No Man's Land

Raya feels a weird sensation curling up from her gut as she reads the messages popping up in the WhatElseIsUp group. Sheena, Minks and Copper are all bowing out of their imminent Friday night party with apologies. Raya is done with her facial make-up and is about to straighten her hair when the entire plan stands cancelled. Sheena and Minks are both married and have small kids. Raya has no way to veto their excuses. Copper is not married and yes, he used to be Raya’ back-up since the school days. They had a pact to get married if they both remained single at 45. But Copper has been presented with a hand-picked fiancé by his parents recently and as Raya could guess, he already prefers the new girl over his old friends.

Raya sighs as she puts back the red hot dress back in her wardrobe. She fiddles through a few dinner options online and then books a regular box meal through Flash. Now that dinner will be home delivered in about 10 minutes, she has nothing to do but fix herself a strong drink at her mini bar. She sits there trying to think of something fun to do as she sips slowly from her long sparkling glass. Raya understands after 4 consecutive pegs that the strange feeling engulfing her was nothing but all-consuming loneliness.

Raya is 36. And accomplished. And quite pretty. Yet, when it came to men she has had only heartbreaks. She makes a firm decision that night, before alcohol induces her to slump into her couch and fall asleep.

The next morning a hung-over Raya registers on the famous matrimonial portal Right One. It guarantees everyone life-long happiness. She has to answer a number of questionnaires truthfully and upload various documents to authenticate her identity before they accept the challenge.

This is year 3018. Online arranged marriage has evolved to a whole new level and one cannot just swoop in and casually look at other prospective brides or grooms like commodities. There are formalities to be done and then you wait; you wait for the Right One algorithm to calculate and present to you the groom tailor-made to fit your requirements.

Raya cups her head in her right hand biting her left hand nails after submitting her details. Within 10 seconds the screen flashes a message that promise to carry on a search on her behalf.

Raya types out a customary thank-you note but there is no smile in her face. She feels defeated. Despite the assurance of Right One, she thinks that it cannot know what exactly she wanted in her ideal man.


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Dr Saoni, a renowned scientist in her sixties, is sitting in her office, leaning back on her chair, looking up at the ceiling.  Cleanliness and minimal presence of furniture make the room exude the vibe of sophisticated austerity. Saoni’s head rests on the gentle cushion of her connected palms while her thrown apart legs make a silent vibratory rhythm. Despite the apparent masculinity of her pose, she looks graceful.

Her work for the morning is already done. She had some routine patches and upgrades to approve which were urgent for the stability of families across the world. And now she is treating herself to a break. She is wondering like she has wondered at many of her breaks, if the decision taken by her ancestors was at all a correct or logical one.

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Raya goes to work and spends a sombre morning avoiding her nosy colleagues. She feels a tad desperate about signing up for arranged marriage. At lunch break she heads to the office library to calm herself down. Raya walks into in the spacious hall and looks around the stately and almost empty alleys. She caresses a few books lovingly before she makes her way towards the store attendant. A guy is already there, having a hard time trying to get a book by Oscar Wilde. The errant store attendant that he is negotiating with is, of course, a machine with pre-fed information.

Feeling frustrated the guy turns around only to be melted down into an obsequious mush as his eyes meet those of Raya’s. Raya has an oval face outlined by distinct black-brown curls. Her eyes are not much but her long lashes and slightly off-set teeth adds a quaint charm to her looks. For 10 seconds the guy sports a half smile and a smitten look. A spontaneous giggle from Raya breaks him out of the trance.

“Hi! I’m Vivaan.”

“You looking for something?”

“No longer!”

“What?”

“I was looking for the missing piece of my heart…but I no longer am.”

Vivaan winks his deep set pair of grayish-blue eyes.

“Very flattered…but you’re kind of veering into the creepy zone now.”

“Oh?! I thought I was hot enough to pull off such corny lines! What am I gonna do?” Vivaan starts to run his fingers through his thick hair in mock anguish. His sculpted arms contrast the innocence of his face and Raya lets out a small, involuntary gasp.

“I’ve the book you want,” she quickly says to cover it up.

“You seem to have all that I want!”

Raya blushes and breaks off eye contact for a while. But she looks up confidently in two seconds and pointing to an empty table, says, “Why don’t we three sit over there and talk?”

“Three?”

“You, me and Oscar Wilde.”

Vivaan and Raya both laugh as they walked together towards the cosy corner.

