Made in Heaven, and Everything She Had to Bargain For

The first wedding in Made in Heaven is the biggest in Delhi, and before the groom’s family asks its planners about flowers, it asks them about the bride. The groom is heir to a bicycle fortune. The bride, Aliya, is a journalist. His parents feel that something is amiss, and the two planners they have hired, Tara Khanna and Karan Mehra, are to find out who she really is, or there may be no wedding at all. What they turn up is an abortion in her past, a private fact about her own life, and it goes onto the table between two families as one more item to be settled.

When the couple balk, Tara takes the bride aside. Her argument, in one critic’s account of the scene, is arithmetic. Is she sure her husband will never regret the fortune he would be giving up? And his parents will not live forever. In the end the money will be theirs. It is not quite cynical advice. It is the advice of a woman who knows how these sums come out, because she once did them for herself. Tara grew up lower-middle-class, and she married the heir to an industrial fortune.

That scene holds the series in miniature. Made in Heaven stages one wedding an episode, and behind each one is a deal: a family that has the bride’s past investigated, parents who demand a dowry on the wedding day, a political match the planners help a bride escape. It is usually praised for what it exposes behind the big wedding. What it sees most clearly is narrower, and harder. Almost nothing its women are owed arrives as a right. A bride’s past, her dignity, a share of a marriage, a place in the house she married into: each of them has to be bargained for. And the planner who bargains best is the one who grew up with the least.

This essay follows that one thread through both seasons: the bargain, who strikes it, and what it costs. Beside it the series sets two other things, and it offers them more sparingly. One is a right, claimed in the open, at a price, by the other planner. The other is neither a right nor a bargain at all.

This essay follows both seasons to their ends. A later section opens by saying so, and anyone who would rather see the endings first can stop there and come back after watching.

Made in Heaven was created by Zoya Akhtar and Reema Kagti, who wrote it with Alankrita Shrivastava, and produced by Excel Entertainment and Tiger Baby Films; Akhtar, Kagti, Shrivastava, Nitya Mehra and Neeraj Ghaywan are among its directors. The first season, nine episodes, arrived on Prime Video on 8 March 2019, and the second, seven episodes, on 10 August 2023. It is in English and Hindi. Sobhita Dhulipala plays Tara and Arjun Mathur plays Karan, with Jim Sarbh as Tara’s husband, Adil Khanna, and Kalki Koechlin as her best friend, Faiza Naqvi; in the second season Mona Singh plays Bulbul Jauhari and Trinetra Haldar Gummaraju plays Meher Chaudhry. Mathur was nominated for the International Emmy for best performance by an actor in 2020 for playing Karan. In Japan the series streams on Prime Video under a title with a subtitle of its own, a phrase that means a fated meeting.

The series was not screened for this essay. What it says happens comes from the series’ published record and from reviews and recaps written when each season appeared. Lines are paraphrased, never quoted as exact, and where accounts of a scene differ, the essay keeps to what they share.

Talking to a Toronto weekly in March 2019, Kagti said of the weddings that all of it was “a delicious backdrop for drama, but we also wanted to scratch beneath the surface”, and that it was “always a vehicle for us to explore Indian society, to make some kind of social commentary.” This essay takes her at her word about the surface, and looks at one thing beneath it.

There is an English saying that marriages are made in heaven, and the agency at the centre of this series is named after it. The name is the product. What Tara and Karan sell to the families of south Delhi is the look of a match that was meant to be: the flowers, the music, the light, the photographs that will be passed around for years. What they handle, behind the flowers, is how each match was actually made.

They are hired and paid by families, and a family’s interest in a wedding is not always the bride’s. The first episode shows how far the service reaches. It reaches into a woman’s past, on behalf of the family she is marrying into, and then into her decision, with an argument about money. The series presents both as part of the job, which is exactly the point.

Even the agency is a deal. It was bankrolled by a loan shark, Ramesh Jauhari, and Karan is still paying him off; by the second season Jauhari is a partner and his wife, Bulbul, audits the books. Tara, who married into money, does not run the agency for the money. The two of them broker other people’s bargains from inside one of their own.

This Library’s essay “India: What Gets Negotiated Inside an Arrangement” argued that arranged marriage in India did not collapse as women’s education and earnings rose. It acquired a negotiation inside it, with a veto, a meeting, a timeline that can be argued over, and that negotiation very rarely reaches caste. Made in Heaven is set among the families for whom the negotiation is richest, and it is told from a side that essay did not set out to cover: the people hired to run it. Its planners sit on neither side of the table. They are paid to make whatever the table agrees look like fate.

