Ma all but dragged me out to the back yard after lunch. “You might be here just for a few days but you will behave yourself,” she said, gripping my arm tightly.
I jerked her hand off and rubbed the small bruises her fingers left behind. “I will say what I feel like saying. If you don’t like it, I can pack up and leave.” That was not what I really wanted to say, but I was angry and furious at being treated like a five-year-old. I was a twenty-seven-year-old woman; I was not a child. When would they learn that? And then again, when would I learn to act my age? Why did I have to go off the deep end over matters that did not concern me? I knew that; I knew that it didn’t really matter what Thatha or Ammamma thought about black people or white. Yet I couldn’t help myself and couldn’t regret what I said. Somehow I felt justified in taking umbrage at what they had said because I was right. But that didn’t change the fact that I had behaved badly and hurt my grandfather, my aunt, my grandmother, and my mother. Now if only I could find some beggars on the street to kick, I could call it a day.
“Are you threatening me?” Ma demanded, and I just gave her a “yeah sure” look but didn’t say anything.
“Are you?” she asked again, her eyes boring into mine.
I didn’t look away. Sometimes it was better to face the demons than ignore them. All that was left now was to purse my lips in a pout to look like a recalcitrant adolescent. Just the image I was trying not to portray. How could I convince them to trust my judgment in men if I was pouting like a child?
“All the sacrifices we made for you,” Ma said in disgust. “And this is how you repay us?”
I raised one eyebrow negligently and the little guilt I was feeling took a nosedive. “Ma, put a sock on the sacrifice routine,” I said with belligerence, all my vows of being the perfect daughter for the two week trip vanishing completely. This “you owe us” line was not one I liked, not one I believed in. I hadn’t put a petition to my parents asking them to give birth to me. It was their choice and since they made that choice I couldn’t owe them.
My mother’s eyes raged at me and she was about to say something when Sowmya came into the back yard with the dirty dishes in a blue plastic tub for the maid to clean. She set the tub down next to a plastic bucket that lay directly beneath a leaky water tap. For a while there was just the sound of the drops of water, drip-drip-drip, landing on a steel plate recently rinsed by Sowmya.
She looked at both of us and put a hand on my mother’s shoulder. “We are getting the oil and spices together,” she said calmly.
Ma nodded vaguely, obviously shook up by my statement. I refused to feel guilty. All my life my mother had been drilling in me the “we sacrificed for you, so you have to be our slave” line and I had had it up to here. If I would think about it calmly I would see that I was exaggerating. My parents had given me a lot of leeway compared to so many other parents. They had afforded me a good education. They had spent a decent amount of money to send me to the United States and make a better life. Sure they always tried to get me married but they never forced a decision on me as I had seen other parents do.
A classmate of mine in engineering college had ended up marrying a man she didn’t even like the look of because her parents insisted that it was the best match she could get. He was not asking for any dowry-it was her lucky day!
“All this is the influence of America,” Ma concluded. “You were never such a bad or rude girl before.”
She went inside and I curbed the impulse to run behind her with apologies. The love-hate relationship I shared with Ma was peppered with guilt and seasoned with the need for acceptance, I think from both sides. I wanted-no, sometimes needed-acceptance from Ma, but I wanted her to accept me the way I was, not the way she envisioned me to be. I wanted her to love Priya the person, not Priya the daughter who didn’t live outside of her imagination.
“Priya.” Sowmya tried to soothe me and I raised both my hands to silence her.
“She doesn’t want to believe that I am who I am, so she blames America for it,” I said caustically. “She doesn’t want to believe that I don’t really like her or care that she and Nanna made a thousand sacrifices for me.”
Lies, all lies. I did care, how could I not? But like gifts that become uncouth burdens when pointed at with ownership by the giver, Ma and Nanna’s sacrifices seemed to be uncomfortable loads that I didn’t want to acknowledge because I was being asked to.
“But they did,” Sowmya argued.
