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sanchopanzalit

Indian Matchmaking

Payal Nagpal


Potential Beard Number Five texts me. He suggests dinner at the Marina; another waterfront fusion restaurant in downtown Atlanta, with tiled tables and bay windows and a menu featuring some of globalism’s most dire atrocities: ube crepes and chicken tikka mac and sake topped with cold foam.


“It’s a date,” I respond. And then I text my mother, confirming that yes, I’m meeting Potential Beard Five, and no, I won’t call him that when I see him. But it would be helpful if she stopped referring to him as Green Card Man. 


This is the first green card seeker she’s set me up with. Potential Beards One, Two, and Four wanted beards in return, for the purposes of what I now know is called a lavender marriage. Potential Beard Three just wanted to spite his ex-girlfriend; and while I considered that a motive no less noble than the next, my mother worried. “Honey, he seems fickle. He might not follow through,” she said.


Ma wants me to enter a contractual loveless marriage with a man for the sake of appearances; she insists I can have as many elicit lesbian affairs as I want on the side—so long as they stay under wraps. But it’s not like she’s homophobic or anything. She doesn’t object to my queerness; she’s simply concerned about its impact on the family business.


*


“You’re going to inherit the company. You need to keep the legacy going,” she tells me whenever the family business comes up. “The women in our family have a gift. A gift. A long-held tradition—” She stops there, usually, blinking hard, transitioning back from persona to person. She realizes the truth is only so pliable when the person it's being molded for isn’t a stranger.


Ma’s relationship with the truth is tenuous. I suspect she has trouble reminding herself that there is no long-held tradition. The family business began two years ago, as a solo operation, but the idea of lineage is intrinsic to its success. A connection to ancestors. To healers. Divinely ordained spiritual matchmakers.


The business was a result of three converging phenomena: my father’s death, the viral success of Netflix’s Indian Matchmaking, and the TikTok explosion of white girls participating in Eastern spirituality, which led those who sought to impress them—white boys and brown girls—to do so as well. 


*


The family business was conceived over comped caramel cappuccinos in a hospital cafeteria while my dad was in the ICU. 


Ma, after having guzzled most of a caramel cappuccino, handed her takeaway cup back to the barista.“It’s not caramel-y enough.” She demanded it be remade. The barista put a fresh order into her iPad and held out the credit card machine. Ma said, “How dare you? When my husband’s dying upstairs?”


She summoned tears.


The manager came over, made my mother a fresh drink, and admonished the unempathetic, syrup-withholding barista. She gave my mother another free coffee the next day. My dad died the day after that, and Ma ordered the largest cappuccino size on offer, with whipped cream and extra caramel. She pointed straight at the manager when a new barista rang her up. “She knows me. I get my drinks for free.”


I expected the manager to object, but she came over to our table, dripping with sticky sympathy, to see if Ma’s cappuccino was sweet enough. 


Ma nodded. “It’s not warm, though,” she complained. “But maybe that’s because everything feels cold today. My husband, he…” she let her voice trail off.


The manager said she understood. That she was so, so sorry. A hotter drink was made.


My mother said thank you.


The manager patted her shoulder. “Were you married a long time?”


“Thirty years next May.”


“Was it an arranged marriage?”


Ma and I exchanged glances, stunned.


“You know, I’ve heard those are the most special kind.” The manager quoted Sima Aunty from Netflix: “Arranged matches are made in heaven, they’re just executed on earth. I’ve been hoping to learn more about them, you know. To see if I could get an arranged match. It just seems like a deeper, more meaningful way to date.”


Ma raised me on a set of fundamental truths—racism can be found in the most unexpected places, can present itself in the most delightfully unpredictable ways, and one must always, always, find a way to use it to their advantage. She’d say, “The system works if you know how to work it.”


So my mother agreed to tell the manager more about her arranged love story, anticipating a lifetime of free caramel cappuccinos. She still goes to that coffee shop in the hospital; it’s only a block away from where we live. Together.


*


I’m twenty-five years old and still live with my mother. For free. That’s why I don’t get to complain that she’s still overbearing; that she’s still a pesky helicopter mom when I’m the one who got fired from her job, ran out of rent money, and trudged up to the metaphorical helipad with two suitcases and a tick-infested cat, asking if I could stay. I didn’t make enough money to meaningfully contribute to the household through any of the part-time gigs I acquired after moving in, so eventually, I took to being Ma’s defacto bookkeeper, personal assistant, and show-pony.


I am proof of the ancestral wisdom she claims. “My daughter’s in training to be the next matchmaker in our lineage,” my mother says whenever a client sees me in the office—what used to be the living room. She tells them I’ll be going to India soon, to spend four months in an ashram, to receive Sage Rangaswamy’s tutelage.