When the first season appeared, Nadia Nooreyezdan, writing in The Swaddle, read it as a series about the calculated compromises women make in order to survive. The phrase was in her headline, and it is right. This essay wants to sharpen one word of it, because the series itself is sharper than the word.

A compromise is something you give up. A bargain is something you trade. A right is something you are owed, and should not have to buy. The three leave different marks. A compromise costs the one who makes it. A bargain costs both sides and can be won, and whatever it wins comes with the price still attached. A right costs nothing to hold, which is exactly why it is so hard to come by: someone has to be made to honour it, and in the world of this series that someone is seldom in the room. So its women trade. They trade what they have: money, where there is money; silence; a reputation; the look of sincerity.

None of this is a moral failing in the women who do it, and the series, on this reading, does not present it as one. It shows a world whose other doors are closed, or slow, or dangerous, and women who understood that before anyone around them did.

Tara’s own sums began early. Two accounts of the first season place a finishing school in her past, where, as one reviewer put it, she learned the knife-and-fork manners of the world she was entering. Before her marriage she worked for the Khannas’ company. Adil, the heir, was engaged to someone else.

When word of the two of them got out, Adil’s father, who was her employer at the time, offered her a sum of money to walk away from his son and keep quiet. She turned it down.

A reviewer writing episode by episode on the blog Don’t Call It Bollywood read the refusal as a wager on sincerity: her feelings for Adil, whatever she had persuaded herself they were, set above any cheque. It worked, the reviewer noted. The father was moved, and the son came looking for her. On that reading the refusal is both things at once, feeling and tactic. What is certain is the arithmetic. A sum of money is a small price, and a final one. A marriage into a fortune is a large price, and it goes on paying. She refused the smaller bargain and held out for the larger.

In the second season, when Tara tells her mother that the chef she has started seeing is a nice man, her mother answers, in the critic Kaveree Bamzai’s account of the scene in Open, that her daughter was not made for suburban men paying off their loans. It is a small exchange, and it explains a great deal. The valuation began at home.

It would be easy to read Tara as a climber and leave her there. Kagti, in the same 2019 interview, put the writers’ view of their characters plainly: “In real life, people are a mix of good and bad. They aren’t heroes and villains. They are just people trying to live life.” On this reading, Tara learned early, from a mother, a finishing school and an employer with a chequebook, that a woman like her would be valued at what she could marry. She did not argue with the valuation. She beat it.

The fourth episode shows the other face of the job. The groom is a civil servant who wants a modest wedding, and the couple decide to pay for it themselves. On the day, in The Swaddle’s account, his parents quietly hold up his wedding procession with a demand for a dowry, and the planners find themselves acting as go-betweens while the bride’s despondent parents try to pay, so that their daughter’s wedding will not be ruined.

Then Tara steps out of her role. Just before the rite that would have married them, she tells the bride what has happened, and the bride stands up and walks out of the hall.

It is worth being exact about what the groom’s parents did, because the episode stages it as a family negotiation and the law does not regard it as one. Under India’s Dowry Prohibition Act of 1961, demanding a dowry, directly or indirectly, from the parents or other relatives of a bride is itself an offence, punishable with prison. The right not to be asked had been on paper for nearly sixty years before this wedding day.

What made it real on the day was not the statute. It was a piece of information, handed over by a planner whose job was to see the wedding through, and a bride with the nerve, and the standing, to leave her own wedding. By the reporter’s account in that 2019 Toronto interview, the episode drew on several real cases of young women walking away from the ceremony on hearing a dowry demand. They are not a statistic, and this essay offers none. They are a reminder that in a room full of relatives, a right is often only as real as a woman’s ability to walk out of the room.

Set it beside the first episode and both faces of the job are visible. In one, Tara digs up a woman’s past for the family and argues her back towards the marriage with arithmetic. In the other, she hands a bride the one thing that lets her refuse. Neither scene settles which is the real Tara. Side by side, they suggest that both are the job.

Karan has nothing to trade. He is gay, and he hides it from the families who hire him. In the years the first season is set, India’s penal code still carried Section 377, a provision of the code written under British rule in 1860 against what it called carnal intercourse against the order of nature, and under it the way he loved was a crime.