I twisted around and faced Sowmya. “And that makes me what? Their property?”
“Just their daughter.”
I shook my head. Sowmya knew better than anyone that a daughter was a piece of property, something you unloaded after a certain point. Sowmya had already become excess baggage and my grandparents were waiting to get her married and out of their house.
In Telugu, the word for girl is adapilla, where ada means theirs and pilla means girl. In essence, the creators of the language had followed the rules of society and deemed that a girl was never her parents’, always the in-laws’, always belonging to someone else rather than to those who birthed and raised her.
“But I’m not just a daughter, I am me,” I said wearily, trying not to sound like a cliché. “No one seems to give a damn about me. Everyone is interested in their daughter, granddaughter…” I let my words trail away as I wiped from my face tears that had fallen, unbeknownst to me.
“Let us go inside,” Sowmya suggested, uneasy I believed with my show of emotion. “We have to put the mango pieces in peanut oil.”
We sat down again in the living room. My grandfather was taking a nap in the adjoining bedroom and Ammamma was snoring softly on the sofa. Ma was pounding on mustard seeds in a large black stone pestle; runaway mustard seeds that had jumped out of the pestle were evidence of the indelicate force she was using to powder them.
I sat down next to Neelima who was pounding dried red chili. Her eyes were watering and I held my breath. There was red hot chili pepper in the air.
Lata was putting fenugreek seeds in another pestle. No one was speaking. I felt I had silenced them all, blown up a bomb, and everyone was now quiet in the aftermath.
“Lata, I’m really sorry,” I said humbly. Now that the blood was not roaring in my ears, I knew that I had no right to judge her. She had made the choices she wanted to make and I who claimed that personal choice was of great importance should respect that. Lata gave me a tremulous smile and shrugged. It was more than I deserved.
“Ma,” I called out but she didn’t even look at me, “I’m sorry, Ma. Really.”
She didn’t acknowledge the apology and I sighed. There she was again, sulking like a five-year-old, instead of behaving like a grown woman.
Just like me?
“Ma, I’m really, really sorry,” I repeated, and she continued to pound on her mustard seeds, probably to drown out my voice.
Sowmya was visibly disturbed and she sat down next to my mother on the floor and spoke softly to her. I couldn’t hear what she was saying but, whatever it was, my mother was obviously displeased.
“You stay out of it,” Ma bellowed, and Sowmya immediately moved away from her. “She is my daughter and I will do as I want to do.”
“Akka, she is just here for a few more days,” Sowmya said. But her Akka, my mother, was in no mood to listen to Sowmya.
“She thinks she can say anything she likes,” Ma rattled away as her hands powdered mustard seeds. “So she is in America… as if that should impress us.” She looked at me and stopped pounding for an instant. “I don’t care. If you don’t treat me with respect… I am your mother after all.” She continued the pounding.
“Then you have to learn to treat me with respect, too,” I told her very gently, and the shit hit the fan.
“You are too young to gain my respect and you have done nothing so far to gain it,” she raged. “Respect! Children respect their parents… and that is all there is to it. You have to learn to behave yourself. I am not your classmate or your friend that you can speak to me like this.”
The eternal problem! My mother wanted to be a textbook parent while I felt that I was old enough to warrant being treated as an equal. We had had this particular flavor of fighting many times in the twenty years I had lived in her house.
“I said I was sorry, what more do you want?” I demanded in frustration, not using an apologetic tone, not even by a long shot.
“You always say sorry, but you do the same thing again. You don’t mean it.”
My temper flared once more. “So now I’m a bad and rude person and a liar?” I asked petulantly.
“Priya, shush,” Sowmya pleaded. “Please don’t fight. She is here for such a short time. If you fight like this, she might never come here again.”
