By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

MUMBAI - In this romantically restricted society, Ashish Chettri is as close as you get to a serial seducer.
He is an irrepressible flirt who claims to pursue three women at a time, a loquacious utterer of compliments, a ceaseless seeker of dates.
And that is just with his thumbs.
Like many Indians today, Mr. Chettri is a solely cellular suitor.
He flirts brazenly by text message, but rarely, if ever, in person.
Text messages have become an integral part of courtships in many countries. But the short messaging service, or SMS, is proving particularly revolutionary in India, where it is becoming a way for the young to maneuver around deep-rooted barriers to premarital mingling.
For young, middle-class men like Mr. Chettri, the challenge is to interest women without most of the options available to the Western man.
The Western flirt might banter with a woman at a crowded bar.
He might suggest that they find a quiet place to “talk.” He might then ask the woman out for a meal at a restaurant. Should closeness develop, he might soon invite her to his apartment to have a
“drink.”
Good luck trying that routine in India.
Dating of any kind is minimal in the countryside, where two-thirds of Indians live. In big cities like this one, posh bars and clubs attract a relatively small Westernized elite who date as if in Paris or New York. But for middle-class men like Mr. Chettri, much persuasion is required even to induce a woman to have coffee with you, and that may be as far as it goes.
If a text suitor makes it to the next step, say an invitation to the movies, new challenges arise. “She will come, but she will come with two, three friends,” said Vaibhav Shingre, 25, a co-worker of Mr. Chettri’s. “You have to specify, ‘Please come alone.’”
Because many young Indians will marry only someone their parents approve of, and in some cases choose, much of this text messaging is recreational.
Young Indians, girls especially, are taught not to show any interest in the opposite sex. The prohibition extends to such behaviors as giggling at a man’s jokes. “Jo hansi, voh phansi,” goes one old Hindi staying. (If a woman laughs, she is already in the net.)
The texting craze seems to have spread into the Indian countryside.
Hundreds of kilometers inland from cosmopolitan Mumbai is Umred, a staunchly conservative town of 50,000.
Sonali Lanjewar, 19, a student and the reigning local beauty queen, said by telephone from Umred that texting had helped people her age communicate with the opposite sex, even if they could not follow up by meeting.
“Our parents are strict: They don’t let us go anywhere,” she said. “When you send an SMS, no one knows you sent it.”
She said she received text messages all day long, most from boys who would never say such things out loud.
“They try to make girlfriends on SMS,” she said.
“They say, ‘I like you a lot; I deserve you; I’ll do anything for you; leave your family and be with me; you’re very smart; you’re very cute.’”
As for Mr. Chettri, he has done enough textual flirting to read the early signs of success. When he texts persuasively, he says, the response times shorten and intimacies are more openly bared, just before he gets the text to end all texts: “I want to meet you.”
He meets, and he woos, but in this tradition- bound nation he has few illusions: He knows before long, he will be back at his phone, thumbs tapping away.