It was overpowering, the smell of mangoes-some fresh, some old, some rotten. With a large empty coconut straw basket, I followed my mother as she stopped at every stall in the massive mango bazaar. They had to taste a certain way; they had to be sour and they had to be mangoes that would not turn sweet when ripened. The mangoes that went into making mango pickle were special mangoes. It was important to use your senses to pick the right batch. You tasted one mango and you relied upon that one mango to tell you what the other mangoes from the same tree tasted like.
“No, no.” My mother shook her head at the man sitting in a dirty white dhoti and kurta. His skin was leathery around his mouth and there were deep crevices around his eyes. His face spoke volumes about his life, the hardships, the endless days under the relentless sun selling his wares, sometimes mangoes, sometimes something else, whatever was in season. He was chewing betel leaves, which he spat out at regular intervals in the area between his stall and the one next to him.
“Amma,” the man said with finality, as he licked his cracked lips with a tongue reddened by betel leaves. “Ten rupees a k-g, enh, take it or leave it.”
My mother shrugged. “I can get them for seven a kilo in Abids.”
The man smiled crookedly. “This is Monda Market, Amma. The price here is the lowest. And all these, enh”-he spread his hand over the coconut straw baskets that held hundreds of mangoes-“taste the same.”
That had to be a stretch, but I didn’t say anything, didn’t want to get embroiled in this particular discussion. I stood mute next to my mother, patiently waiting for the ordeal to be over. My light pink salwar kameez was dirty and I was sweating as if I had never been through an Indian summer before. But I had been through twenty Indian summers, and now seven years later, I was having trouble acclimating to my homeland.
I pushed damp sweaty hair off my forehead and tried to tuck it inside my short ponytail. I had cut my hair a few years ago and stuck to the shoulder length hairdo. My mother had been appalled when I sent her pictures and had bemoaned the loss of my waist-length black hair.
“You go to America and you want to look like those Christian girls. Why, what is wrong with our way? Doesn’t a girl look nice with long, oiled hair with flowers in it? Even when you were here, you didn’t want the nice mallipulu, fresh jasmine, I would string. Always wanted to look like those… Short hair and nonsense,” she complained on the phone before thrusting it in my father’s hands.
I would have preferred to wear a pair of shorts to ward off the tremendous heat but Ma instantly rebelled at the idea. “Wearing shorts in Monda Market? Are you trying to be an exhibitionist? We don’t do that here.”
Since I had arrived three days ago I had heard that many times. “We don’t do that here.” As if I didn’t know what we did or did not do. I was “we.”
My mother picked up a mango and asked the mango seller to cut a slice. She handed the slice to me. “Here, taste,” she instructed, and I looked, horrified, at the slimy piece of raw fruit thrust under my nose.
Was she out of her mind? Did she expect me to eat that?
“Here,” she prodded again, and shoved it closer to my mouth and the strong smell of mango and its juices sank in. And memories associated with that distinct smell trickled in like a slow stream flowing over gently weathered stone.
I remembered stealing mangoes from the neighbor’s tree and biting into them with the relish of a theft well done. I remembered sneaking into the kitchen at night to eat the mangoes Ma was saving for something or other. I remembered sitting with Nate and eating raw mangoes with salt and chili powder, our lips burning and our tongues smacking because of the tartness. Now, I couldn’t imagine putting that piece of white and green fruit inside my mouth. It was not about taste, it was about hygiene, and suddenly everything everybody had warned me about India came true.
My Indian friends who visited India after living in the United States said: “Everything will look dirtier than it did before.” I never thought myself to be so Americanized that I would cringe from eating a piece of mango that had languished in that man’s basket where he had touched it with his hands and…
I shook my head when the man scratched his hair and used the same hand to find a piece of food between yellow teeth, while he waited for judgment to be passed on his mangoes.
Ma sighed elaborately and popped the piece of mango into her mouth. From her eyes I could see she was excited. From the myriad mangoes she had tasted all morning, this was the one that would be perfect for her pickle. But she was not going to let the mango seller know it. It was Haggling 101.
“They are okay,” she said with a total lack of enthusiasm.