And just like that Raya and Vivaan start going out casually. It is the first time since leaving college that Raya is seeing someone sans future expectations. The Right One matrimonial algorithm is at work looking for her future mate. Meanwhile she can certainly have some fun.

Vivaan turns out to be a wonderful man. He is perfect in looks and wit and yet he is equipped with servile instincts. A complete man with low self-esteem; that had always been the dream combination for Raya. But she resolutely puts away such thoughts and checks the Right One website daily for updates. The Right One portal jokes a bit, teases a bit before telling Raya that the search is still on.

A part of Raya panics wondering if the algorithm is about to fail for her. And another part of her prays for some more time with Vivaan. And another very small part of her starts to hope that Vivaan can save her from an arranged marriage just in the nick of time.

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Dr Saoni is having her dinner alone in her home. Her domestic help Jessica has set the table for her and has quietly retreated to her segment of the house. Jessica knows better not to disturb madam at this time. This is the hour when Saoni enjoys her meal while playing with the various wild ideas in her head. This is the hour that has given some of the ingenious inventions of the last few decades to mankind. But today Saoni is analyzing the past about which she had heard from her beloved granny.

Saoni can almost hear her granny’s throaty voice repeat again and again, after concluding the story, almost rhetorically, “What else could they have done?”

Saoni’s great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother Dahlia was the one who had taken the strange decision.

It was a late afternoon, a long time ago, when Dahlia went into her daughter Juhi’s room with a glass of flavoured milk. Juhi was supposed to be napping with her two month old daughter. Any other mother would have crashed the glass of milk if they had to witness the scene that Dahlia saw as she pushed open the door. Her baby grand daughter was lying awake on the bed, playfully reaching out for the toes of her mother, whose lifeless body was hanging from the ceiling right above her. Dahlia had placed the glass down on the bed side table, had covered it carefully and then she had scooped up the infant in her right arm. As she gently rocked the happy child, she read from her left hand, the suicide note left behind by Juhi.

Dahlia found out that her daughter’s fiancé had taken off with another girl, leaving Juhi on her own. Their marriage was scheduled in less than a month and a sudden break up at this juncture had made Juhi take her own life.

Incidentally her elder sister Ruhi used to be a doctor who had gone to work abroad for the betterment of kids in underprivileged countries. Unfortunately she had died a lonely and excruciating death 4 years back, far away from home, due to injuries from a brutal gang-rape.

Dahlia was now a childless mother who had lost the two people she had cared about the most. She could have slipped into a trauma but instead she chose to fight back. And she ran to the last good man she knew to be alive, her brother Divyang, for help.

Over the next few years Dahlia and Divyang formed a team and systematically brought about long term social corrections. They vowed to not raise Juhi’s little daughter to a future of abandonment or dominance.

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Raya knows that she has fallen for Vivaan. The small joys, the big goals, the unexplained high are all back in her life. She no longer wants the guy Right One is supposed to scour out for her. She decides to place a service suspension request while she sees where it goes with Vivaan. She immediately runs to her laptop and powers it up. Soon she would be guilt-free about everything. Her impatient fingers make her login fast to the Right One interface but a surprise is waiting there for her.

Instead of the usual “searching” status, her profile now displays “match found”! Raya wonders what to do as she sieves through the terms and conditions. She finds that her “match” is on the way to meet her at her residence in about half an hour. She starts to panic at this point. An unknown man is coming to her at her behest and she wants to turn him down. And that is not all!

The Right One portal does not really select a classical human being. They only program and genetically groom a robo-man for the subscriber. And Raya now needs a plan to break up smoothly with her pre-coded robo-man.

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The solution that Dahlia and Divyang had devised a long time ago was to create robo-men. The project was lengthy and needed the rest of their living years but they made it a grand success. The robo-men have synthetic and programmable y chromosome while their x chromosome is inherited from their human mothers making them a new breed. Over the years they have evolved to a new level of perfection. Most women now preferred to marry the robo-men as they made perfect husbands.

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For years Raya has refused to get into the game and has waited for the unbiased love of a real man. And now that she has seemingly found it in Vivaan, a robo-man rings her door bell.

Raya steadies her nerve and decides to request him to reassess and postpone the deal. She opens the door with a formal smile.

There is an arch made of exotic flowers installed at her doorstep, a beautiful scent is in the air and a long lost song from the by-gone era is playing out for her, "Nothing's gonna change my love for you..."

And under the arch, down on his knees, is Vivaan. He is holding out an embellished key ring to Raya.

