Kishore Singh: Matchmaking pursuits

My daughter can't be bothered with a boyfriend. She has "boy" friends, of course, but not anybody of significance who can be considered for their matrimonial prospects. To say my wife has "analysed" those scenarios would be stating the obvious, and it has sometimes led to altercations at the dining table, with our daughter protesting the grilling. "Well, they will marry somebody," my wife states with a lack of sentiment, "it might as well be you." No wonder our daughter likes to meet her friends away from home, which means the driver is on duty at night more often than is good for someone who has to report for work at the first flush of dawn.

My son, on the other hand, is a little more liberal with both girlfriends and "girl" friends but keeps his trysts well out of his mother's nosey ways. "I'm going out for a couple of hours," he'll announce out of the blue, or just when we're planning a family rendezvous at the club, "some work has come up". He often has "work" over weekends, and in the evenings, and it requires careful dressing and the use of copious quantities of hair gel and after-shave, and a phone mysteriously "out of range" whenever his mother calls to check if he's likely to be back for lunch/dinner/family movie. Occasionally, he's spotted by my wife's best friend Sarla's children at some pub or bar, but denies it with all the vehemence of a lawyer: "They were mistaken."

As the eldest in their generation of cousins, there is a great deal of pressure from the family to have them "settled". "When are they getting married," extended members of the family have been known to ask - if only to pave the way for their own progeny to go forth and multiply - to which my wife retorts, "As soon as they can afford to pay their rent." Which, of course, they can, a simple fact they effectively hide from their mother through the simple expedient of constantly borrowing money and living in debt while simultaneously growing their savings.

They might not be moving out any time soon, but my wife seems to be displaying a strong nesting syndrome so she has taken to reading the matrimonials in the papers, going online in search of grooms and brides, and can be heard whispering to friends and family in distant lands about "Aunty's Lali's son", and whether "wheatish" means dark or fair, and whether a "six-figure salary" is monthly ("good") or annual ("abysmal"), in dollars or rupees, pre- or post-tax? Suddenly, the air is rife with whisperings of horoscopes and dowries - hopefully, a lack of both - and she's informed everybody she isn't interested in a son-in-law who is a start-up entrepreneur, chef or IT geek, but wouldn't mind a daughter-in-law who is. About the only thing we're agreed on is a mild aversion to public health providers - doctors to you and me - police-wallahs and bureaucrats.

With all the research she's been doing, my wife has come across groups of "prospective" brides and grooms in their second wind - dowagers, widows and widowers and the divorced or still-single-at-60, who are willing to share their love and life with those "of similar mind" -"and body", my wife chortles. From mild shock to pleasure, she now seems to spend a lot of time looking up the personal columns not so much for our children as these sexagenarians. I'm hoping that since the children won't, my wife isn't planning on booting me out sometime soon.