“Okay, enh?” The man frowned and slapped his thigh with his hand in disapproval. “Amma, these are the best pachadi mangoes in all of Monda Market. And”-he paused and smiled at me-“I will give them to you for nine rupees a kilo, enh?”
Ma waved a hand negligently, and memories of my mother bartering over everything came rushing back like a tidal wave. The worst of all incidents was when we were on vacation in Kullu Manali in Himachal Pradesh. It was a popular vacation spot in the Himalayas before Kashmir had become such an issue with Pakistan. In a bazaar in Manali, Ma was trying to buy a shawl; it was not just any shawl, this was an in-fashion and in-high-demand woolen shawl, which had different colors on each side. This was a blue and black shawl and Ma was haggling like she had never haggled before.
The bargaining had stopped over one single rupee. The man said fifty and Ma said forty-nine and they went on for ten minutes after which Ma just walked out of the store. I was about thirteen years old and unhappy that we had just spent half an hour haggling over something she was not going to buy. I didn’t know that she was using another haggling tactic of walking out of the store and then being called in by the vendor who would then believe that she was serious about one rupee.
As I was dragged by the hand out of the shawl shop I cried out, “It is just one rupee, Ma, why do you have to be such a kanjoos?”
As soon as the word was out, I knew it was a mistake. Ma slapped me across the face in the center of the market and took me weeping and wailing back to our hotel.
She never forgave me for letting the entire marketplace know that she was haggling over one rupee or for the loss of the blue and black in-fashion and in-high-demand shawl. The vacation went to hell after that as Ma kept telling me how she was not a kanjoos, not a scrooge, and she was only trying to save money for our future, Nate’s and mine. When I reminded her that she was buying the shawl for herself, I was awarded another sound slap. I sulked for the rest of the vacation and for a couple of weeks even after we got back home to Hyderabad.
Thanks to happy memories like that I never, ever, bargained. It was a relief that in the United States I didn’t have to do it for groceries and clothes; everything came with a fixed price tag. And even when I went and bought my car, I didn’t barter or bargain. The nice Volkswagen dealer gave me the price; I agreed and signed on the dotted line even as Nick insisted that I was being conned.
“You could get it for two thousand dollars less, at least,” he told me when I was signing the loan papers.
“I like the car, I’m not going to fuss over it,” I told him firmly, and Accountant Nick’s eyes went snap-snap open in shock.
And that was that. Nick told me that from now on, when I wanted a new car, I should tell him what I wanted and he would buy it. “Getting conned while buying tomatoes in India is one thing, but when you buy a car it’s criminal to not negotiate,” he said.
But to haggle equated being like my mother and I was never, ever, going to be like my mother.
The mango seller picked out two more mangoes and set them in front of Ma. “Try more. See, they are all the same,” he challenged eagerly, in an attempt to convince her.
Ma ignored the mangoes he chose and pulled out one at random from the basket in question. The man cut a slice off with his knife. Ma tasted the piece of mango and instead of swallowing it, spit it out in the general direction of the ground.
“Eight rupees,” she said, as she wiped her mouth with the edge of her dark blue cotton sari.
“Eight-fifty,” he countered.
“Eight,” she prodded and the man made a “since-you-twist-my-arm” face, giving in to her bargaining skills.
“Okay,” he sighed, then looked at me. “She drives a hard bargain, enh? I am not going to make any money on this sale.”
I made an “I-have-no-say-in-this” face and put the straw basket I was holding in front of him.
“How many kilos?” he asked, and I gasped when my mother said twenty.
How on earth were we, two women with no muscles to speak of, going to carry twenty kilos of mangoes all by ourselves?
I found out soon enough.
It was excruciating. Ma pulled the edge of her sari around her waist and heaved to lift one side of the basket, while I lifted the other. We looked like Laurel and Hardy, tilting the basket, almost losing the goods inside as we paraded down the narrow crowded aisles of Monda Market.
We reached the main road and set the basket down on the dusty pavement. My mother looked at me and shook her head in distaste. “We will have to go home and you will have to change before we go to Ammamma’s. I can’t take you looking like this and we have to take clothes for tomorrow anyway.”
