going to change my mind. Like my father had just a while ago, I walked out of Thatha’s house into the warm night. No one called out after me to warn me how dangerous it was to be out at night, but it was just nine o’clock and the sky was still not completely black; hints of the sun still lurked in crimson streaks around sparse sickly clouds.
I went to the telephone booth from where I had called Nick just a few hours ago and dialed my parents’ home number. Nate picked up the phone on the fourth ring.
I was sobbing and couldn’t get any words out.
Nate was in front of the telephone booth on his motorbike within twenty minutes of my hysterical phone call. It was a Yamaha, which my father and paternal grandfather had given him for his eighteenth birthday a year ago against Ma’s vehement objection. She was convinced that Nate would die in an accident on his Yamaha and hated it with a passion. I had shipped a helmet for him, which had annoyed Ma because she thought I was encouraging him but had pleased her as well, because she knew a helmet would keep her son safe.
“I know this great place where they serve very good ice cream,” Nate said when I sat behind him on the bike.
“Nate, drive carefully or we’ll die,” I all but shrieked when Nate started driving on the bumpy roads of Hyderabad. Maybe Ma had a point!
The ice cream parlor was a cozy copy of a ’50s Hollywood movie. There was a jukebox, a red jalopy in a corner, and Enrique Iglesias was telling some woman she couldn’t escape his love at the top of his weepy lungs.
“Nate,” I said mortified, “You’ve brought me to some teenage hangout?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I thought you’d like to meet Tara.”
I sniffled. “Tara?”
“My girl . . .”
“I know who Tara is,” I said, not wanting him to think I had forgotten. “But I’m all blubbery and she’ll think I’m a weepy hag.”
“She already does,” Nate said with a wink, and waved at a pretty girl sitting at a table right ahead of us. “Isn’t she lovely?” he asked dramatically in a fake British accent.
“Yes, dear,” I said with a grin. This was a side of Nate I had never seen before and it was charming.
“Hi, I am Tara,” Tara said enthusiastically.
“Hello, Priya,” I said, unsure of what I was supposed to say to her. I held out my hand and she shook it.
“So, how are you doing?” Tara asked. “Are your parents mad as hell about your American fiancé?”
Well, she sure got to the point, I thought critically. Now, as an older sister, it was my job to dislike any woman/girl Nate liked, was involved with, and/or wanted to marry
“Screw them,” Tara said before I could respond. “You’ve got one life . . . no second chances, you know. Kis-kis ka khyaal rakhenge, haan? Who, who will we keep happy? So we have to make choices. You have to keep you happy.”
“It isn’t that simple,” I repeated what I had been telling Ma all evening.
“Of course not, that would make it too easy,” she said with a grin. “So, Nate tells me that you love pista kulfi. They make a wicked kulfi here. Why don’t I get you one while you tell Nate what you think about me?”
Nate looked at me, his eyebrows raised. “She’s very nervous. She blabs when she’s nervous.”
“She seems super-duper confident to me,” I said. “And perky as hell,” I added.
Nate’s face fell. “You don’t like her.”
I smiled. “I don’t know her and I have yet to make up my mind. So far so good.”
Tara came back with kulfi for everyone and I got a chance to see how Nate was with a woman. It was a learning experience. He was so much my father in the way he talked and carried himself, always well behaved, always the gentleman.
“I don’t want to argue about this, Tara,” he said when Tara insisted that Nate wanted to go to the United States to do his masters.
“Well, why not,” I said, finishing the kulfi. “It’s a very beautiful place and you could do your masters in a really nice school there.”
“See,” Tara said, and put her hand on Nate’s. “ Arrey, yaar, it will be mast, a lot of fun.”
“Why can’t I just stay in India?” Nate asked belligerently. “Not everyone wants to run and join the Americans, yaar. I definitely don’t.”