Sarala 'Aunty' Pathak

Sarala Pathak, known to three generations of the colony simply as Aunty, arrived in the neighbourhood as a bride in 1975, married within nine days of the proposal by an aunt since deceased whose speed in such matters was, in the family's telling, practically a talent of its own. Sarala herself describes the arrangement, then and now and in every year in between, as perfectly suitable, in precisely the same even tone regardless of who is asking or why.

Her gift for matchmaking announced itself almost accidentally when, at a cousin's wedding in 1979, she happened to mention to two mothers, separately, that their respective children might suit each other rather well, and was proved correct within the year. By the mid-1980s she was being consulted formally, and by the 1990s she had become something close to an institution, carrying a plastic folder of horoscopes and photographs to every function she attended, on the reasonable theory that opportunity does not wait for a formal appointment.

Her memory for family detail rivals any government registry: who owns land in which village, whose uncle has a drinking problem carefully unmentioned at the first meeting, which girl refused which boy in 2014 and the precise and often colourful reason why. She has made, by the most recent count kept by her own hand, ninety-one matches, the overwhelming majority of which she reports, with satisfaction, as still standing.

She takes her fee only from the boy's side, a principle she states as though it were carved into stone somewhere, and refuses to discuss the matter further, though several members of the Ladies' Committee have over the years tried gently to establish the actual arithmetic of her earnings and been politely rebuffed each time.

The Colony Ladies' Committee, of which she has been convenor for eleven consecutive years running unopposed, conducts no meaningful business until Aunty has finished her tea and delivered her opinion, whether the topic is a garden committee dispute, a wedding hall booking, or the moral character of a family recently moved into Block C. Her verdicts, once delivered, tend to become the settled facts of the colony.

She possesses an uncanny facility for detecting unhappiness in other people's homes, often from the doorway itself, before the tea has even been offered, a skill neighbours find equal parts useful and unnerving, and one she deploys freely in conversation with whichever family happens to be her hostess that afternoon.

Her own household, by all outward measure, runs without incident. Her husband Prakash Pathak, a retired bank officer, spends his afternoons at the club and rarely features in her conversation beyond the practical, and her two children, both settled abroad, telephone dutifully on Sundays. She keeps a framed photograph of her own wedding day prominently in the drawing room, a young bride garlanded and smiling nine days after the proposal that made her a Pathak.

In 2016 she engineered what the colony still refers to as the Diwali Miracle, matching a thirty-four-year-old widow's brother-in-law with a divorced schoolteacher from two streets over, a pairing so unlikely that even her closest friends had doubted it, and one that has since produced, to Aunty's evident pride, two children and a joint family holiday to Goa every February.

She continues, well into her sixties, to arrive at weddings uninvited to the ceremony but essential to its planning, folder in hand, ready to remark upon which unmarried cousin present might do rather well for which other unmarried cousin present, because in Sarala Pathak's considered view, the work of assembling a household is never really finished, only handed on, suitably, from one generation to the next.