We were all meeting at my grandmother’s house to make mango pickle. It was a yearly ritual and everyone was pleased that I had come to India at the right time. I regretted my decision dearly. If I had to pick a month, it should have been anything but blistering July. I was glad that Nick wasn’t there with me because he would have melted to nothingness in this heat.
I wiped my neck with a handkerchief and stuck it inside my purse. I probably smelled like a dead rat because I felt like one. My body was limp and the sun blazed down at eight in the morning as if in its zenith.
A whole day at my grandmother’s house scared me. The potential for disaster was immense. I had no idea how I was going to tiptoe around the numerous land mines that were most certainly laid out for the family gathering, as always. When I was young it hadn’t mattered much. I used to find a way to block out the bickering and the noise. But now I was an adult and I was expected to join in the bickering and contribute to the noise. I was hardly prepared for either. In addition, I had to break my not-so-good news to one and all-land mines would multiply.
It had just been three days, but I was already tired of being in India, at home, and especially tired of my mother. My father and I got along well, but when it came to taking sides between his children and his wife, Nanna knew which side his idli was smeared with ghee. According to him, Ma was always right.
When Nate and I were younger and fought with Ma, Nanna would always support her. His logic was quite simple: “You will leave someday,” he would say. “She is all I have got and I don’t want to eat at some cheap Udupi restaurant for the rest of my life. She is right and you are wrong-always, end of discussion.”
Calling my mother a nag was not a stretch-she was a super nag. She could nag the hell out of anyone and do it with appalling innocence.
“No autos,” Ma complained airily, and looked at me as if I was somehow to blame for the lack of auto rickshaws. “Why don’t you try and get one,” she ordered, as we stood on the roadside, unhappy in the skin-burning heat, a large basket of mangoes standing slightly lopsided between us on the uneven footpath.
I waved for a while without success. Finally, a yellow and black three-wheeler stopped in front of us, missing by inches my toes that were sticking out of my Kohlapuri slippers.
With her usual panache Ma haggled over the fare with the auto rickshaw driver. They finally decided on twenty-five rupees and we drove home holding the mango basket between us, making sure none of the precious green fruits rolled away.
The road was bumpy and the auto rickshaw moved in mysterious ways. I realized then that I couldn’t drive in India. I would be dead in about five minutes flat. There were no rules; there never had been. You could make a U-turn anywhere, anytime you felt like it. Crossing a red light was not a crime. If a policeman caught you without your driver’s license and registration papers, twenty to fifty rupees would solve your problem.
Everything that had seemed natural just seven years ago seemed unnatural and chaotic compared to what I had been living in and with in the United States.
The breeze was pleasant while the auto rickshaw moved, but the heat and the smell of the mangoes became intolerable when the auto rickshaw stopped at a red signal or for some other reason. There were many “other” reasons: stray cattle on the roads, frequent traffic jams, a couple of Maruti cars parked against each other in the middle of the road as the drivers passionately argued over whose mistake the accident was.
“If Ammamma had only given us mangoes like she did Lata, we wouldn’t have this problem, now would we?” my mother said as the auto rickshaw leaped and jerked over a piece of missing road.
I had heard nothing but this complaint since I got back. My grandmother had given mangoes from the ancestral orchard only to my aunt Lata. This year the harvest had not been good and there weren’t enough mangoes for everyone. My mother was still seething and would probably continue to seethe for the next fifteen years. After all, she was still angry that her wedding sari had cost less than the sari her parents had given their daughter-in-law, Lata, for her wedding.
The battle between Lata and Ma was fought with jibes and remarks. My mother held her head high because my father was the managing director of an electronics company and we lived rather luxuriously compared to Lata. My uncle Jayant was an engineer at BHEL, Bharath Heavy Electronics Limited, a public company where everyone got paid like government officials. Lata and Jayant had a small one-bedroom apartment where they lived with their two young daughters. Ma never ceased to mention how crowded it must be.
