in my parents’ house, he was rarely found there. He was now in engineering school in Madras and lived in the university dorm. He came home for the summer but usually found something to do with friends that prevented him from staying at my parents’ house for more than three days in a row.
“The fourth day, there is always hell to pay,” he told me. “First three days she pampers, fourth day she wants to take me to Ammamma’s house and there is Lata there and Anand and his illicit wife. . . . And from then on things start going from bad to worse to really rotten real fast.”
Nate had spent three days with me and had escaped on a hiking trip in the Aruku caves with his friends the day before our pickle-making ritual.
“But I planned this six months ago,” he lied easily when Ma threw a tantrum. “I can’t back out now.”
Nate and I had a good relationship. We communicated regularly via email and he and I spoke on the phone if my mother was out of earshot on his end. There was no sibling rivalry between us. Nate was ten years younger than I, and we believed that he was too young and I was too old to feel any rivalry. Because of the age difference, there was no race for the attention of my parents. We were family and we fought over HAPPINESS and other assorted food items and philosophies, but we acknowledged the fact that we both had spent time in the same womb, and accepted each other, flaws and all.
My father had sneaked off to work this morning in the car despite Ma’s nagging and she lamented about that as well. “Couldn’t he have taken the day off?” she said when the auto rickshaw stopped in front of my parents’ house. “Now we will have to take an auto rickshaw to Ammamma’s house, too.”
“He’s taking tomorrow off,” I said as I helped her haul the large basket of mangoes inside the veranda, after she paid the auto rickshaw driver with the grace of a kanjoos, makhi-choos, scrooge, scrooge, who would suck the fly that fell in her tea.
“Now go change; wear something nice,” she ordered as she collapsed on a sofa.
The electricity was out. For six hours every day in the summer, the electricity was cut off to conserve it. The cut-off times changed randomly but were usually around the times when it was most hot. Today seemed to be an exception, because instead of cutting off the electricity from eleven to one in the afternoon, they had taken it out at eight-thirty in the morning.
I sat down on an ornate and uncomfortable wooden chair across from my mother who was resting her feet on the large, ostentatious coffee table centered in the drawing room.
“What should I wear?” I asked. I was here for two weeks and had promised myself I’d do exactly what my mother wanted me to do. Maybe that, I thought, would help ease the blow when I landed one right there where her heart was.
“The yellow salwar kameez.” Ma’s eyes gleamed. She probably thought I had changed. Never as a teenager had I asked her what I should wear when we went to visit relatives.
“Which yellow one?” I asked, slightly annoyed because it felt like surrender.
“The one with the gold embroidery.” She picked up a newspaper to fan herself.
I gaped at her. The yellow one with the gold embroidery was made of thick silk. Was the woman off her rocker?
“It’s too hot, Ma,” I argued lightly. “Why don’t I wear a cotton one?”
She agreed, but grudgingly. This was her chance to show her American-returned daughter off. But she couldn’t really show off. I was unmarried, I was twenty-seven, and sometime soon she was going to find out I was living in sin with the foreigner I intended to marry. Life would have been easier if I had fallen in love with a nice Indian Brahmin boy—even better if I hadn’t fallen in love at all and was ready to marry some nice Indian Brahmin boy my parents could pick out like they would shoes from a catalog.
I hadn’t planned on falling in love with Nick. We met at a friend’s house. Sean was a colleague and a friend and his sister was Nick’s ex-girlfriend and now “just a good friend.” As soon as Nick said, “Hello,” I knew he was trouble. I had never before found an American attractive—well,