My mother’s eyes blazed at that. “She doesn’t have to come here. She is not doing us any favors by coming here. She has done nothing but made our lives miserable.” Ma stopped pounding on the mustard seeds and went to work on me instead. “She is twenty-seven years old and she won’t marry. Our neighbors keep asking us and we have nothing to say. You are an embarrassment, Priya. You have done nothing to make us proud. So if you don’t come back, it won’t kill anyone here.”
That hurt!
I walked out of the living room in a daze. I reached the veranda and slipped my feet into my slippers, slung my purse on my shoulder, and shakily got the hell out of my grandparents’ house.
Yellow and black auto rickshaws drove noisily on the thin, broken, asphalt road as I walked on the dirty roadside, sidestepping around rotten banana peels and other unidentified trash. A vendor was pushing a wooden cart on the uneven road as he announced to the world he had fresh coriander and spinach. I walked past the vendor and kept walking. The roads became familiar as they flipped past my eyes.
I wish I had never come, I thought, as I blinked the tears away. I wished Nick was here, just to tell me that everything was okay with my universe. I felt like I was a little girl again, scared that mummy didn’t love me. And she didn’t, she had just said so. Fresh tears sprang in my eyes even as I brushed the old ones away.
I stopped in front of a small paan and bidi shop where they sold soda, cigarettes, bidis, paan, chewing gum, and black-market porn magazines, the covers of which you could only see through shiny plastic wrappers. They were hidden, but not completely; you could once in a while catch a naked thigh or a dark nipple thrusting against the plastic wrap. A man sat at the hole in the wall and looked at me questioningly.
“Goli soda, hai?” I asked.
“Hau,” the man said with a perfect Hyderabad Hindi accent. “Flavored, or plain?”
“Plain,” I said, and dropped a ten rupee note in front of him.
The first time I had goli soda, I was five years old. I remember going for a movie with Jayant and Anand; it was an old black-and-white movie made in the thirties called Mayabazaar, the bazaar of illusions, a Telugu movie, which I watched even now, whenever I could get ahold of it. It was a magical movie, a small, obscure story plucked from the great epic The Mahabharata.
I had seen some other children drink the soda before the movie and I threw a tantrum to get one too. We had been given strict orders by my mother that, no matter what, I should not eat or drink anything at the cinema theater because the food and water was not good there and there was a good chance I would fall sick.
The soda came in thick green bottles and the gas of the soda was blocked inside with a marble. The bottle was opened with a black rubber opener that sucked the marble out with a big popping sound. As a child I could hardly resist the sound of the marble popping out of place and landing inside the neck of the bottle, or the fizz that appeared on top.
After I threw a mile long tantrum, Jayant relented and bought both Anand and me one soda each and made us promise on the top of his head (the theory being that if we went against our promise, Jayant would die) that we wouldn’t tell anyone he let us drink goli soda. Unfortunately, Jayant had been found out because both Anand and I came down with dysentery and the blame was placed squarely on the unhygienic goli soda.
As soon as the shopkeeper opened the bottle I grabbed it eagerly and put it to my lips even as warning bells rang inside my head. This could be a really bad idea if I fell sick for the rest of my visit.
“Chee, Priya,” Sowmya called out from behind me and I almost jumped at her voice. “Can’t you drink a nice cool drink or something? Why does it have to be this… chee dirty stuff you drink?”
I drank the entire soda before speaking. “It’s good stuff,” I told her and she sighed.
“Two meetha paan,” Sowmya said to the shopkeeper and I pulled out money from my purse.
“Can we go sit somewhere?” I asked as I waited to put the paan in my mouth and relish the sweetness and taste of it.
Sowmya looked around and pointed to a dilapidated road that had been trampled on by numerous feet and automobiles over the years. We took that road and came close to the Shiva temple our family frequented often because of its proximity. We sat down on a cement bench that had a worn campaign poster on it.
We both chewed noisily on our paans. Juices threatened to drip from the corner of my mouth to embarrass me.
“They make the best sweet paan at this place near the university,” I said, remembering my old engineering college days. “And there is another place in Koti,” I added, “where they sell used textbooks.”
