and I lifted my eyes. Thatha was home from the construction site where he was building a new house that he could rent out. When he had told me that they were building yet another house, I had joked he was becoming a regular slum-lord. But for Thatha, building houses on the land he had purchased years ago was an investment, a future for his heirs, the ones yet to be born.
He stepped inside his plot of land and opened his arms wide. I raced into them and felt like a little girl again, little Priya with her big old grandfather.
“I was not here to welcome you,” he apologized. His eyes wandered to Neelima who had stood up and his sharp gaze I’m sure didn’t miss the tears on her cheeks. “What is with her?” he asked me, and nodded at Neelima who scurried inside the house.
“Everyone is being perfectly mean to her,” I told him, and inhaled the smell of tobacco and cement that hung on him. Thatha chewed tobacco, a nasty habit in any man but him. He made it look dignified; or maybe I was just biased.
“She is imagining it,” Thatha said, putting his arm around me. We walked inside the veranda and he groaned comically at the voices coming from the hall. “They are all here?”
“Mango pachadi,” I supplied laughing. It was good to see the old man and it was good to be this comfortable with him even after seven years.
He looked around mischievously and then winked at me. “The pomegranate tree has some red, red fruit; let’s go,” he whispered, and we both sneaked out holding hands.
The pomegranate tree and a few mango trees were scattered in the area between my grandparents’ house and the house they gave up for rent. As a child I was not allowed to wander around the fruit trees because more than once I had fallen sick eating too many not so ripe pomegranate seeds.
It was a ritual. We would come for a visit and Thatha would sneak me away to eat the forbidden fruit. We would usually get caught because I would end up with some fruit stains on my clothes. My mother would never let it slide. She would kick up a fuss and Thatha would apologize and the next time we came for a visit, he would take me to the pomegranate tree again. We were partners in crime. We were pals.
“Here.” Thatha peeled a pomegranate fruit with his pocket-knife, broke it open, and handed me a piece of the fruit. We sat down on the stairs that led to the apartment upstairs and watched the traffic go past the metal gate of his house.
“So how is my American-returned granddaughter?” he asked amicably.
“Doing well. But things here don’t seem that . . . well,” I said, slurping over juicy pomegranate seeds.
He sighed. “Anand . . .” He paused thoughtfully, then continued, “made a mistake. . . . But what do they say in English? To err is human?”
I shook my head. “He married the woman he loves; that’s a blessing, not a mistake.”
Thatha’s eyes twinkled. “Love isn’t all that it is cracked up to be, Priya. Marriage needs a lot more than love.”
“But love is essential,” I argued.
“You fall in love later,” he said with a patriarchal wave of his hand, “after you get married and have children ”
I wanted to argue the point with him, even though I knew it was futile. He was set in his ways and I in mine. We lived by a different set of philosophies. In his rulebook, duty was high on the list, and in mine, personal happiness was a priority.
“What if you never fall in love with your wife . . . or husband?” I questioned.
Thatha gave me another piece of fruit embedded with bright shiny pomegranate seeds. I took it from him and started peeling the seeds off from their rind before popping them into my mouth. It wasn’t the season for pomegranates but this one had ripened early and was sweet.
“You always love your wife . . . or husband, as the case might be,” he said in that authoritarian tone that broached no further dispute.
But he knew just as well as I did that unlike his children and other grandchildren, that tone would not deter me. It had been that way since the beginning. I had had the most arguments with Thatha , the most debates, and, ultimately, the most fights. We discussed various subjects