the bowl to cool, and was drunk from there. It was an interesting South Indian ritual that I had almost forgotten. It appeared some things had changed here as well. They used coffee cups now.
The coffee cups were actually teacups, white with a golden lining around the rim of the cup and saucer. I set the cups on the saucers and placed a teaspoon alongside each one of them.
Sowmya leaned against the wall next to the Venkateshwara Swami temple in the kitchen and looked at me with obvious relief. “I am so glad you are here,” she said. “At least now they can concentrate on you for being unmarried and leave me alone.”
“Thanks,” I retorted in good humor and then I quieted. “Has it been very bad?”
“Terrible,” Sowmya sighed. “It was getting better, but then . . . Now Nanna doesn’t even bother to ask me if I like the boy; he just says if the boy likes me, that is it.”
My grandfather was getting up there in the age department and I knew he was worried that Sowmya would be unmarried for the rest of her life. Who would take care of her after he died?
“You know that’s not how he means it. He’d never ask you to marry someone you didn’t want,” I tried to reason.
“I know,” Sowmya said, and shrugged.
“How did they react to Anand’s marriage?” I asked, changing the direction of the conversation.
Sowmya rolled her eyes. “It was a nightmare. They went on and on, and when he brought Neelima home the first time, Amma actually asked her to leave. Then Amma and Nanna went to Anand’s flat three days later and asked them to come back. They even paid for their wedding reception, but I don’t think she has forgiven them for throwing her out of the house the first time Anand brought her here.”
“Can’t blame her for that.”
Sowmya straightened, pulled out a bottle of instant coffee from the open cabinet next to the gas stove. She opened the bottle and poured one teaspoon of coffee into each of the cups I had lined up by the stove. “But she comes back; Neelima keeps coming back. I think Anand makes her because he wants her to get along with Amma and Nanna. I don’t think anything is going to get better until . . . maybe they have a child.”
“Are they planning to have children?” I asked the natural question.
Anand and Neelima had been married for over a year now and by all Indian standards they should at least be pregnant. It always boggled me, the lack of contraception and planned parenthood. Most of the married couples I knew from India had a child within a year of their wedding, which meant that they never thought about contraception. Most Indian couples wouldn’t dream of having sex without the benefit of a nice, five-day marriage celebration. Some of my Indian friends were adamantly staying childless, but the pressure from their families was pushing them into having unprotected sex with their spouse.
Sowmya held the steel saucepan in which the milk had been boiling with a pair of steel tongs. The milk looked frothy and I wrinkled my nose at the familiar smell of slightly burned milk. As the milk sizzled into the cups, Sowmya clicked her tongue sadly. “Neelima says that they have been trying, but no baby yet.”
“It’s just been a year,” I said. “You like her.”
“She is nice to me,” Sowmya replied casually. “She is a good girl. She helps me whenever she comes home. Amma never cooks and Nanna . . . well, he doesn’t like to cook . . . and why should he when I am here?”
My grandmother was a strange creature. She came from a generation where women were treated like doormats, yet she had managed to stay out of the kitchen for most of her life. Earlier in her marriage her mother-in-law did all the cooking, and by the time she passed away my mother had been old enough to do the cooking. During the times my mother couldn’t cook, my grandfather wielded the spatula.
There was a ritual in most Brahmin families, even now in some, during which women who are having their period had to “sit out.” “Sitting out” literally means they are relegated to one room at the end of the house—the room next to the veranda in my grandparents’ house—and are not allowed to touch anyone or anything during their “contaminated” period. When I was young I