Sowmya smiled. “Remember when we went there in your final year and drank so much coconut water?”
“Hmm,” I said as the forgotten taste of coconut water streamed through my lips. “Why do Ma and I never get along? I always think I try but… in retrospect I can feel that I don’t. She makes me feel like a little child and I start to behave like one.”
“Maybe you want too much,” Sowmya said, plucking a leaf from a bougainvillea bush growing by the bench.
“You don’t see too many of those in the U.S.,” I said, pointing to the paperlike purple flowers. “Whenever I see a bougainvillea I’m reminded of the house we lived in in Himayatnagar where there were so many of those bushes.”
“And your mother had half of them cut down when she found that snake in the bathroom,” Sowmya remembered, laughing. “Remember how big the snake was?”
It was a black, thick, coiled cobra that had managed to get inside the bathroom. And Ma had walked in on it when we were all watching TV. The scream she rendered when she saw the snake gave all of us goose bumps and for a second we were a little afraid to go into the bathroom and see the hair-raising monster Ma was crying out about.
“It raised its fangs and hissed,” Ma had said hysterically, even after the snake had been killed and burned. “Those bushes, that’s where they hide,” she told Nanna. “You have to cut them all off.”
So the bougainvillea bushes went, but Nanna left just a few by the gate of the house and Ma always insisted that they should be cut down as well. What if another cobra was lurking there? “They live in pairs.” She was fearful until the day we moved out of the rented house into the house Ma and Nanna constructed in Chikadpally.
“There are some good memories,” I said to Sowmya. “I’m sure there are… I just can’t remember them. When it comes to Ma, I can’t remember any of the good times.”
“I sometimes feel the same way,” Sowmya said and patted my shoulder sympathetically. “Want to go inside the temple? It’s closed but they got a new Shivaling. It is very beautiful, made of black marble, with gold work done on it.”
This temple had seen several pujas conducted on behalf of and by several of my maternal family members. In the seven years since I had seen it last it hadn’t changed much. Thatha had brought me here in the morning, the day before I left for Bombay where I caught the 2 A.M. flight to Frankfurt and then onward to the United States.
Thatha had some puja performed then. All I could make out from the Sanskrit words mumbled by the pandit were my first and last names, and Thatha’s family name. The old pandit with a large potbelly hanging behind his thin ceremonial thread that languished across his chest had seemed grouchy. He had a hoarse voice and he had coughed half a dozen times through the puja that Thatha had paid for in my name.
“To bless you,” Thatha said, patting my head fondly. “To wish you the best in your long journey to a whole new world.”
There had been quite a crowd that morning. It was just 8 A.M. but several people had already lined up to have pujas performed for their loved ones, their cars, computers, children, et cetera.
Thatha and I had taken some consecrated white sugar, prasadam, and found a quiet corner in the garden in front of the temple to sit and watch the people, dressed in bright colors, moving with the purpose of God. As we ate the prasadam from our hands, the sugar melted in the May heat and made our hands sticky.
“Now don’t forget to call… often… as long as you have the money,” Thatha told me. “And if you need money, you are really short, then call… I will send you some.”
I nodded. I had promised myself that once I left home I would not take any money from my parents or my family. Independence was not just a word to me, I wanted to stand on my own two feet, not run back to Thatha and Nanna at the first sign of trouble, financial or otherwise.
“I have a tuition waiver,” I said to Thatha. “I will get some kind of assistantship. I will find a job… anything… I will be okay.”
“Pay attention to your studies,” Thatha said sternly. “And don’t take up some stupid job in some restaurant bussing tables. Okay?”
I had known even then that it wouldn’t make any difference whatsoever to Thatha’s mindset regarding what he thought were lowly jobs for those of a higher caste and I hadn’t bothered to convince him otherwise. But now I felt compelled to talk him out of his beliefs about black and white people, Americans, love marriages, and compulsory heirs. Why was it important to me now what had been understandable then?