My parents had built a large house. They hoped that once my brother and I got married and had children, there would be plenty of room when we came to visit them. But now that I was going to marry an American, I could imagine Ma and Nanna would not want us to visit because then they would be able to avoid the pointed question from neighbors and other family members, “How could you allow this to happen?”
Nate of course could not be counted on to spend much time in my parents’ house once he left for good. Even when I was living in my parents’ house, he was rarely found there. He was now in engineering school in Madras and lived in the university dorm. He came home for the summer but usually found something to do with friends that prevented him from staying at my parents’ house for more than three days in a row.
“The fourth day, there is always hell to pay,” he told me. “First three days she pampers, fourth day she wants to take me to Ammamma’s house and there is Lata there and Anand and his illicit wife… And from then on things start going from bad to worse to really rotten real fast.”
Nate had spent three days with me and had escaped on a hiking trip in the Aruku caves with his friends the day before our pickle-making ritual.
“But I planned this six months ago,” he lied easily when Ma threw a tantrum. “I can’t back out now.”
Nate and I had a good relationship. We communicated regularly via email and he and I spoke on the phone if my mother was out of earshot on his end. There was no sibling rivalry between us. Nate was ten years younger than I, and we believed that he was too young and I was too old to feel any rivalry. Because of the age difference, there was no race for the attention of my parents. We were family and we fought over HAPPINESS and other assorted food items and philosophies, but we acknowledged the fact that we both had spent time in the same womb, and accepted each other, flaws and all.
My father had sneaked off to work this morning in the car despite Ma’s nagging and she lamented about that as well. “Couldn’t he have taken the day off?” she said when the auto rickshaw stopped in front of my parents’ house. “Now we will have to take an auto rickshaw to Ammamma’s house, too.”
“He’s taking tomorrow off,” I said as I helped her haul the large basket of mangoes inside the veranda, after she paid the auto rickshaw driver with the grace of a kanjoos, makhi-choos, scrooge, scrooge, who would suck the fly that fell in her tea.
“Now go change; wear something nice,” she ordered as she collapsed on a sofa.
The electricity was out. For six hours every day in the summer, the electricity was cut off to conserve it. The cut-off times changed randomly but were usually around the times when it was most hot. Today seemed to be an exception, because instead of cutting off the electricity from eleven to one in the afternoon, they had taken it out at eight-thirty in the morning.
I sat down on an ornate and uncomfortable wooden chair across from my mother who was resting her feet on the large, ostentatious coffee table centered in the drawing room.
“What should I wear?” I asked. I was here for two weeks and had promised myself I’d do exactly what my mother wanted me to do. Maybe that, I thought, would help ease the blow when I landed one right there where her heart was.
“The yellow salwar kameez.” Ma’s eyes gleamed. She probably thought I had changed. Never as a teenager had I asked her what I should wear when we went to visit relatives.
“Which yellow one?” I asked, slightly annoyed because it felt like surrender.
“The one with the gold embroidery.” She picked up a newspaper to fan herself.
I gaped at her. The yellow one with the gold embroidery was made of thick silk. Was the woman off her rocker?
“It’s too hot, Ma,” I argued lightly. “Why don’t I wear a cotton one?”
She agreed, but grudgingly. This was her chance to show her American-returned daughter off. But she couldn’t really show off. I was unmarried, I was twenty-seven, and sometime soon she was going to find out I was living in sin with the foreigner I intended to marry. Life would have been easier if I had fallen in love with a nice Indian Brahmin boy-even better if I hadn’t fallen in love at all and was ready to marry some nice Indian Brahmin boy my parents could pick out like they would shoes from a catalog.
I hadn’t planned on falling in love with Nick. We met at a friend’s house. Sean was a colleague and a friend and his sister was Nick’s ex-girlfriend and now “just a good friend.” As soon as Nick said, “Hello,” I knew he was trouble. I had never before found an American attractive-well, besides a young Paul Newman and Sean Connery, and Denzel Washington-but no one in real life. I think most Indian women are trained to find only Indian men attractive; maybe it has something to do with centuries of brainwashing.
I was of course flattered that Nick was attracted to me as well, but I didn’t expect him to pursue a relationship. And I really didn’t expect that I, even in my wildest flights of fantasy, would be amenable to dating him. But he was, and I was.
