“It is not like I have been saying no, Lata,” Sowmya pointed out.
“I know,” Lata said, and sighed. “Our choices are so pathetic. Look at me, pregnant for the third time so that your father can have a grandson, so that Jayant can feel that he is for once closer to his father than Anand, so that when the old man dies he will leave something more to us than he plans to. Disgusting lives we women have to live.”
“We make our own choices,” I said.
“No,” Sowmya said as she stood up. “No, we don’t. If I had a choice, I would have gotten a job, gotten outside the house. Who knows, met someone. But Nanna wouldn’t have it.”
“You have choices,” Lata said, looking at me. “And you are going to blow it. An American boyfriend?”
“I didn’t plan it,” I told her what I had told Sowmya. “It just happened.”
“Have you slept with him?” Lata asked.
“None of your business,” I said without thinking. “That’s very personal.”
“There is no personal for women,” Sowmya piped in. “My father knows when I menstruate because I have to sit out, they know who talks to me and who doesn’t, they know what movie I see and with whom, they know exactly, down to the paisa what I spend on anything. Personal! My foot!”
I had never seen Sowmya so riled up, but then I had never seen her as a real woman with feelings and emotions, always as Sowmya, everyone’s punching bag. The one you could dump on, the one who put up with everything. I think all of us had forgotten that beneath the thick glasses lay the perceptive eyes of a woman. Not some bride-to-be but a grown woman who was as angry at the world as I was but had more of a right to be so.
I found Indian rituals appalling but I didn’t have to live them; Sowmya and Lata did. My life was better and my choices infinitely more appealing than theirs. My parents had given me this and I owed them the truth about my personal life. They needed to know and soon that Nick existed and because he did exist, I could not marry Adarsh or any other good-looking Indian “boy.”
“Where did Natarajan go?” Ammamma asked. Both Thatha and Ammamma refused to call Nate anything but Natarajan. Nate they said was too anglicized and in any case why would you shorten a nice God’s name like Natarajan?
“He had some studying to do, so he went home,” Nanna made the excuse. “He wants to catch up with next semester’s syllabus.”
“What a hardworking boy,” Ammamma said, buying into the cock-and-bull story. “See, Priya, that is the kind of boy girls want to marry. And Adarsh is like that. His mother told me that he used to study until four in the morning every day to pass the BITS Pilani entrance exam. Hardworking boys make good husbands.”
First, BITS Pilani, unlike all other engineering colleges in India, did not have an entrance exam; admission was granted based on 12th class exam results. Second, I couldn’t figure out the connection between hard work and good husband; I knew several hardworking guys at work who I was positive would make awful husbands.
“Pass the sambhar, Priya Ma,” Nanna said, looking at me curiously. “So, what did you think of Adarsh?”
“What do you mean, what did she think?” Ma demanded. “She—”
“Radha, I want to know what she thought,” Nanna interrupted Ma. It was a ploy; he knew I couldn’t speak my mind here, in front of all these people.
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “I spent all of ten minutes with him. It’s hard for me to say what he’s like.”
Ma’s face twisted and she glared at me.
“No, seriously,” I said, “you expect me to marry this man and I don’t even get a chance to talk to him before Nanna shows up asking if he wants chai.”
“How much time would you need?” Thatha asked. “A whole day? A year? Priya, marriage is what all that time is for.”
“Not in my world,” I said easily. “I don’t want to risk marrying the wrong man because tradition expected me to not know him before marriage. I can’t take that chance.”
“We all took that chance and we have done just fine,” Ammamma said.
I shook my head. “Please, I don’t want to discuss this.”
“Why?” Ma asked.
I was about to tell her exactly why when in pure movie fashion, the phone rang.