I didn’t know why I had changed from accepting Thatha the way he was to a Thatha who I wanted to change.
“Look.” Sowmya pointed to a thick gold chain studded with diamonds that circled the top of the Shivaling inside a cage within the temple. “They say it costs one lakh rupees.”
“Is that why they have it so nicely locked up?” I asked, barely able to see anything through the thick, closely aligned metal bars between us and the Gods.
“Ah, you know people, they will steal anything, even God’s jewelry,” Sowmya said. “So silent it is, but in another few hours, there will be so many people here. Are there temples in the U.S.? I know there is one in Pittsburgh; everyone says it is a big temple. All Indians get married there.”
I laughed. “I don’t think all Indians get married there. But yes, I’ve heard it’s a big temple. There are a couple in the Bay Area. There is a huge one in a place called Livermore and there is another one in Sunnyvale, close to where I work.”
“Do you go there often?”
I shrugged. “I’ve been there a couple times… I don’t have the time, Sowmya.”
I didn’t add that I was not particularly religious. I didn’t go to any temple because I didn’t feel compelled to go.
“Do you go to church, then?” Sowmya asked, and I was taken aback.
“Why would you think that?”
Sowmya shrugged. “Got to follow something, right?”
“No,” I shook my head. “I don’t go to church.”
“I just… thought maybe you’ve changed that way as well,” Sowmya said.
“I have changed?” I didn’t think I had changed at all.
“Yes,” Sowmya said. “You are more… stronger. You stand by your opinions a lot more than you used to and you don’t let your Thatha get away with everything.”
I laughed softly. “But my relationship with Ma is still in the same pit.”
“Nobody can fix that one, ” Sowmya declared, and brought her hands together in prayer with a clap. “Maybe he can”-she pointed to the Shivaling with folded hands-“but I don’t think so.”
We laughed together and then she held my hand and squeezed it. “I am so happy to see you, Priya. You are a welcome change and I have missed you so much.” Sowmya hugged me then. “It is so good to talk to someone like this again,” she said, and sighed. “But you’ll be gone soon.”
“I’ll come more often from now on,” I said impulsively. “Maybe you can come and visit me?”
Sowmya made a face. “Yes, your Thatha is waiting for me to go gallivanting around the world unmarried.”
“Maybe,” I said.
“Maybe,” she agreed, and pushed her glasses up her nose.
I was seeing this world, my ex-world from my Americanized vision. This ex-world of mine was different to me now from what it had been before. I saw some things better, while other things had blurred beyond recognition.
Thatha was not my hero anymore because I saw him in a harsher light, an American light that didn’t condone men like Thatha. I had changed, I agreed with Sowmya. I hoped it was for the better.
Ma wasn’t in a better mood when we got back. Despite bad tempers, upset moods, and the exhausting heat, the work in Ammamma’s pickle sweatshop continued.
Lata was barking orders, while Ma was telling Lata how she was doing everything wrong. Not out of love was this food made, but out of need to prove superiority.
Ammamma was also saying her piece but no one was listening to her. We all listened to Lata and Ma and I felt like a yo-yo doll giving in to whoever spoke the loudest.
For the first time I realized that this mango pickle-making ritual like everything else was a power game. Ammamma had lost the battle a long time ago; my mother had been winning, but now Lata had thrown in a googlie-a cricket ball with a spin-by getting pregnant to please the old ones.
Lata and Ma were the contenders while Neelima, Sowmya, and I were spectators. Ammamma sometimes played a biased referee while other times she tried to recapture her days of glory.
My relationship with everyone in this room was in some way or the other fractured, but it was my relationship with my grandmother that was the most superficial. Ammamma was a feeling, a smell, a memory, not a real person. I knew little about her. I knew who her favorite film star was and which movie she watched repeatedly ever since Thatha bought a VCR, but I didn’t know how she felt one way or the other about her life, about having given birth to her first child when she was just fifteen years old.
