like saying. If you don’t like it, I can pack up and leave.” That was not what I really wanted to say, but I was angry and furious at being treated like a five-year-old. I was a twenty-seven-year-old woman; I was not a child. When would they learn that? And then again, when would I learn to act my age? Why did I have to go off the deep end over matters that did not concern me? I knew that; I knew that it didn’t really matter what Thatha or Ammamma thought about black people or white. Yet I couldn’t help myself and couldn’t regret what I said. Somehow I felt justified in taking umbrage at what they had said because I was right. But that didn’t change the fact that I had behaved badly and hurt my grandfather, my aunt, my grandmother, and my mother. Now if only I could find some beggars on the street to kick, I could call it a day.
“Are you threatening me?” Ma demanded, and I just gave her a “yeah sure” look but didn’t say anything.
“Are you?” she asked again, her eyes boring into mine.
I didn’t look away. Sometimes it was better to face the demons than ignore them. All that was left now was to purse my lips in a pout to look like a recalcitrant adolescent. Just the image I was trying not to portray. How could I convince them to trust my judgment in men if I was pouting like a child?
“All the sacrifices we made for you,” Ma said in disgust. “And this is how you repay us?”
I raised one eyebrow negligently and the little guilt I was feeling took a nosedive. “Ma, put a sock on the sacrifice routine,” I said with belligerence, all my vows of being the perfect daughter for the two week trip vanishing completely. This “you owe us” line was not one I liked, not one I believed in. I hadn’t put a petition to my parents asking them to give birth to me. It was their choice and since they made that choice I couldn’t owe them.
My mother’s eyes raged at me and she was about to say something when Sowmya came into the back yard with the dirty dishes in a blue plastic tub for the maid to clean. She set the tub down next to a plastic bucket that lay directly beneath a leaky water tap. For a while there was just the sound of the drops of water, drip-drip-drip, landing on a steel plate recently rinsed by Sowmya.
She looked at both of us and put a hand on my mother’s shoulder. “We are getting the oil and spices together,” she said calmly.
Ma nodded vaguely, obviously shook up by my statement. I refused to feel guilty. All my life my mother had been drilling in me the “we sacrificed for you, so you have to be our slave” line and I had had it up to here. If I would think about it calmly I would see that I was exaggerating. My parents had given me a lot of leeway compared to so many other parents. They had afforded me a good education. They had spent a decent amount of money to send me to the United States and make a better life. Sure they always tried to get me married but they never forced a decision on me as I had seen other parents do.
A classmate of mine in engineering college had ended up marrying a man she didn’t even like the look of because her parents insisted that it was the best match she could get. He was not asking for any dowry—it was her lucky day!
“All this is the influence of America,” Ma concluded. “You were never such a bad or rude girl before.”
She went inside and I curbed the impulse to run behind her with apologies. The love-hate relationship I shared with Ma was peppered with guilt and seasoned with the need for acceptance, I think from both sides. I wanted—no, sometimes needed—acceptance from Ma, but I wanted her to accept me the way I was, not the way she envisioned me to be. I wanted her to love Priya the person, not Priya the daughter who didn’t live outside of her imagination.
“Priya.” Sowmya tried to soothe me and I raised both my hands to silence her.
“She doesn’t want to believe that I am who I am, so she blames America for it,” I said caustically. “She