Chapter 19: Shaadi Ka Spreadsheet

## Chapter 19: Shaadi Ka Spreadsheet

OMKAR

I buy the ring on a Wednesday.

Not because Wednesday has any romantic significance, it doesn't; Wednesday is the middle of the week, the hump, the day that exists primarily to separate Tuesday from Thursday; but because Wednesday is the day the jeweller on Laxmi Road has the least foot traffic, and I need time. Time to examine. Time to compare. Time to deploy the spreadsheet.

The spreadsheet is titled RING SELECTION MATRIX. It has columns for Metal Type (gold, silver, platinum, rose gold), Stone Type (diamond, sapphire, ruby, emerald, none), Stone Size (in carats, to two decimal places), Band Width (in millimetres), Price (in rupees, inclusive of GST), and a column I've labelled "Zara Factor"; a subjective score from 1 to 10 that represents my estimate of how much Zara would love each ring, based on my knowledge of her aesthetic preferences, her skin tone, her hand size, and the specific way she uses her hands (constantly, expressively, a hands that makes things and who therefore needs a ring that doesn't interfere with creation).

The jeweller, a third-generation Marwari businessman named Gopalji whose shop has been on Laxmi Road since before Independence and whose glass cases contain more gold per square metre than the Reserve Bank of India, watches me with the patient amusement of a man who has sold rings to nervous grooms for forty years.

"Bhai sahab," he says, "you have been looking at rings for two hours. The shop closes at eight."

"I need more data."

"Data? This is jewellery, not a budget allocation."

"All decisions are budget allocations. The question is always the same: what is the optimal allocation of finite resources to maximise the desired outcome?"

Gopalji looks at me. Then he looks at the spreadsheet on my phone. Then he looks back at me.

"What does she like?" he asks.

"She likes colour. She likes things that are unique. She likes things that are made by hand. She doesn't like diamonds: she says diamonds are 'rocks with a marketing budget.' She likes sapphires because they're the colour of chai held up to the light."

Gopalji disappears behind the counter. He returns with a tray, not the trays he's been showing me, which contain the standard engagement rings of the Indian jewellery industry (large, gold, designed to impress mothers-in-law). This tray contains three rings. Small. Delicate. Different.

The third ring. I know it immediately. The way I know the right answer on a balance sheet — not through calculation but through recognition, the instant, visceral certainty that this number is correct and all others are wrong.

It's a rose gold band, thin, delicate, the width of a thread, with a single sapphire. The sapphire is small; not the ostentatious stone of a solitaire but the modest, perfect stone of a ring that understands that beauty is not about size. The colour is, it's the colour of chai. Not any chai. Zara's saffron chai. The specific gold-amber-blue that the saffron creates when it blooms in the elaichi and adrak, the colour that I have been drinking every morning for months and that I have never been able to describe and that this stone, somehow, captures.

"This one," I say.

"You're sure? No more data?"

"The data is irrelevant. This is the ring."

He wraps it. I pay. I put the box in my pocket. The left pocket, close to my heart, which is a sentimental gesture that I would normally find irrational but which, in this context, feels like the only rational choice.

I ride home on the Activa. The ring box is in my pocket. The ring is in the box. And the question, the question that I have been preparing to ask for weeks, that I have rehearsed in front of the mirror (eleven times), discussed with Gauri (who blinked, which I interpret as approval), and planned on a spreadsheet that has since been deleted by Gauri (which I also interpret as approval, because Gauri's deletions are, I have come to understand, a form of editorial intervention); the question is ready.

---

The proposal happens on a Sunday.

Not because Sunday has romantic significance — it doesn't; Sunday is the day I do meal prep for the week, which involves four hours of chopping, cooking, and portioning food into labelled containers, an activity that Zara describes as "the most unromantic thing I've ever witnessed" and that I describe as "optimising caloric intake through batch processing."

But Sunday is also the day we go to the old bookshop.

The bookshop is on Appa Balwant Chowk, the narrow, chaotic, magnificent lane in the old city that is Pune's answer to the question "what would happen if you put every bookshop in the world on one street and removed all the space between them?" The lane is barely wide enough for two people to walk abreast. The bookshops are stacked vertically: ground floor, first floor, second floor, books in every direction, the exact gravitational pull of paper and ink and the accumulated knowledge of a civilization that has been writing things down for five thousand years.

Our bookshop, the one we've been coming to since we started dating, is called Appa's. It's on the second floor of a building that was constructed during the Peshwa era and that has been settling, gradually and gracefully, into the earth ever since. The stairs creak. The walls lean. The books; second-hand, dog-eared, annotated by previous owners whose marginalia ranges from profound to incomprehensible, are arranged in categories that Appa (the owner, a man of approximately seventy whose age and whose bookshop have both achieved a state of beautiful decay) has invented himself: "Books That Make You Think," "Books That Make You Feel," "Books That Make You Angry," and, in the back corner, "Books That Appa Hasn't Read Yet And Probably Won't But Keeps Anyway."