His landlord installs a camera in his room and secretly films him with a man. When the landlord’s wife finds the recordings, the landlord says he was gathering evidence for the police, and Karan is arrested. In custody, a policeman sexually assaults him.

Look at where the law stood when the camera was found. The man who had filmed another man in secret had the law’s own word for what he held: evidence. The man he filmed was the one arrested. This is the cruel part, and it deserves anger, aimed where it belongs. Karan had no bargain to strike and no right to call on. The law that ought to have protected his privacy was the law that made his privacy a crime.

Then the landlord comes to him and confesses that he too is gay. Karan drops his case against him, and resolves instead to go after the law itself, in the open, with his own name and face on the challenge. Here someone declines to trade and insists on a right, and the series will make him pay for it.

The law did change, though not because of anyone in the series. On 6 September 2018 a bench of five judges of the Supreme Court of India, in Navtej Singh Johar v. Union of India, held unanimously that Section 377 was unconstitutional insofar as it criminalised consensual sexual acts between adults, whether two men, a man and a woman, or two women. It remained in force for acts without consent and for acts with animals. On 17 October 2023, two months after the second season appeared, the same court held that there is no fundamental right to marry, and that it could not recognise the right of same-sex couples to marry under the Special Marriage Act. The man who plans other people’s weddings could not, under the law as the court left it, have his own recognised.

From here, this essay describes how both seasons end.

Tara has suspected Adil of an affair, and has confided her suspicions to her best friend. The other woman is the best friend, Faiza. When a car crash exposes the two of them, Tara gives Faiza her blood. Later she goes to Faiza’s house and wrecks it. Both acts are hers, and this essay will not choose between them.

Near the end of the season, a flashback shows how Tara won Adil. She arranged for the two of them to be recorded having sex in his office, and leaked the footage, and the scandal ended his engagement. Say plainly what that is. It is recording a man during sex without his knowledge and publishing it without his consent, and its purpose was to end his engagement to another woman. Nothing in this essay’s sympathy for Tara unsays that sentence. Nothing in the sentence is a verdict on who she is.

Now the refused money reads differently. The scandal was hers. The father’s offer was an attempt to put a price on it. Her refusal held out for the larger price, the marriage itself. It may be the most complete bargain in the series, and she built its leverage herself, out of the one thing a family with a great deal of money could not simply buy back: its name.

The season does not let her keep it cleanly. She walks out of the mansion with her jewellery and goes to the office, and finds it wrecked by a right-wing mob. The two of them look at the wreck and laugh, and plan to start again with the jewellery she has taken. The season ends on a card noting that Section 377 was later struck down as unconstitutional.

Hold that laugh against everything before it. Nothing in it is a trade. Her jewellery is their capital, his fight is their danger, and the wrecked room belongs to both of them. It is also, for the moment, all they have.

The second season opens six months later. The agency is struggling. Jauhari is a partner now, Bulbul audits the books, and Meher, a trans woman, runs production. Tara and Adil are waiting out their divorce, and Faiza is pregnant with his child.

Karan’s mother is dying of cancer. When he refuses to marry a woman, she tells him not to come back. In a series full of weddings, it may be the most expensive refusal of one: a son who will not buy his mother’s acceptance with a marriage that would be a lie. He comes apart. He turns to drugs and gambling, takes money from the business, falls out with Tara, and loses the man he loves, Akshay, over his lies. His mother dies without accepting him.

Here the right that Karan claimed in the first season reaches its edge. A court can strike down a law. It cannot make a dying mother send for her son. What he needs now cannot be bargained for, because he has refused the only price she would take, and it cannot be won, because there is no court for it. It could only have been given, and it was not.

Tara, meanwhile, is seeing a chef, Raghav. She seduces Adil, then tells him she wants his house, the Khanna mansion. Khushbu Sharma, writing in The Leaflet, described the move without softening it: Adil believes the night was genuine on both sides, and Tara uses it to demand the house as alimony. In the finale the mansion is hers in the settlement. She has taken it from Adil’s widowed mother, who says she will never forgive her. Raghav will not live in a house taken from a widow, and he leaves.

Count what the bargain buys and what it costs. It buys the Khanna mansion. It costs a man who might have loved her without keeping score, and the forgiveness of the widow whose home it was. The series sends this bill in the currency of character, and that is where one of its most serious critics began.

Sharma, writing in August 2023, called the whole narrative counterproductive, because “it shifts the discourse on women’s inheritance, alimony and maintenance from a rights-based framework to a bargain that only ‘smarter’ and ‘sharper’ women can negotiate.”

