figment of poets’ imaginations that they subjected the world to because they couldn’t stop dwelling in pain without making everyone else just as miserable as them.

An unwelcome montage of the Raje siblings climbing all over their significant others against a pool house wall did a dramatic dance in her head.

Well, no one said the Rajes weren’t burdened with enough glorious luck to make everyone else look like the losers they were. The Rajes weren’t the norm and Naina wasn’t stupid enough to believe that good fortune, or joy, rubbed off through contact. Spending a lifetime being friends with Yash had at least taught her that much.

“Remember how I always said I would only ever marry Yash? Just because he’s in love with someone else doesn’t mean I’ll suddenly settle for someone else too.” She squeezed her mother’s shoulder, because Mummy looked like she needed something to keep her from collapsing under the weight of this revelation, which Naina had made at least fifty times since Yash’s grand declaration of love for India Dashwood on national television. “I really appreciate how hard Navdeep Mamu and you have worked for me. I mean, a widowed doctor—with no children! How did your brother even find him?”

Her mother scowled. “Do you think I don’t have enough people in my life treating me like stupid? Do you think I need my own child to do it too?”