Sometimes she calls him Sage Ramaswamy. Sometimes she has trouble keeping up with the details—which Sage did she train under? Which goddess blessed her? How long did she spend meditating on star-charts in the Himalayas? Did she move to America when her husband got a job at Google during the tech boom, or did she immigrate because she had the divine intuition that the diaspora—untethered from their motherland—would feel the need for her matchmaking guidance more acutely than regular old Indians in India?


*


What she isn’t confused about is that I need to get married. To a man. Soon. “You would never take advice from a broke financial planner or a therapist having a panic attack,” she says. “Nobody wants a matchmaker with an unmarried daughter.”


“Why don’t you set me up with a woman? You can carve out a niche as a progressive, LGBT-friendly matchmaker; I’m sure there’s a gap like that in the market.”


“It's conservative families that have the big bucks,” Ma says. “And they won’t employ a matchmaker that does queer stuff; they’ll think What if little Mia or Tia or Neel is actually gay? What if this gay-friendly matchmaker confirms their gayness through irrefutable things like astrology and star charts? It’s best to stay away from that stuff”


I understand that, I suppose. For my mother to run her business, the stars have to uphold the heteropatriarchy. 


There’s room for transgression, of course. In fact, transgression is at the heart of the operation. The white clients sign up because they believe they’re moving beyond the materialistic, occulocentric Western dating world. The brown clients are engaging in a radical reclamation of their cultural identity. And my mother is a brilliant businesswoman because she knows how these people want to be perceived.


*


She compliments clients on how charming and eloquent they are, so she can preemptively quell their insecurities about having to use a matchmaker to find love. 


If a mother signs her son up for the service and lands up at his first matchmaking appointment, my mother might ignore her or even disagree with something she says—so the smothered mama’s boy can tell himself he’s the one with agency in this process. 


Whenever one of her white girls mentions having a public-facing Instagram, my mother, anticipating that they’ll eventually be accused of cultural appropriation for using her, thanks them for being sensitive to the ancient roots of her practice. She uses zeitgeist-y spiritual buzzwords liberally: holistic, law-of-attraction, vibration, manifestation. Ancestral. Ancient.


To be fair, her methods are ancient. Time-tested. They involve pairing people based on socioeconomic background, approximate age, and level of attractiveness. My mother explained the process with sociopathic clarity in an attempt to prepare me for her eventual retirement. This was before she declared she would never retire because she’s in an industry where age means wisdom and wisdom means money, and of course, decrepit old ladies are the wisest. Now that she wears baggy clothes that make her look cachexic and dies the remainder of her black hair grey, she appears as ancient and ancestral as her divinely ordained matchmaking techniques.


This is what she told me. “First, you should match the client with someone they’ll likely reject, but it should be a profile that casts them in their own best light. See this girl, Maya—” she pointed to a headshot on her desk, “She’s hot. A solid 9. Claims she wants someone empathetic and industrious; doesn’t care what they look like. So I’m sending her on a date with this guy, who started his own non-profit and volunteers in his free time. You’d think she’ll be all over him, right?”


“Yeah,” I said.


“No. Because he’s a five. After a few dates with him, Maya will come back to me and say, ‘He’s wonderful, just what I was looking for, but there’s something missing. No spark.’ And then I’ll set her up with this guy,” my mother held up another portrait “He’s the heir to his dad’s business, barely worked a day in his life. But he’s a nine, too, and the girl’s already proven to herself that she cares about empathy and industry by entertaining the possibility of marrying the first boy.”


“So you think she’ll go for the attractive one?”


“Mark my words.”


“That’s ridiculous, Ma.”


But the nines got married; and a few weeks ago, an invitation to Maya’s baby shower arrived.


“Whatever happened to the five she rejected?” I asked Ma. “He got with another five?”


“No! She was a seven. But unemployed.”


“Ha. So unemployment takes two points off?” I joked. And that gave her the idea for a new point-matching system. She’s beta-testing it right now, as a more efficient way to deal with the growing volume of clients.


*


Start with how hot they are. Add one point if they went to college, two if they went to grad school, but subtract three if it was for a field in the humanities. 


Plus one for a good health insurance package, minus one if they’re mouth breathers. A second language can earn people up to three points—it’s not impressive if an Indian speaks their mother tongue, but if they’ve dabbled in something like Italian, they’re extra-attractive. White people who speak Eastern languages score the best on that metric. In fact, when I examined Ma’s spreadsheet, I discovered her high-score sheet was almost entirely white.


“This is insane,” I told her. “It’s so…”


“Realistic?” she prompted.


“Socially constructed… Destructive…”


“It’s what the stars say. Forces beyond my control.” Ma looked at me incredulously, like I was stupid for thinking the stars didn’t also uphold the white supremacist tenets of a neoliberal capitalist marketplace. That’s the system: it works if you work it.


I suppose that’s why I ask her what Green Card Man’s point value is, so I know how to prepare for the date. 


A seven. Only one more than me. A gap easily bridged by some extra cleavage.

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