Girl Most Likely To. Poonam Sharma

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      Girl Most Likely to

      Poonam Sharma

      Contents

      Acknowledgments

      Chapter 1

      Chapter 2

      Chapter 3

      Chapter 4

      Chapter 5

      Chapter 6

      Chapter 7

      Chapter 8

      Chapter 9

      Chapter 10

      Chapter 11

      Chapter 12

      Chapter 13

      Chapter 14

      Chapter 15

      Chapter 16

      Chapter 17

      Chapter 18

      Chapter 19

      Chapter 20

      Chapter 21

      Chapter 22

      Chapter 23

      Chapter 24

      Chapter 25

      Chapter 26

      Chapter 27

      Chapter 28

      Chapter 29

      Chapter 30

      Chapter 31

      Chapter 32

      Chapter 33

      Chapter 34

      Chapter 35

      Chapter 36

      Chapter 37

      My Postscript

      Coming Next Month

      ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      My thanks to…

      My agent, Lorin Rees, for helping me

       make the leap into fiction.

      My editor, Kathryn Lye, who improves the story

       without altering the point.

      Red Dress Ink, for taking me on.

      And my family—for their inspiration, humility,

       and for being the sort of people who never give up, nor fail to be grateful for it all.

      For a guy named Michael, who knew me once,

       and thought that I should write a novel.

      1

      “Celibacy is rotting your brain.”

      Cristina insisted through my cell phone, while the taxi jerked up Fifth Avenue. It might even have been true, but it was a hateful thing for a best friend to say.

      At my age—and my father never missed an opportunity to remind me of my age with all the subtlety of a presidential ass-pat—my mother had managed a screaming child, a barking dog, a doting husband and a medical residency. And she did it from a three-bedroom Colonial in Great Neck, Long Island. By twenty-seven, left to my own devices, I had amassed a lucrative, yet uninspiring, seventy-hour Wall Street workweek, a telling but unintentional track record of shoving plant corpses down the trash chute while the neighbors slept, and a very large, very expensive and very empty bed. It was the latter fact that had me feeling particularly vulnerable. And of the many mistakes I made that Saturday evening, the first was expecting Cristina to understand.

      “Just because I’ve decided to be rational and take control of my life, that doesn’t mean I’m crazy.” I pouted, checking my watch. Draped in my traditional powder-blue silk salwar kameez and matching satin Charles David heels, I was hurtling helplessly toward another lavish Indian wedding where my parents would be seated where the love of my life ought to be. After ten years of scouring every dormitory bar, party and young singles’ mixer, not to mention checking under every rock and in more than my fair share of countries around the world, I was in no mood for honesty. If bunions were my reward for a decade of running in four-inch heels, then cynicism was my logical response to the umpteenth fix-up with a prince whose castle would eventually make me break out in hives.

      “But an arranged marriage? For you, Vina?” her voice climbed. It was laced with all the straight-postured self-righteousness of a New England housewife snatching home hair dye from the hands of a teenaged daughter. “I don’t think so.”

      I sucked air through clenched teeth.

      “See? This is why I wasn’t going to tell you about tonight. And it’s not an arranged marriage. It’s an arranged…date, and it just happens to be taking place at a wedding.”

      Ever since I met Cristina, when we were the lone female interns in the J.P. Morgan investment banking department, she’d refused to cut me emotional slack. And that was what I respected most about her. Unfortunately, she also refused to accept that merely being ethnic (Cuban, and from Miami) didn’t mean she automatically grasped my situation. Convincing her that it was a good idea to be set up with the Punjabi lawyer courtesy of my parents required an appeal to the rational side of her brain. Fortunately, we were both investment bankers; I knew exactly how to put things into terms that she could grasp.

      “Look,” I added, cradling my cell between ear and shoulder while aiming my compact at the pinky finger I used to catch errant eyeliner, “I have thirty months left until thirty. I know your mom had you when she was, like, forty. But you have to understand that Indian women don’t have Cuban women’s genes. Sure, our hips were made for childbearing, but that’s where the similarity ends. The fact is that I’m only fertile until, like, thirty-five. And anyway, to figure out ideal fertility age, you take the average age of menopause for women in your family, and subtract twenty years. That’s when your fertility takes a serious nosedive. For my mom, menopause was fifty, so that means that childbirth is supposed to be before thirty for me.”

      “But…”

      “Also…consider that it takes at least six months to fall in love with anyone and run the required background checks, another nine months to get engaged, and a year to plan the wedding. And my husband and I will need at least a year of being married without being pregnant—to screw like bunnies before gravity has its way with me. That’s thirty-nine months. So even if I meet Mr. Right tonight, I’m still cutting it close.”

      “Where do you get this stuff?”

      My logic impressed her.

      “They re-air The Oprah Winfrey Show at two a.m.” I clicked my compact shut, and noticed that one of my heels was stuck in a glob of gum on the floor of the cab. “And you know that I haven’t been sleeping well these days.”

      In an effort to spare the hem of my salwar kameez, I leaned onto one hip and lifted my shoe. Naturally, the pleather seat beneath me mimicked a fart. My eyes collided in the rearview mirror with those of the cabbie, who, until that point, had occasionally glanced at me with the standard balance of boredom and curiosity. Suddenly he sat up straighter, spearing me with a look of moral superiority—all this from a man who had never encountered a stick of deodorant. I stared out the window.

      “What kind of a name is Prakash, anyway?” Cristina finally asked.

      “Um, I don’t know…an Indian one?”

      “Well, it’s just not the kind of name that I can imagine you screaming out in a fit of passion.”

      “Life is not a fit of passion, Cristy.” I resented her for making me sound like my mother. “And I think the point is that I’m supposed to have