Zara loves this bookshop. She loves the chaos of it, the books piled on the floor, the dust motes in the light from the single window, the smell of old paper and binding glue and that must of a room that has been full of books for longer than most buildings have been standing. She browses the way she does everything — instinctively, reaching for books that catch her eye, reading first pages, putting them back or adding them to a pile that grows on the floor beside her feet.

I love this bookshop because Zara loves this bookshop. And because the books here are the kind of books that have histories; previous owners' names on the inside covers, underlined passages, pressed flowers between pages, the physical evidence of lives lived with books.

We are in the "Books That Make You Feel" section. Zara is sitting cross-legged on the floor, reading the first page of a novel whose cover has been loved away. I am standing beside her, pretending to browse, actually working up the nerve to do what I came here to do.

The ring is in my pocket. The left pocket. Close to my heart.

"Zara."

She looks up. The curls, escaped from the bun, as they always escape, the anarchic curls that will not be contained, fall across her face. She pushes them back. The gesture is automatic, habitual, the gesture I have watched a thousand times and that I will, if the next few minutes go as planned, watch a thousand thousand more.

"Yes?"

"I need to tell you something."

"You look serious. Is everything okay?"

"Everything is—" I stop. Start again. The words are there, I've rehearsed them: but the rehearsal was in front of a mirror and a cat and the reality is a bookshop and the woman I love and the dust motes and the creaking floor and a weight of a moment that will divide my life into before and after.

"Eighteen months ago," I say, "I walked into Rustom's. I ordered masala chai. You drew a smiley face on my cup. And I fell in love with you."

"Omkar—"

"Let me finish. I fell in love with you and I didn't know what to do with it. I'm a man who knows what to do with numbers. I know what to do with spreadsheets and balance sheets and risk assessments. But love is not a number. Love is the thing that makes the numbers irrelevant. And I spent eighteen months trying to fit you into a spreadsheet and failing, because you are the variable that breaks every model, the outlier that defies every trend line, the; the error that turns out to be the answer."

I take the ring box out of my pocket. I kneel. On the wooden floor of a Peshwa-era bookshop, between the "Books That Make You Feel" and the "Books That Make You Think," in the dust and the light and the smell of old paper.

"Zara. Will you marry me?"

She looks at the ring. At the sapphire, the saffron-chai colour, the stone that is her colour, the colour of every morning we've shared and every morning we will share. The dawn smelled of wet earth and the faint sweetness of neem flowers opening. She looks at me — kneeling, nervous, the accountant on the floor of a bookshop with a ring that cost him a month's salary and a question that cost him eighteen months of courage.

"Yes," she says. "A thousand times yes."

"Once is—"

"A thousand times yes. This is not hyperbole. This is emphasis. This is the most emphatic yes I have ever yesed."

She pulls me up. The kiss, our kiss, the kiss that started on a landing in Deccan and that has grown, over months, into something that is both familiar and new every time; happens in the bookshop. In the dust motes. In the light from the single window. Between the books that make you feel and the books that make you think.

Appa, who has been watching from behind the counter with someone who has witnessed proposals in his bookshop before and who considers them a natural extension of the book-buying experience, claps once and says, "Congratulations. Now buy something."

We buy something. A copy of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy, because the title is appropriate and because the book is about love and loss and the beautiful chaos of India and because Zara picks it up and says, "This is us," and I say, "We're not utmost happiness," and she says, "Not yet. But we will be."

We walk out of the bookshop. Down the creaking stairs. Into the lane: the narrow, chaotic, magnificent lane of Appa Balwant Chowk, with its bookshops and its bicycle-wallahs and its particular Sunday energy of people who have come to the old city to buy books and who are, at this moment, witnesses to two people walking hand in hand with a ring and a book and the unmistakable glow of a future that has just been decided.

I text Jai: She said yes.

Jai texts back: I know. I've been watching from across the street. Congratulations. The sapphire was a good choice.

You've been WATCHING?

Old habits. Also, I wanted to make sure nothing went wrong. Consider it a final surveillance operation.

Jai.

Yes?

Thank you. For everything. For the phone call. For the missions. For believing that an accountant could do what you asked.

You were never just an accountant, Omkar. You were always more. You just needed someone to show you.

I put the phone away. Zara is beside me, looking at the ring on her finger, turning her hand in the light, the sapphire catching the sun and throwing tiny prisms on the walls of the lane.

"It's the colour of your chai," I say.

"I know." She smiles. The love smile. The smile that is mine. "You chose a ring the colour of the thing that brought us together."

"I'm a man of patterns."

"You're a man of love. You just express it in patterns."

The lane is loud, the bicycles, the vendors, the arguments about book prices, the precise Pune soundtrack of a Sunday in the old city. We walk through it, hand in hand, the ring on her finger, the book in my bag, the future, uncertain, unplanned, impossible to spreadsheet, ahead of us.

And for the first time in my life, the uncertainty doesn't terrify me.

It thrills me.