“Then you should find a nice boy. . . . Hey, why don’t we hook her up with Adarsh Sarma?” Nate suggested jokingly and Tara threw her paper napkin at him.
“You dog,” she complained. “But I can come and visit you, right, Priya?”
“Absolutely,” I said.
They were so young, I thought. So very young! Was I ever that young? When I was in college, I didn’t have any boyfriends. Well, I did have a crush on someone once in a while but no relationships. I had friends. Even now I had a good relationship with a couple of boys I went to engineering college with. With other classmates my relationship was limited to an occasional phone call.
I never had the easygoing teenage years that Nate was indulging in. There were no teenage hangouts, none that I visited, nor was Britney Spears part of my vocabulary. In fact, when I was in India I didn’t know much about the pop music of the United States. Nate and Tara were aware of it all, their feet tapped to the music and Tara hummed to the lyrics. This was already another generation and in this generation girls could meet boys at a place like this after nine in the night. My mother would’ve hung me out to dry if I had tried to leave the house this late and especially to meet a boy.
“My parents adore Nate,” Tara told me. “They think he is amazing. They want to meet your parents but Nate keeps avoiding it. But sooner or later, Nate, it will have to happen.”
Nate shifted in his red plastic chair uncomfortably.
“You wouldn’t like our mother,” I said, and thought that Ma would simply hate Tara. Tara was what Ma would call a girl without a mother.
When Nate flipped through television channels to land on MTV, Ma would look at the gyrating, bikini-clad women in the videos and shake her head. “If you had shown up on television like that,” she told me, “I would skin you alive. These girls . . . cheechee, they don’t have mothers; if they did, no mother, no mother and I don’t care which country she is from, would allow this.”
Tara definitely fell in the no-mother category in her tight yellow blouse and small black skirt. She wasn’t different from a typical girl her age in the U.S. but for me it was a shock to see how much things had changed here in India. When I was this young, there was no way I could’ve walked out of my mother’s house alive wearing what she was wearing. Ma would never have permitted me to bring a boyfriend home or even to have one to start with.
Nate and Tara were holding hands, touching each other with a familiarity I had not experienced until I met Nick. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that these two teenagers had had sex, even though it would make me queasy.
Yes, this was a different generation and they made me uneasy with their progressive ways. But who was I to speak? I was planning to marry an American who I’d been living in sin with for the past two years. I most probably made my parents’ generation queasy with what they thought were my progressive ways.
“I’m going to put some money in the jukebox,” Tara said, and walked toward the glittering music box.
“She is nice,” I said because I knew Nate wanted me to like her.
“Yes, she is,” Nate said. “Ma will absolutely hate her.”
“Yes,” I nodded, and we both laughed.
“You feeling better?” Nate asked.
I grinned and patted his hand. “This was a good idea, Nate. Thanks. I feel better. Thatha was . . . brutal. He said that we can’t make mango pickle with tomatoes, that if I married Nick, our marriage would end in divorce.”
“It could,” Nate said. “There are no guarantees.”
“I know. So, are you planning to marry this girl without a mother?” I asked, not wanting to dwell on my impending marriage and divorce as Thatha would like to have it.
Nate laughed. “Before I take her to meet Ma, I really need to get her into a decent salwar kameez.”
Tara was definitely an independent woman of the twenty-first century. She zipped home on a white Kinetic Honda, waving, even as I gasped at her speed and lack of a helmet.
“She will be fine,” Nate said when I voiced my concern, feeling like my mother. “She is always careful and . . . won’t wear a helmet,