This essay’s thread runs straight into that objection, and it should not slip past it. To say that the series sees how women’s claims arrive as bargains is not to say that it questions the fact, and on Sharma’s account it mostly does not. It admires Tara’s sharpness, lets her win, and then charges her in another currency: a widow who will not forgive her, and a man who will not live in what she won. Her share of the marriage is settled, in the end, as a question about what kind of woman she is.

Set it beside another Indian story of a marriage ending. This Library’s essay “Thappad, and the Question Nobody Asked Her” followed a wife whose husband slaps her at a party held in his honour: she refuses the compromise her own lawyer advises, refuses the large settlement the lawyer then urges her to claim, and asks for nothing but the divorce. The film honours her for it, and rightly. But put the two stories side by side and a pattern shows. The woman who asks for nothing is principled. The woman who asks for the house is grasping. Either way, what she is owed becomes a test of who she is.

A right is not a test of anything. That is the whole of its worth, and it is why the critic’s objection reaches past one series. When what a woman is owed can only be extracted, the women who extract it are called greedy and the women who decline are called good, and the plain question, whose is it, never gets asked.

In Japan the series carries a subtitle that its original title does not have: a phrase meaning a fated meeting. It is a lovely phrase, and over this series an ironic one. So many of the matches in Made in Heaven have been investigated, priced or argued over before anyone calls them fate. That may be the most useful thing the series has to say to a viewer anywhere who was raised on the other story.

On the question of a settlement, the text of the law where this essay is written starts somewhere definite. Japan’s Civil Code, whose provisions on dividing property at divorce were revised by a law that took effect on 1 April 2026, now provides that a spouse who divorces may claim a division of property from the other; that if the two cannot agree, either may ask a family court to decide, unless five years have passed since the divorce; and that the court, in deciding, treats each spouse’s contribution to what was acquired or kept during the marriage as equal, unless it is clear that it was not.

This is not a comparison of two countries, and it is not advice to anyone. Nothing here says what Tara, a fictional woman in Delhi, would be owed under any law. It is a sentence from a statute, set beside a story. The story makes a woman’s share of a marriage a trial of her character. The statute starts from equal, and leaves it only where a difference is clear.

None of this makes Made in Heaven a series about Japan, and neither the series nor this essay is a portrait of Indian weddings or of Indian women in general, any more than one Japanese drama is a portrait of Japanese ones. What travels is the mechanism: what a woman is owed, arriving as something she has to trade for.

The last wedding this essay follows belongs to Julie, who is pregnant, and Roman, a young musician who has given up going to Berklee to stay with her. On the day, Roman has a panic attack. Julie calms him, and tells him to go and live his life. He leaves. She goes ahead with the wedding anyway, walks down the aisle, and makes her vows to herself.

Of the weddings this essay has followed, it is the one in which the bride holds a promise and chooses not to collect on it. Roman had traded his music for her. She hands it back. What is left when the deal is released is not nothing. It is a woman at an altar, celebrated, promising herself what nobody else has to.

Meher’s boyfriend, Danish, stays with her in spite of his family. Adil and Faiza marry. And the series ends with Tara and Karan together in the Khanna mansion.

Hindi cinema has told a story about two wedding planners before. In Band Baaja Baaraat, a romantic comedy of 2010, two young Delhi planners go into business on the understanding that they will not fall for each other, and fall. That is the genre’s shape: the partnership becomes a romance, and the romance a wedding. Made in Heaven’s partners are a woman and a gay man, and what holds them together is not romance. They are not lovers and will not marry. Over two seasons they have shared a business, a wrecked office and a falling-out, and come back to each other; and they end in the same house.

This Library’s essay “Chosen Again, Not Chosen Once” argued that a wedding is a single visible marker pointing at something that has to keep happening: a decision made again, in small ways, long after the album has gone into a drawer. The planners of Made in Heaven sell the album. Tara’s marriage was chosen once, by force, and did not survive being lived in. Her partnership with Karan was never declared in front of anyone. It has no album. It breaks, and it is chosen again. On this reading it is the one union at the centre of the series that was never a deal.

It would be dishonest to stop there. The house they end in is the spoil of a bargain, taken from a widow who will not forgive it. The series does not pretend otherwise, and neither should this essay. What was given is living inside what was taken. That is not a moral. It may be the most honest picture of a life that Made in Heaven offers.