Before I knew how it happened, and before I could think of all the reasons why it was a really bad idea we were dating, we were having dinner together. As if things were not bad enough, we started to have sex and soon we moved in together and after that everything really went to the dogs because we decided to get married. And now I was sweating in my parents’ home, dreading having to tell them about Nick.
To remove the sweat and the two layers of dust that had deposited on my skin after my trip to Monda Market, I took a quick bath, dipping a plastic mug in an aluminum bucket filled with lukewarm water, heated by the sun in the overhead tank. My mother still had not installed showers in the bathrooms. “Save water,” she said.
I put on a yellow cotton salwar kameez to appease Ma and looked at myself in the mirror. My skin had turned dark almost as soon as the Indian sun had kissed me and I knew no amount of sunscreen was going to stop my melanin from coming together to give me the ultra-ultra-tanned look. My hair had also become stringy. It was all the extra chlorine in the water. And my…
I winced; I was doing that complaining-about-India thing that all of us America-returned Indians did. I had lived here for twenty years, yet seven years later, the place was a hellhole. Guilt had an ugly taste in my mouth. This is my country, I told myself firmly, and I love my country.
TO: PRIYA RAO ‹PRIYA_RAO@YYYY.COM›
FROM: NICHOLAS COLLINS ‹NICK_COLLINS@XXXX.COM›
SUBJECT: GOOD TRIP?
HOPE YOU HAD A GOOD FLIGHT. SO SORRY I MISSED YOUR CALL. I WAS IN A MEETING AND I TURNED OFF THE CELL PHONE. AND SO SORRY THAT YOUR MOTHER IS GIVING YOU A HARD TIME ABOUT BEING SINGLE. I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO SAY EXCEPT THAT YOU ARE NOT SINGLE.
I MISS YOU. THE HOUSE FEELS EMPTY WITHOUT YOU. I SLEPT ON YOUR SIDE OF THE BED LAST NIGHT. I THINK I’M GETTING SAPPY IN MY OLD AGE.
CALL ME AGAIN, THIS TIME I’LL KEEP THE CELL PHONE TURNED ON, HAIL OR SNOW. JIM AND CINDY INVITED US TO GO CAMPING AT MT. SHASTA. WHAT DO YOU THINK? AND THERE WAS A MESSAGE FROM SUDHIR FOR YOU ON THE ANSWERING MACHINE. HE WANTED TO WISH YOU BON VOYAGE.
TAKE CARE, SWEETHEART.
NICK
TO: NICHOLAS COLLINS ‹NICK_COLLINS@XXXX.COM›
FROM: PRIYA RAO ‹PRIYA_RAO@YYYY.COM›
SUBJECT: RE: GOOD TRIP?
I JUST WISH THEY KNEW I WASN’T SINGLE-WITHOUT MY TELLING THEM. ANYWAY, WE’RE GOING TO GO MANGO PICKLE MAKING AT AMMAMMA’S HOUSE AND I THINK I COULD TELL THEM THEN. I WISH YOU WERE HERE. NO, THAT ISN’T TRUE, I WISH I WASN’T HERE.
IT’S STRANGE TO BE IN HYDERABAD AGAIN. I LOOK AT MY MOTHER AND I THINK ABOUT ALL MY AUNTS AND MY GRANDMA AND I HAVE TO WONDER HOW THEY STAY AT HOME ALL DAY, EVERY DAY, WITH NO LIFE BESIDES FAMILY. SUDHIR ALWAYS SAID THAT INDIAN WOMEN (HIS MOM ESPECIALLY, I THINK) ARE DEMENTED BECAUSE THEY STAY HOME DOING NOTHING BUT RAISING THEIR KIDS. I DON’T AGREE WITH THE DEMENTIA PART BUT I MUST SAY THAT LIFE SOUNDS EXTREMELY CLAUSTROPHOBIC.
