and took aim. The mango flew and struck me on the forehead before falling into my lap.
My mother made a disgruntled sound and looked at the now half-squished mango lying unceremoniously on my yellow salwar kameez.
“You have to hold the mango, Priya, ” my mother said, and proceeded to demonstrate with expertise how a mango should be cut. I narrowed my eyes in frustration, but she didn’t seem to notice. She was busy cutting me into size along with the mango.
The first slash of the knife split the mango in two halves. Then Ma used a paring knife and removed the stone, but let its hard casing stay stuck to the flesh of the mango.
“Now you have to cut it again,” she told me and did so. Four pieces of the mango lay in front of her, their proportions hideously the same. They were mocking me, just as my mother had wanted them to. “If the mango is small”—she picked up an example—“then only one-half is enough.”
Lata snickered softly and muttered something about modern girls. My shoulders slumped. I didn’t want to get defensive, but I would like to see any of these women manipulate databases the way I could. So, they could cut some measly mangoes. So what?
Being competitive by nature and having the need to prove to the world around me that I was not only a good database programmer but also a good mango chopper, I wielded the knife one more time. This time I cut the mango, not in two clean halves but two squishy portions. After the fourth mango had gone to waste, my grandmother asked me to come and sit next to her and watch and learn. I didn’t want to watch and learn, but the writing was on Ammamma’s polished floor. It was pathetic to admit defeat to a lousy piece of fruit but I did it as gracefully as I could.
Between the sound of knives coming down on wooden boards and paring knives scraping against the hard coating of the mango stone, the house seemed like a mango pickle sweatshop. They were good at what they did and they all did it with ease. Their eyes focused on green fleshy fruit and the knives in their hands gleamed with juice while their mouths gossiped.
“When is the boy coming to see Sowmya?” Lata asked conversationally.
This would be boy number 65 according to Ma’s scoreboard.
“Tomorrow evening,” Ammamma said, as she opened her brass betel-leaves box.
That box had fascinated me since I was a little girl. I liked paan, when it was sweet, but my grandmother liked it bitter. She was an expert at making it and I watched in childlike fascination all over again as she put together a paan. She opened a green betel leaf that was slightly darker on the edges because of sitting in an uncomfortable position in the box. Then she opened a small box of light pink paste and applied it on the betel leaf with her leathery fingers.
“So, he is some lecturer at some college?” Lata asked mockingly. I couldn’t understand why Lata was being so antagonistic toward Sowmya. Granted Lata and Sowmya were not good friends, but Lata usually didn’t go off quite like this. What was really shocking was how my grandmother was not supporting Sowmya anymore.
Had they given up? When Anand got married it had been a blow, not only because he had married a woman from another state, but because he had married before his younger sister had. The rules were clear about this, too. The brother closest in age to a sister has to wait to marry until his sister does. If that doesn’t happen, the chances of the sister getting married are pretty slim. In the olden days when girls were married before they hit puberty this rule was put into place so that the brothers would not spend all the dowry money set aside for their sisters.
“Not at some college, at CBIT,” Sowmya blurted out. “And he has already seen my picture,” she added.
“So did that homeopathy doctor,” Lata countered.
“Hush,” my mother said. “Just because you are pretty and married doesn’t mean you have to talk like this. She will get married when it is time. God has it all planned. ”
Yeah, right! Poor Sowmya, caught in a society where she couldn’t step out of the house and couldn’t stay in.
A crackling sound dragged my attention back to my grandmother who was crushing betel nuts with a small brass nutcracker. She