much to be done and Lata and your mother do absolutely nothing. They just sit around giving orders. Must’ve been queens, maharanis, in some past life.”
I grinned. “And they take all the credit for the pachadi.”
Sowmya snorted. “I make better avakai than both of them. You think they would come upstairs and strain their backs a little? Nothing. They will sit downstairs under the fan while we sweat up here.”
On the terrace there was a coconut-straw bed that was used for the purpose of drying mangoes or any other fruit or vegetable that needed to get some sun. And it was a good place to get some sun—heat scorched the cement floor, burning everything in its wake.
“Ouch, ouch, ouch.” Sowmya and I danced on the cement floor as the heat burned our bare feet. We reached the coconut-straw bed next to which tall coconut trees threw some shade on the floor, making it cooler, bearable to touch with the soles of our feet.
“Should’ve worn slippers,” I said. “I’d forgotten how hot it gets.”
“Ah, slippers are for babies,” Sowmya said, laughing. “I don’t know how you can stand the cold in the States. It gets very cold, doesn’t it?”
I shrugged. “In San Francisco I think it’s always cold. But it gets quite hot in the summers in the Bay Area and yes, a little cold, nothing drastic. It doesn’t snow or anything.”
“Why is it always cold in San Francisco?”
“It’s by the bay. Lots of people joke that the coldest winter they endured was a summer in San Francisco.”
“Then why do you live there?” Sowmya asked.
“Because I like the city,” I said. I didn’t tell her that it was Nick who liked the city a lot more than I did. I wouldn’t mind living in the South Bay with the Indian restaurants and Indian movie theaters in arm’s reach. But Nick liked the way he could just walk from our apartment and find a café to get a cup of coffee and a croissant.
“Can’t have tandoori chicken early in the morning,” Nick would say when I would complain about San Francisco, and how I hated to find parking when I got home every day from working in the South Bay, and how wonderful it would be to live close to all those Indian restaurants.
But my bitching and moaning aside, I liked living in San Francisco as well; not as much as Nick, but I certainly liked being able to live amidst the bustle of the city. I liked having an apartment from where I could look at San Francisco and know that I was here, in the U.S., in the land of opportunities. I had worked so hard to get here and nothing said America as clearly to me as standing in the balcony with a cup of coffee looking at the city of San Francisco.
Neelima came upstairs and spread the muslin cloth on the coconut straw bed. We dunked the mangoes in the bucket filled with oil, salt, and turmeric.
It was great fun, just like the olden times when I was a child visiting my grandparents. My hands would smell of turmeric and stay yellow for days. I hadn’t done this for so long and I was stung by the loss. I had lost so much since I had left India and I hadn’t even thought about it. I had become so much a part of America that the small joys of dunking pieces of mango inside gooey paste were forgotten and not even missed.
It was as if there were two people inside me: Indian Priya and American Priya, Ma’s Priya and Nick’s Priya. I wondered who the real Priya was.
I had always thought that self-evaluation was nonsense. It didn’t really mean anything. How could you not know yourself? I believe we know who we are, we know the exact truth about ourselves, and it is when this truth is not palatable that we want to dig deeper within our conscience to find something better, something we can live with. Did I need to dig deeper now, to explore who I was beyond Nick’s Priya and Ma’s Priya?
We laid the oil- and spice-coated pieces of mango on the cloth, our yellow fingerprints marking the pristine white muslin.
“Did you tell your Thatha?” Neelima asked without looking at me, and suddenly I was face to face with familial politics again.
Everything was so complicated and it struck me like a sack of mangoes—I couldn’t live here. Nostalgia for a mango and HAPPINESS was one