REGARDLESS, I’M HERE. LOOKING FOR APPROVAL. SOME KIND OF OKAY SIGN FOR MY MARRIAGE PLANS. I NEED THEM TO SAY, “YES, IT’S ALL RIGHT FOR YOU TO MARRY THE MAN YOU’RE IN LOVE WITH.” WHICH IS RIDICULOUS! WHO ELSE SHOULD I MARRY BUT THE MAN I LOVE?
AT LEAST THEY HAVEN’T THROWN ANY “SUITABLE BOYS” MY WAY… YET. THEY HAVEN’T EVEN HINTED, WHICH MAKES ME VERY SUSPICIOUS. COMING HERE MADE ME REALIZE THAT I MISSED INDIA, MY FAMILY, EVEN MA. AND I MISSED NATE. HE HAS GROWN UP. HE’S A MAN NOW AND IT SEEMS SO STRANGE TO SEE HIM ACT LIKE ONE.
I MISS YOU. I MISS YOU VERY MUCH.
AND YES, TELL JIM AND CINDY THAT WE’D LOVE TO GO CAMPING. I GUESS ONCE I’M BACK I’LL BE READY FOR A VACATION.
I’LL TRY AND CALL AGAIN, BUT IT COULD BE TRICKY. I CAN CERTAINLY SEND EMAIL. MA DOESN’T UNDERSTAND COMPUTERS SO SHE’LL NOT SNOOP AROUND NATE’S COMPUTER AND HE’LL DEFINITELY CHEW HER OUT IF SHE TRIES.
I LOVE YOU,
PRIYA
I went downstairs and found my mother lying haphazardly on the couch, snoring harshly. Her thin hair, which had been through repeated bad dye jobs, lay lifelessly against the maroon fabric of the sofa. Her lumpy stomach went up and down and I could see the flesh at her midriff spill each time she breathed out. I never understood why Indian women wore saris in this day and age when alternatives like salwar kameez would not be frowned upon. A sari was uncomfortable, and the midriff-the area where most of the battles of the bulge were fought and lost-stood exposed like an unraveled guilty secret.
I looked at my wristwatch and frowned. She had made me hurry up but had fallen asleep herself.
“Ma,” I called out. She stirred a little, so I called out again and this time her eyes opened. They were bloodshot and she looked at me, slightly disoriented. Her gaze then fell on the clock. She sat up groggily.
“Go and get an auto,” she told me, then stood up yawning and stretching. “And not one paisa more than fifteen rupees. Tell the auto rickshawwallah that and if he does any kitch-kitch, I will deal with him.”
I slipped on my sunglasses, took my purse, and went through rows of houses to reach the main road. A buffalo strolled on the newly laid asphalt street and I tiptoed around it in fear. I was always afraid of stray animals on the road. The fear of buffaloes was deep-rooted, probably embossed onto my consciousness because of a “bad childhood experience” as the shrinks in all the movies say about serial killers. According to my father (my mother tells a slightly different version of the same story), when I was just seven months old we went to visit some relatives in Kavali, a small town in the same state as Hyderabad. My mother left me in the open veranda on a straw mat, while she went inside the house for something or the other. All of a sudden a buffalo came charging through the street, inside the gate, and onto the veranda. By the time my mother called out and my father came rushing outside, the buffalo was towering over me, sharp horns pointed toward me, a leaky snout dropping mucus close to where I lay unaware of the perilous situation I was in.
“God knows why, but the bull went away, though for a while we thought it would hurt you,” my father said.
My mother’s version of the story was mostly the same as my father’s, only in her story it was my father who had left me on the veranda, not she. “I never left any of my children anywhere without supervision. It is your father… always wants this and that and leaves children where they are without any thought,” she explained.
I reached the main road and found an auto rickshaw. The driver was smoking a bidi, lounging on the vinyl-covered seat of his three-wheeler, while a small radio at his feet was playing the latest hit song from a Telugu film. “Come and take me in your arms, come and take me and make me yours. You are gone I know but I wait you know, for you to come and make me yours,” a female voice sang to an oft-used melody.
“Himayatnagar,” I said loudly to be heard over the song, and the auto rickshaw guy nodded and turned the radio off just as a woman’s heartbroken voice begged her lover yet again not to leave.