After Ma, it took Ammamma ten years to conceive again and I could only imagine how hard those years must have been. It would have been imperative to have a male child, especially for Thatha, and it must have been pure torture to wait every month to see if she had a period or not.
Jayant’s birth was a miracle, or so everyone claimed. After that Ammamma didn’t get pregnant for eight years but it hadn’t mattered since she’d already delivered the son.
Anand was born when Ammamma was thirty-two years old. “I didn’t even think I could get pregnant and boom… suddenly my belly was growing. Your Thatha, he was so happy,” she had told me, smiling fondly at Anand.
After Sowmya was born two years later, Ammamma started to have uterine problems. When Sowmya was a year old they found a tumor in Ammamma’s uterus and they had to perform a hysterectomy.
They had also found a tumor in Ma’s uterus when I was fifteen. Ma again put the blame squarely on that quack doctor and the birth control pills, but Ammamma told me that it was hereditary. Even Ma’s Ammamma had had a tumor.
“So you have children fast,” Ammamma always advised. “God may take your womanhood away and then where will that leave you?”
For Ammamma, having children was an achievement, something she was proud of. How did she feel today when all her children were grown and most of them ignored what she had to say?
I had asked her once how she felt about being married off so early. “It was the way it was those days,” she replied but never told me how she felt about following tradition, accepting her fate. I knew nothing about her true feelings, she was just Ammamma, the woman who sat on the sofa all day long watching television and eating paan.
I didn’t know the woman behind the relationship I had with her.
And neither did Ammamma know the woman behind her granddaughter.
I looked at all the women in the room and wondered if behind the facade all of us wore for family occasions we were strangers to each other.
I was trying to be the graceful granddaughter visiting from America but my true colors were slipping past the carefully built mockery of myself I was presenting. Maybe the masks worn by the others were slipping, too. Maybe by the end of the day I would know the women behind the masks and they would know me.
I tried once again to talk to Ma but she shunned me and I concluded that she didn’t want to look behind the label: DAUGHTER, and didn’t want me to look behind the label: MA. If she wouldn’t show me hers, how could I show her mine?
“We just add these in?” I asked, looking skeptically at the chickpeas soaking in water. Lata pulled a yellow bucket filled with spices close to her and dumped all the chickpeas in. Then, when her arm was up to her elbow she asked me to pour oil and the pieces of mango in for her to mix.
Lata always made the chickpea avakai, Thatha’s favorite. When I was little I used to pick the chickpeas out of Thatha’s plate as my palate was not ready to endure the chili and spice of the avakai. Thatha would wipe away traces of spices and chili from a chickpea and line it up with others for me to nibble on. Ma would tell Thatha he was spoiling me, that I should learn to eat spicy food and not eat out of other people’s plates, but Thatha continued and I continued.
Even as an adult I could never eat food that was too spicy. When Nick and I went out to Indian restaurants he usually handled the hot food better than I did.
“Who’s the Indian here?” Nick would ask, as he wiped moisture from his forehead. He would continue to eat, despite getting soaking wet with sweat, while I would give up on the really hot food.
“My mother would like you… well, your eating habits at least,” I told Nick. “She believes that food isn’t real food if your nose and eyes don’t water a little while you eat.”
Ma and Lata ordered us around like slaves to bring the big pickle jars from the kitchen. Sowmya and I demurely went and got six huge glass jars. Neelima started to cut muslin cloth into large squares. The pickle went inside the jars and then the muslin was tied to the mouth of the jar after which the lid was tightly closed.
We all worked as if we were on automatic pilot, abiding orders and following the leaders blindly. The last of the pickle was being put into the jars when Ammamma decided to stir up some conversation. “So tell us, Priya, do you have a lot of Telugu friends in the States?”
“A few.”
“They say the Bay Area has a very big Indian population, especially Telugu,” Lata said, as she used a wooden ladle to fill her jar with her pickle.
“Some,” I said tersely.