“All this while, all that you did, was fake?” Raya thinks sadly.

But aloud she decides to be civil, since she is anyway, out of options.

“A key ring?” Raya asks Vivaan.

“Yes…I bought an apartment…will you make it a home for me?” Vivaan looks at her with his perfect eyes which now seem to be slightly weird. Raya runs her finger along the key ring as she nods in assent.

Vivaan gets up and says, “Just so that you know, I’ve spent my entire budget on the apartment, the wedding ring you have to buy on your own.”

Raya laughs out this time as she grips and twists Vivaan’s shirt to pull him closer. As she stares into Vivaan’s handsome face, she feels her heart race again. Maybe marrying a  robo-man would not be that bad. Raya gently places her lips on Vivaan’s and whispers, “Let’s skip the wedding and plan for the honeymoon first!”

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Raya and Vivaan go on to live 10 glorious years of a happy marriage before the first sign of trouble occurs.

Vivaan has been an exceptional husband, fulfilling every need of his wife in the past decade. Raya just has one duty towards him; she needs to take him for his biennial maintenance and upgrades. They are also parents to a 2 year old girl, Viya. Viya is not biologically Vivaan’s daughter. Though Vivaan is a man of unquestionable virility, yet when it came to becoming a mother, Raya had opted to be inseminated by an anonymous real man. Vivaan had been terribly upset at first but a timely software patching ensured that he fell in line with the decision.

And now Raya is bored. She is bored of living the lie that she had started.  She often wonders what it would be like to be with a real man and she knows that there is one real man out there with whom she is connected, Viya’s genetic father.

So one night while Vivaan is putting Viya to sleep, Raya types out a secret mail to the concerned authorities, requesting to know the identity of her daughter’s father.

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After passing through the various automated rounds of verification Raya’s mail manages to reach the inbox of Dr Saoni, for her approval. She reads the mail two times and then sits with her head hanging for a while. She then pushes back her rolling chair and paces in the room restlessly for a few minutes before going back to the email and approving it.

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Raya is not the only woman who sought Saoni’s approval in this regard. Everyday several women, happily married to perfect robo-men write to Saoni, hoping for her help. And every time Saoni decides to play along.

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The next day Raya reads the reply mail with tense anticipation while Vivaan is making breakfast in the kitchen. She finds out that the man who had sired Viya is now married. But his contact details had also been sent as an attachment.

“Raya, come dear, I made your favourite breakfast,” Vivaan calls out lovingly.

Raya nervously closes her browser and rushes to the table to see spinach, eggs and toast served with freshly brewed coffee. Vivaan is waiting for her with a smile. Raya looks around her home as Vivaan pulls out a chair for her and suddenly the spotless perfection of her home seems to be a pathetic charade to her. She resolutely saves the unknown man’s number before she starts to eat.

Meeting the man turns out to be easy. Mihir, as he is called, is another middle aged man, tired and bored in a loveless marriage. The call from Raya acts like a sudden splatter of spice in his bland days.

The first meeting between Raya and Mihir is simply electrifying. Mihir is not particularly handsome but he is masculine and his eyes seem to shine with wisdom and erudition. Even though Raya and Mihir try to fool themselves by being friends for two weeks, eventually passion takes over and they confess about their illicit desires of the flesh to each other.

They write to the authorities together, explaining their predicament. This is a simple problem for Saoni's team and one junior scientist draws out the simple plan of spousal swap to solve it.

Convincing Mihir’s wife turns out to be too easy. She is already frustrated with her husband and is happy to trade him off for a much better looking Vivaan. Vivaan is not given a chance to express his opinion and is instead genetically manipulated into happily accepting the swap. Mihir is overjoyed to fit into the ready-made family of a new wife and cute daughter.

Viya is a little sour about the sudden changes but Mihir is very patient with her and things are improving. To Raya, everything in life is finally real.

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Meanwhile Dr Saoni and her super secret all-women team are in a meeting room planning an upcoming project. They are only ones who know that real men have gone extinct around 2 centuries back. The launch of the robo-men had been catastrophic to them and within a few generations, they got wiped out from the earth.

So at present when a woman requests for a real man, she is just given a robo-man whose upgrades have been frozen. Protecting this secret is also a part of the team’s duty.

However, everyone in the room, including Saoni, herself is voluntarily celibate. Now that men are finally complying with the wishes of women, they all feel a strong need for the extinct species. You see, there is no joy in taming a lion that was never wild.