“Chalis rupya,” he said, and I shook my head. I hated to barter, but even I knew forty rupees was too much.
“Thees,” I countered, holding up three fingers, and he agreed without any resistance, which underscored the point that forty rupees was too much and probably even thirty was excessive, but I didn’t have the stomach to go on.
I pulled out fifteen rupees from my purse and gave it to him. “I will give this to you now and my mother will give you another fifteen,” I told him and he looked at me quizzically. I got into the rickshaw and asked him to drive to my parents’ house. “And don’t tell my mother that the price is thirty, just fifteen. Accha?”
The auto rickshaw driver winked at me. “Take it easy, Amma, apun can keep secret,” he said as he hitched his pants up to his knees and started the scooter of the auto. “Vroom-vroom… to your castle, hain?”
I gave the man directions and he drove, chuckling to himself. When we reached the gate of my parents’ house, I asked him to wait while I went to get my mother. The rickshawwallah didn’t listen to me and even before I had set foot on the road, he honked three times, loudly enough to wake up the dead.
Ma came out of the house hurriedly, responding to the honks, wearing a red and yellow cotton sari, and my eyes took time to adjust to the bright colors. I didn’t like knowing that I had to adjust to India -it was absurd. I was Indian, yet everything seemed only vaguely familiar. I couldn’t remember how I used to feel when my mother wore a sari that made her look like a large Tequila Sunrise.
With the help of the auto rickshaw driver we put the twenty kilos of raw mangoes in the auto rickshaw. Ma and I squeezed on the slightly torn brown vinyl seat with difficulty, our legs hanging limply on the side of the large straw basket. I put a cotton bag with a change of clothes between us, along with a bag of gifts I brought for the family, and got ready for a bumpy and uncomfortable ride.
“Now, if Ammamma wants to give you something, just take it, okay? ” Ma told me. “But if she gives you something very expensive, like jewelry, then,”-she paused and shrugged-“ask me if you can take it.”
“And what’ll you say?”
“I will ask you to take it,” Ma told me irritably. “But that doesn’t mean you have to take it right away. Nothing wrong in showing some reluctance.”
Familial politics always made me want to be without family. I never understood the intricacies. It was like facing a complex math problem that had numerous ways to solve it and you didn’t know which one was the right way because the answer to the problem changed randomly. When was it right to look reluctant and when was it right to look eager? I didn’t have a clue seven years ago and I was not any wiser now.
“And if anyone asks you about marriage, just ask them to talk to me,” she further instructed.
My marriage, but she wants to talk to them, whoever they were-typical Ma. “And what will you tell them?” I asked patiently.
“If they have a good U.S. boy in mind and he is in India on leave like you, we can probably arrange something,” she explained. “If it works out, you will be married and happy. It will be a load off my chest. An unmarried daughter… What must the neighbors think?”
I glared at my mother. She was holding tightly to an iron handle on her side of the auto rickshaw and her naked potbelly heaved through her sari’s pallu as the auto rickshaw went through bad roads and worse roads.
There was this misconception my mother refused to discard. According to her, a woman was happy only if she was married. She had not once asked me if I was happy now. The question was moot; how could I be happy if I wasn’t married?
I wanted to lash out, tell her that I was getting married very soon, but I knew now was hardly the time. Maybe at dinner, I told myself nervously. Dinner would be a good time. Everyone would be there and we would be spending the night at my grandma’s house. There would be safety in numbers.
“If anyone tells you that you are too old to be unmarried”- my mother paused dramatically-“it is your fault.”
If I expected Ma to be compassionate, I was living in a fool’s paradise. And I was anything but a fool.
“That nice boy in Cheee-cah-go,” she continued, “he was perfect. But you didn’t want him. You don’t want anyone, all nakhras you have.”
Here we go!
“Ma, the nice boy in Chicago had a girlfriend, an American girlfriend. He didn’t want to get married and was only agreeing to talk to girls to get his parents off his back.” I repeated what I had told her three years ago when the same matter had come up.
Ma shook her head. “All boys wander a little and I am not saying that being with one of those Christian girls is good, but he would have said yes.”
