Dev Ganit, whose first name means “lord” and last name means “mathematics,” comes from a long line of failed mathematicians who could name theorems but never prove them. He was born in Dojhara, a desert village in northwestern India known for a lawsuit between its two wells since before anyone can remember. Dev considers the lawsuit the best thing his village ever built, and left at the age of three carrying its great lesson: never let a good argument die of neglect.
He grew up in England, where he learned to queue, to apologize for existing, and to study mathematics at Cambridge, the last of which proved more useful, though he insists the first two come in handy at dinner parties. His proofs were correct, making him the first Ganit to live up to the family name, a scandal from which the family has never recovered.
In his early thirties he moved to America, where the portions were larger and the apologies unnecessary, and where he met Frankie, from the upper Midwest, who found his apologies hilarious and his portions insufficient. He has been happy ever since, which he finds suspicious but has decided not to investigate. Some theorems you do not prove. You simply stop looking for the counterexample.
He believes everything in life reduces to a mathematical formula, and has derived most of them. The formula for happiness took him forty years. It turns out to have been sitting across the breakfast table the whole time, doing the crossword in ink.
Now in his sixties, as an author, he has achieved the two honors every writer secretly craves: one book banned, another his wife won’t let him publish. The banned one he is proud of; in America a ban is marketing. The other is his wife’s favorite, because she read it at the kitchen table, laughed until it hurt, and told him some books are written to be published and some to be a marriage. On their anniversary she reads her favorite chapter aloud, doing all the voices, including, unforgivably, his. He considers this a better royalty than money.
Some years ago, his wife delivered him to a gathering he had calculated every way of avoiding, and there, similarly delivered, similarly near the exit, stood a physician. In a conversation both were attempting to end, it emerged that they had been born in the same village. Dev computed the probability that two boys from Dojhara, population small, wells two, would collide at an American party neither wanted to attend, and concluded the wives had arranged it, a charge they have never denied.
The physician’s name is Ved, and their names are anagrams. Dev maintains this as the entire story of Dojhara: the same raw material, assembled in a different order, arguing ever since. On Tuesdays Ved writes seriously, with evidence and credentials. On Thursdays Dev writes about the same subject with none of those things. Readers ask which is right. Dev refers them to Dojhara. Two wells, one water, a lawsuit five hundred years strong. You do not settle an arrangement like that. You subscribe to it.
He lives with three females, one of them human, his wife Frankie. His lovebird, Sigma, loves him by biting him until he bleeds, an honesty he treasures. His Havanese, Pi, is irrational, loves everybody, and has lately taken to visiting Ved for examinations she does not need, returning each time mysteriously heavier. She barks at good and bad people with equal conviction, which makes her as reliable a judge of character as most book reviewers, and considerably better company.
Dev Ganit is a fictional person and Dojhara is a fictional place.