The avakai arrived with an Indian who was coming to the Bay Area and whose parents Ma and Nanna knew. Raghunath Reddy didn’t seem to mind carrying the midsized glass jar. “One amongst the many,” he told me when he dropped the mango pickle off at my office, which was right next to his. “I have two more jars and one sari to deliver,” he added.
Nick thought the pickle was too spicy but continued to eat it without ghee or rice, which was as close to killing yourself as you could come with the hot-hot pickle.
My experience with India in the summer had left me with a better understanding of Nick and my relationship with him and my family. Nick was pleased that I didn’t end up marrying a nice Indian boy and assured me that he had never thought about leaving me because I couldn’t tell my family about him.
“We come from different cultures, I understand that,” he said. “I was frustrated at times but never enough to not want to be with you. This is who you are; you’d not be you if you didn’t care about your family.”
It was a relief to be back in the U.S. This was familiar territory and I didn’t feel like a cross between a delinquent teenager and a bad daughter anymore. That feeling had passed when Ma, at the Hyderabad International Airport, had waved good-bye with tears in her eyes.
I got an email from Nate with all the family gossip. Thatha was not speaking with Nanna anymore as the last time they talked, which was just a week ago, they ended up talking about me and almost came to blows. Ma was back to normal, bitching and moaning that I didn’t call enough and when I did, she bitched and moaned that I talked too long with Nanna and wasted my money.
“Write long letters, tell everything there, don’t waste money on phone calls,” she said. “Send email, send us a picture of Nick. We still haven’t seen him.”
Lata had ballooned up with her advancing pregnancy and couldn’t wait for the baby to get out. Despite Jayant’s insistence she refused to have an ultrasound done. When I called her, she told me that she thought it was another girl and that she was just fine with that. She even had a name picked out, Nithila, which meant “pearl” in Telugu. If it was a boy, she said, she would go with Abhay, “the one without fear.”
Sowmya was getting married on September 21 and was very sorry that Nick and I couldn’t make it to the wedding. She understood our predicament as our wedding date was set for October 3.
Nanna and Ma were coming and even Nate had decided to make an appearance.
“Your wedding and I won’t be there?” Nate had written in his email. “Are you trying to be funny or something? So, are you going to introduce me to some hot chicks?”
Apparently, Tara, the girl from Delhi Ma would have hated, proved to be unsuitable as she had kissed another boy at a cousin’s wedding in Madras.
“It was just a kiss, she said,” Nate wrote in yet another email where he told me the entire sob story and how much her betrayal had hurt him. “I go for lots of weddings, don’t catch me kissing anyone, just.” But at Nate’s age, relationships come and go with little pain and Tara had already faded into a forgotten yesterday.
Frances was planning our wedding with great pleasure. Nick and I’d caved in and had agreed to a Memphis wedding (a Hindu ceremony followed by a Baptist one) and a San Francisco reception.
It was going to be a small wedding, Frances told me, just three hundred of her closest family and friends and then we could add to that with our close friends and my family.
The invitations were to go out in a few days and I wanted to make sure I sent my parents a personal letter along with the invitation.
The envelope with the wedding invitation, a note from me, and a picture of Nick had been ready for days but I kept forgetting about it. It wasn’t deliberate. Finally, with just a month left to our wedding I dropped the letter off at my company mailroom. The mailroom guy assured me that the letter would reach its destination in five to seven days…