“I wouldn’t want him to, ” I exploded. “He was living with this woman. They had a relationship going on for three years. I wasn’t going to marry a man who was in love with another woman.”
“Love, it seems, is very important,” Ma said sarcastically. “He was making eighty thousand dollars a year. Do you know how much that is in rupees?”
“I make eighty-five; do you know how much that is in rupees?” I countered.
“You didn’t three years ago,” she shot back. “He must be making so much more now. All that money…” She clicked her tongue and started giving directions to the driver instead.
I leaned back and closed my eyes. Another week and a half, just another eleven days, and I’ll be out of here. I repeated it to myself like a mantra.
My grandmother’s house had always been a home away from home, a place where my mother couldn’t always dominate and coerce. A home where I was spoiled often and where not all of Ma’s rules applied. I had played in this house since I was born, and as we got close to it, I immediately recognized the smells emanating from the streets and the surroundings. It was a blow to my olfactory senses that even after seven years I still knew how this place smelled and how the air tasted.
The house stood on a large premium plot of land in the center of the city. Coconut trees grew around it and there was a well that had been used for years in the old-fashioned way to draw water. The well now had a motor pump that extracted water from the ground and filled the overhead tanks, but evidence of the old ways hung on the well in the form of a piece of old frayed coconut rope dragged over a rusty metal pulley.
When I was twelve years old it had been a rite of passage for me to be allowed by my grandfather to bring up a bucket of water from the well. Ma had been scared that I wouldn’t be able to pull the heavy bucket and that it would pull me inside the well instead. She wanted me to have help, but Thatha had been adamant that I do it all by myself. I had rope burns on my soft palms but I strutted around like a proud peacock for days after that.
There was a small two-room house for the servants in one far corner of the plot and on another corner there was a large house that my grandparents rented. They had even constructed a second floor to their house. It was a modern three-bedroom apartment, which my grandparents rented out, too. They lived downstairs with my aunt Sowmya. Sowmya was three years older than I, and like me was not married, but unlike me had always wanted very much to be.
Ma paid off the auto rickshaw driver who winked at me as he told my mother with a straight face that the fare was only pandrah rupiya. We carried the basketful of mangoes to the house gate. Ma opened the gate and yelled for my grandparents’ servant.
Badri was my grandparents’ new servant. He and his wife Parvati had taken residence in the servant quarters just a year ago. Badri did all the gardenwork and cleaned the yard, while Parvati did the dishes and swept and mopped the floors in the house.
The old maidservant I grew up with, Rajni, was as much a part of my childhood as my grandparents’ house. She had left a year after I went to the United States, to go back to her village to live with her son.
Rajni was not a Brahmin and so she was not allowed inside the kitchen, but my grandparents had given her access to pretty much everything else. Sowmya cooked and left the dishes outside where Rajni cleaned them. Sowmya would take the clean dishes back inside the kitchen to put them in their rightful places. I used to think Rajni was a slacker because she didn’t do that part.
It had been a rainy day when my grandmother explained to me that Rajni was from a lower caste and we were from the highest caste. She couldn’t enter our kitchens; in fact, in the good old days, lower caste people wouldn’t even be allowed inside the house and Rajni would be untouchable, in every sense of the word. Things were apparently better now, Ammamma had said. “We Brahmins have become more tolerant, what with the days being so mordern and everything.” She hadn’t sounded too happy about the modern days.
I picked up our bags and helped Badri put the basket of mangoes on his head. My mother walked into the house like a queen as Badri and I followed like servile courtiers.
I smiled when I entered the grilled veranda on which a huge wooden swing swayed, covering it almost entirely-an obvious hazard for children. The swing had always been on the veranda. I probably wouldn’t recognize the veranda without it.
I removed my sandals and peeped inside. The living room was empty, but I could hear sounds coming from the womb of the house, resonating with my memories as if a tuning fork had been put into motion.
One could see to the other end of the house from the front door. All the rooms lay on opposite sides of my line of vision and I saw a smiling Sowmya step outside the dining area next to the kitchen.
She ran to me and we hugged.