2084: An Algorithmic State — Act XIII: Love, Chapter 68: The Wedding and the Union

A whole lane spends three months on a red cloth for twenty minutes of vows. Three blocks from the Ministry, Priya and Rohan’s Union takes twenty-five minutes, one yes apiece, and prints a certificate that says ninety-four per cent.

In Brief: In a lane in the margins, Naina marries Farhan, a mechanic, in a long, unplanned day of food, music and argument. The same week, Priya and Rohan hold their licensed Union ceremony near the Ministry. Samar goes to the first wedding and thinks about the second on the walk home with Kavya.

The red cloth had been three months on its frame before Samar ever saw it finished.

He arrived at the courtyard on the morning of Naina’s wedding and found it strung the full width of the lane, between two buildings.

The courtyard had not merely filled. It had transformed. Chairs and low benches had been dragged from a dozen different households and set out in arrangements no single authority had decided. Children wore clothes too formal for the games they were still determined to play in them. Somewhere a drum had started at dawn and showed no sign of tiring. The smell of frying oil lay so thick over the lane that Samar, breathing it, knew why Fatima had closed her stall for the day rather than compete with it. Zainab moved through all of it in a sari of deep, unfaded red, the red of something kept folded away for exactly this occasion. She was directing three separate arguments about seating with the calm authority of a woman who had clearly done this before and would do it again. Samar watched her catch sight of the wedding cloth strung overhead and stop, for a moment, in the middle of the lane.

The qazi arrived at noon, an elderly man Samar did not recognise. The ceremony itself, when it finally began, took perhaps twenty minutes of actual formal words inside four hours of everything around them. The mehr had been discussed and agreed between the families the week before, and now it was stated for the record, a sum everyone present already knew. Naina, in her own version of the same deep red, said qubool hai three times. She said it once for herself. Then, in the old way, she said it twice more, for whatever doubt custom assumed a person might reasonably still be carrying even at the very moment of saying yes. The groom was a quiet man named Farhan who worked two lanes over as a mechanic. He said the same three words back with a nervousness that made half the courtyard laugh and the other half pretend not to have noticed. No screen offered either of them a prompt. No facilitator stood a discreet distance back, ready to step in. An uncle mispronounced a blessing and was corrected, loudly, by three people at once. The correction became its own small joke, and Samar suspected it would outlive the wedding itself in the retelling.

Afterward there was more food than anyone could have counted. There was music that argued with itself between two competing sets of speakers for most of an hour, until someone simply unplugged one of them. There was dancing that had no choreography and needed none. Fatima’s stall was closed for the first time anyone could remember on a working day. She danced two full songs with Manzoor, in a manner both of them would later deny with equal conviction. Near dusk she brought out a tray of something she had been slow-cooking since before dawn for this one afternoon. When asked, she refused to say what was in it beyond “the thing my mother made for weddings, which is not a recipe, it’s an argument I have with a pot every single time.” The tray emptied within minutes, whether or not anyone’s curiosity had been satisfied.

Naina’s new mother-in-law wept twice. The first time was during the ceremony itself, at the third qubool hai. The second time was later, over nothing anyone could quite name. She simply stood near the food with tears on her face and waved away every person who came to ask if she was well. Then Zainab went to her without asking anything at all and stood beside her, saying nothing, until whatever had needed to pass, passed. At some point in the long unscheduled afternoon Samar lost track, entirely, of what time it was. No one around him had the smallest interest in helping him find it again.

Priya and Rohan, the pair the Union Bureau had matched at ninety-four per cent, held their Union ceremony the same week, in a room three blocks from the Ministry. Samar had once stood outside that room and watched the two of them meet across a screen, in a life that already felt to him like someone else’s.

It began at the hour stated on both their calendars and ended, as the protocol promised, within twenty-five minutes.

The garlands were real flowers, grown in a licensed facility that certified them free of the allergens either party’s profile had flagged. They were exchanged at the ceremony’s midpoint, and the officiant narrated the gesture as Priya and Rohan performed it. Neither of them had attended enough weddings of this kind to know the sequence without being told. Their families watched from a screen mounted at the back of the room. Priya’s mother was in a city three sectors over and had not been able to secure transit clearance in time. Her face was slightly too large for the screen’s resolution, and she waved with a brightness that did not entirely reach her eyes. Rohan’s father was present in the room itself, seated and silent. He was dressed with a formality that had nowhere to spend itself in a ceremony built for twenty-five minutes.

The officiant read the formal consent aloud, and Priya and Rohan each confirmed it once, a single affirmation apiece. The charter had long ago dropped the older custom of asking three times. Its theory was that a citizen whose compatibility had already been certified at ninety-four per cent needed no extra confirmation of a doubt the model had not detected.

Twice during the ceremony Rohan found himself glancing at his father’s carefully blank face. He was trying to read in it some version of what his father must have felt at his own wedding, decades before any of this. He found only the same practiced stillness his father brought to everything. Watching it, he understood that he might never actually learn the answer. The occasion that would once have drawn out the story, a long, unhurried evening with nothing else scheduled after it, had no equivalent left in either of their calendars.

A certificate printed itself at the end of the ceremony, with the compatibility figure recorded permanently beside both their names. It was a credential neither of them would ever be permitted to fully set down. It would be there in any future dispute and any future difficulty. It would be there in any future year in which either of them might privately wonder whether ninety-four had ever meant what they had once believed it meant.

There was a meal afterward, catered and efficient, finished within the hour allotted for it. Rohan’s father shook his son’s hand. Priya’s mother, on the screen, said she was proud, and the connection dropped a moment later. It might have been her own signal’s fault or the screen’s. No one in the room seemed entirely certain which, or troubled themselves to find out.

Samar did not tell Kavya, that evening, about the ceremony he had once watched through a window, though he thought of it. He was walking back through a lane still littered with the wedding’s leftover joy. A child was asleep on a bench no one had thought to move her from. Someone’s borrowed chairs were still waiting to be returned. In the last of the light, the red cloth overhead was beginning to look less like a decoration and more like a flag some army had forgotten to take down.

“You’re quiet,” Kavya said.

“I was thinking about how long that cloth took to make,” Samar said. It was true, and also not the whole of what he was thinking, and Kavya would know the difference without needing him to supply the rest. “Three months. For twenty minutes of actual ceremony, inside a day that didn’t end when the twenty minutes did.”

“That’s rather the whole of it, isn’t it,” Kavya said. “Not the twenty minutes. Everything nobody scheduled around them.” She looked back at the cloth, dark now.

“Do you think Priya and Rohan will be happy,” Samar asked, surprising himself with the question.

“I think they might be.” Kavya considered this, unhurried, as she considered most things that refused to resolve cleanly. “I don’t think happiness is the thing your Union Bureau took from them. I think what it took was the three months and the four hours.”

They walked the last stretch home under a red cloth still catching the light. Somebody, behind them, was already telling the story of the uncle and the blessing, and getting it wrong, and being corrected.

About this serial: 2084: An Algorithmic State is a dystopian novel by Nithin Palal, published online one chapter at a time.

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Next: Chapter 69: The Dissolution Counter