There are at least four ways this reading could be wrong, and a fifth that belongs to the one making it.

First, it may flatter the planners, as the series sometimes does. Rahul Desai, reviewing the second season for Film Companion, wrote that “the screenplay seems to suggest that an outsider’s gaze is all it takes to conquer prejudice and reverse decades of social conditioning”, and that “giving every problem a conclusion – where someone or the other sees the light – not only robs the cause of its dignity, it also strips the North Indian demographic of the identity and agency that the series reserves for its misfits.” He was writing about the second season, but the objection reaches back. This essay leaned on one such moment, Tara’s word to the bride before the rite. If the series makes its planners the ones who see the light, a reading that praises them for it has taken the bait.

Second, the thread of this essay may simply be the series’ own frame, repeated. To describe every claim as a bargain risks accepting that claims are bargains, which is exactly what Sharma objected to. The essay has tried to answer in the only way open to it, by setting a statute’s plain sentence beside the story. It does not pretend that a sentence of Japanese law settles anything in Delhi.

Third, warmth. This essay has written about Tara with sympathy, and a reader may feel that the sympathy excuses her. It should not. She had a man recorded without his knowledge and published it. She ended another woman’s engagement. She used a night with Adil to take a widow’s house. Understanding why a person trades is not permission for what she traded. The series asks its audience to hold both at once, and so does this essay; a reader who cannot is not wrong.

Fourth, class. The series is set among the rich of south Delhi, and so is this argument. The bargains it describes are open only to people who have something to trade. Desai’s sentence about the agency the series keeps for its misfits cuts here too. The women with least room are not in the pictures this essay has looked at, and it has not found them.

Fifth, and aimed at the writer: this essay is written from Japan, about a series in Hindi and English, set in a city it knows only through other people’s accounts. Where it goes beyond what critics who could hear every line have said, it is interpretation, and should be read as that.

Three words, kept apart: what you are owed, what you can trade, and what can only be given. From the inside they feel alike. All three are about getting something you need. They behave very differently.

A right does not have to be earned and cannot be bought; its difficulty is that someone has to be made to honour it. A bargain can be won, and has to be paid for, and whatever it buys comes with the price still attached. A gift cannot be won at all, which is what makes it worth having, and it cannot be demanded, which is what makes it so hard to live without.

Tara’s story shows what happens when every need is routed through the second word. Karan’s shows what happens when a need that belongs to the third is taken to the first: a court can hear him, and his mother still does not send for him. And the ending, on this reading, suggests three things about the third word. What it names is rare. It does not come from where the pictures say it will. And it can arrive between two people who were never supposed to be each other’s anything.

If you have spent a long time bargaining for things that should simply have been yours, a share, a say, a little respect in the house you live in, you were not foolish to bargain. Very often nobody showed you another door. But it may be worth sorting, quietly, what you have been paying for that was yours all along, and what you have been trying to buy that can only be given. The first is a question for someone who knows the law where you live. The second is worth knowing, so that you can stop paying for it.

This is a reading of a television series. It is not legal advice about marriage, divorce or property, in India, in Japan or anywhere else, and it diagnoses no one, the characters included.

It rests on the series’ published record and on interviews and reviews read where they were published: Reema Kagti’s remarks to NOW Toronto in March 2019; Nadia Nooreyezdan in The Swaddle and Ajit Saldanha in the Deccan Chronicle in 2019; an episode review on the blog Don’t Call It Bollywood; and Rahul Desai in Film Companion, Khushbu Sharma in The Leaflet and Kaveree Bamzai in Open in 2023. What a reviewer describes is given as that reviewer’s account.

Law appears as its texts and courts state it, as of the dates given: India’s Dowry Prohibition Act of 1961, Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, and the Supreme Court’s judgments of 6 September 2018 and 17 October 2023; Japan’s Civil Code as it reads today. Japanese law is set beside the story and applied to no one in it, and neither country is set above the other.

No maker, performer, critic or court named here has any connection with this publication, and none has endorsed it.

What have you had to bargain for that should have been yours without asking?

When someone offered you a small, final price to go away, what did you hold out for instead, and what did it cost?

Is there a claim of yours that you have treated as a test of your character, when it was only a claim?

Who in your life have you never had to negotiate with?

For readers in Japan: anyone who has experienced sexual violence can call #8891 from a mobile phone to reach the nearest one-stop support centre for victims of sexual crime and sexual violence, and the call is free.