# To Marry Or Not To Marry The question had been circling Priya's mind for three weeks now, like a vulture above dying prey. Not that Rohit was dying prey—far from it. He was, by all reasonable measures, a fine man. A surgeon. Steady income. Kind eyes. The sort of person who remembered to ask about her mother's arthritis and actually listened to the answer. Her mother thought she was mad to hesitate. "What are you waiting for?" Ma had asked that morning, standing at the kitchen counter with her hands deep in dough. "A letter from God? He's a good boy, Priya. Settled. Not like that Vikram fellow who wanted to become a poet." Priya had smiled at that. Vikram *had* become a poet, more or less. She saw his verses sometimes on social media, liked by forty-three people on average. It was not, she imagined, the life her mother had feared for her—but it was also not the life her mother had envisioned when she said the word "settled." The problem was not Rohit. The problem was the question itself. She had said yes, technically. Three months ago, when he'd taken her to the old lighthouse near the beach and asked her with a trembling voice that made her chest tighten—she had said yes. They were engaged. It was decided. The wedding was set for October. Her cousin was already designing the invitations. Her father had begun the preliminary investigations into the boy's family horoscope, just to be sure Saturn wasn't being particularly vindictive that season. Everything was moving forward with the inexorable logic of a train leaving the station. But last Tuesday, sitting in her office—a small cubicle in a marketing firm that paid her enough to live alone, though Ma never quite approved of this arrangement—Priya had wondered: *Was this what she wanted?* And the question, once asked, would not leave her. It wasn't that she didn't love Rohit. She did. Or rather, she loved the idea of loving him, which she suspected might be the same thing, or an entirely different thing. She loved his steadiness. His hands, which were gentle even though they'd been trained to cut into living flesh. The way he laughed at his own jokes before finishing them. But did she want to spend fifty years listening to him? That was the rub, as they said in Shakespeare. Fifty years. Maybe sixty if modern medicine was kind. Decades of the same person, the same breakfast table, the same bed. The thought filled her with a sensation she couldn't quite name—not fear, exactly. More like standing at the edge of a very large pool and suddenly realizing you couldn't see the bottom. Her best friend Anjali had cut through it all when Priya finally confessed her doubts over coffee at their usual place. "Do you love him?" Anjali asked. "Yes," Priya said. "Do you *like* him?" "Yes." "Do you want to have his children?" Priya had hesitated. "I... don't know if I want children at all." Anjali had set down her coffee cup with the gravity of a judge pronouncing sentence. "Then *that's* your answer. Not the man. The life. You don't know if you want the life that comes with the man." It was true. Priya had always imagined herself alone—not lonely, but solitary. Reading in cafes. Working late without explanation. Taking trips without considering anyone else's vacation days. The idea of merging with another person, of becoming a unit, of having to account for her time and explain her moods and compromise on everything from where to live to what to cook for dinner—it seemed to her like drowning slowly in warm water. But her mother would weep. Her father would feel ashamed. The wedding invitations had already been ordered. She thought of Rohit's face when she'd said yes. He had looked like a man who'd been given the world. She thought of the life he wanted: a house in the suburbs, children with her eyes and his intelligence, perhaps a dog. A sensible, good life. A *successful* life, by the measures that mattered to her parents. The question was not whether Rohit was good. The question was whether goodness was enough. Whether a good man and a decent future could substitute for whatever wild, untamed thing she felt looking for inside herself. Priya set down her coffee cup and looked at her friend. "What if I'm just afraid?" she asked. "What if I'm letting fear masquerade as philosophy?" Anjali smiled—sadly, knowingly. "What if you are? What if you're not? Does it change anything?" It didn't, Priya supposed. That was the real terror. Whether her doubts were genuine or phantom, profound or merely cold feet—it didn't matter. The question remained unanswered. And every day that passed without an answer was a kind of slow commitment, a series of small surrenders to the inevitable. She had three weeks left. October was coming. And Priya had not yet decided whether to marry or not to marry. Whether to say yes to the life waiting for her, or to ask for her doubts back and walk into the unknown alone. She finished her coffee. It had gone cold while she'd been thinking. It tasted bitter now, like all answers do before you've lived with them long enough to know if they were right.