“You don’t like Telugu people?” Lata asked, when I seemed reluctant to expound.
“I didn’t say that,” I protested.
Lata shrugged. “My brother who lives in Los Angeles told me that there are some Indians who don’t like other Indians who live in the States. They always stay away from them and only make friends with white people. I think that is a shame.”
“I agree,” I replied with affected sincerity. “The race of a person should be of no importance when you make friends. I have several American and several Indian friends. I also know some people from Turkey.”
Ammamma’s eyes popped out. “What? You have friends who are white? Who are black?”
She could as well have been saying that my friends were little green men from Mars.
“What can you talk to them about?” Ammamma asked. “They are not really friends, are they?”
I gaped at her. Was the woman really stupid, or was she merely pretending?
“What do you mean?” I asked, unsure of her question.
“She means what do you have in common with these white people,” Ma piped in. “You should stay with your own kind. These white people will always swindle you.”
“And how do you know that?” I sighed, first my grandfather and now my mother. It was a family thing, probably embedded in the genes.
“You think I am fifty years old and I know nothing?” Ma demanded harshly. “I know enough and I am telling you that you should only make friends with Indians, preferably our kind. Nice Brahmins… they will always be there to help you. You have to work with these other people, why should you spend your spare time with them?”
How was I supposed to argue with that?
“I have friends from different races and different countries. I don’t care where they’re from. If they’re good people…” I began, once again a futile gesture.
“White people are never good,” Ammamma announced emphatically. “Look what the British did to us.”
I rolled my eyes. It was ridiculous the way my family thought and felt about the West. Ma would always show off about her daughter in the United States, but she didn’t quite like the idea of her daughter even having friends who weren’t Indian. This did not bode well for my revelation regarding Nick this evening.
I was relieved of pursuing the discussion when a car honked and Ma asked me to go open the gate.
My father was finally here-it was the best diversion I had had all day.
TO: PRIYA RAO ‹PRIYA_RAO@YYYY.COM›
FROM: NICHOLAS COLLINS ‹NICK_COLLINS@XXXX.COM›
SUBJECT: RE: RE: RE: RE: GOOD TRIP?
SOUNDS LIKE YOU’RE HAVING A REGULAR GREAT TIME! I’M GLAD YOU DON’T FEEL GUILTY ABOUT ME-I’D HATE IT IF YOU DID. SO TO ANSWER YOUR QUESTION, NO, YOU SHOULDN’T FEEL GUILTY FOR BEING IN A HEALTHY RELATIONSHIP. YOU CAN’T PLAN RELATIONSHIPS, IF YOU PLAN THEM THEY ARE CALLED ARRANGED MARRIAGES AND HONESTLY, I THINK THAT’S A TAD COLD-BLOODED.
YOU’VE MADE YOUR OWN LIFE HERE IN SAN FRANCISCO, WITH ME, AND YOU DON’T OWE ANYONE ANYTHING. KEEP THAT IN MIND. NO MATTER HOW YOUR CULTURE TELLS YOU THAT YOU OWE YOUR PARENTS, YOU HAVE TO REMEMBER THAT CHILDREN NEVER OWE THEIR PARENTS. YOU DON’T OWE YOUR PARENTS ANYTHING BUT YOU’LL OWE YOUR (OUR!) CHILDREN COMPLETE LOVE AND LOYALTY BUT THEY WON’T OWE YOU ANYTHING-AND SO THE CYCLE SHALL CONTINUE.
I’M TEMPTED TO FLY DOWN AND CARRY YOU AWAY-WARRIOR STYLE. I KNOW YOU CAN TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF, BUT I KNOW YOU’RE GOING TO GET HURT AND I FEEL IMPOTENT SITTING HERE IN OUR HOME WAITING FOR YOU TO BE STUNG BY YOUR FAMILY. JUST TRY AND STAY CALM.
CALL ME IF YOU CAN, IT’LL MAKE US BOTH FEEL BETTER. NICK.