Winter can get a bit delusional in DC, Washington that is. One moment the sun’s shining brightly with the bonhomie of a smiley icon; the next, clouds scud across a sky that is as blue as Paul Newman’s eyes and, blink, it’s almost darkness at noon. It is on one such afternoon over tea with delicate little samosas and a sort of fusion bhel puri that doesn’t quite hit the spot for a Mumbai habitué like me, that a group of ladies-who-tea-together gathered for some chai and chat. I am the visiting desi from the homeland.

Conversation moves on frothily from guesstimates about when the Indian ambassador Ronen Sen (yes, the unfortunate one whose boomeranging remark about journos and headless chickens had evidently and eventually come home to roost) is leaving and who would replace him. To, ‘Is the charismatic Barrack Obama going to beat the forceful, knows-her-mind Hillary Clinton to the post’. To, the latest Arpana Caur canvas one of the women has just had shipped over. And then, the discussion turns serious.

To what is really exercising some of them that day: how are they going to find ‘suitable’ grooms for their daughters and nieces and neighbours’ progeny? ‘Where have all the boys gone?’ is the refrain of the day. And, just then, in what appears like perfect timing, the sky clouds over in empathy. The sprightly woman who broaches the subject is worried about her niece who is just a year short of entering the third decade of her life. Brilliant, personable and attractive, the young woman has everything going for her. But then, that is the problem. She has perhaps gone a degree too far: an MBA from one of the best business schools to embellish her doctorate in engineering from one of the best universities on the East Coast. And the last straw: jaw-dropping job offers from the most coveted American consulting companies.

The young lady in question wants to marry a desi – only an Indian or Indian-American will do. Alas, as her aunt explains with a fairly audible sigh, “Her Indian classmates shied away from her because she had done better than them. Indian men don’t really want to marry women who are more qualified than they are and are going to rise much faster.”

The tea has not even gone cold before others come up with their stories of the ‘Search’ for evasive grooms. The subtext of the laments is clear: what if their daughters end up marrying goras (white Americans in NRI parlance), as they increasingly are. Or, what is feared most and mouthed rarely, a black American, the desi buzz around Obama notwithstanding.

Chalo Internet is the current mantra. Mrs X has abandoned her pursuit of a son-in-law for her thirtysomething daughter who is a physician attached to a hospital in the city and is heels-dug-in on the fast career track. Shrugging her shoulder she pitches in with: “Maybe she will find somebody on one of these matchmaking sites…. A friend of hers met her fiancé on a chat site. Lucky girl, he is also a Punjabi,” she says, with a touch of envy in her voice.

As the women chatter in the glass-fronted living room looking on to a landscaped garden with Italianate sculptures there is a sense of deja vu. Make that deja heard. The conversation I could not help eavesdropping upon in the waiting room of my dentist’s office in New Delhi a couple of months ago echoes in my ears. Two middle-aged women, very much like the ladies of DC, were discussing the dearth of grooms in India. ‘Nice boys’ were overseas, already married or gay and the rest were dowry-hungry. There wasn’t much, they seemed to concur, for a woman of ambition and substance, once past the mid-20s milestone. Two oceans and thousands of kilometres apart, it was checkmate for the brains-and-beauty combo, the burgeoning breed of desi power babes.