One Winter’s Day: A feel-good winter romance

by Laura Briggs

  The answer was no, of course. For the life of her, Tessa couldn’t figure out why some part of her persistently felt that the answer was yes instead, since that made utterly no sense at all.

  Five

  A cloud of curious smells surrounded Ama as she entered the restaurant’s outer hall, which contained the stairs to her family’s private apartment, the fragrance of her marketplace visit mingling with that of the jasmine rice that had been cooking in the kitchen that morning. No smell from her father’s fire, however, which meant he wasn’t grilling the chicken for tonight’s special yet, weirdly enough.

  “Jaidev, I brought you some new spices,” Ama called. She shrugged off her blue cardigan as she set down her shopping bag. “This new Hispanic stall outside the whole foods store had some amazing chipotle, and they were handing out samples of this black pepper rub at the—”

  “There you are!” hissed her sister Rasha, hurrying downstairs to meet her. Right behind her was Ama’s mother Pashma and Ama’s auntie—instantly, Ama smelled trouble instead of spices. Was it an emergency? Was someone hurt? Or was it—but it couldn’t be—

  “Here I am?” she answered suspiciously.

  “He’s here,” hissed her auntie. “In the private room with your father—”

  “Who?”

  “The guy from the website!” said Rasha, who would be squealing with excitement if not for her lowered voice.

  Horror filled Ama. “What?” she said, her voice louder than she intended. “No. No, this is a joke. He can’t be—” Her brain drained itself of sensible replies. “How?”

  “Papa invited him,” answered Rasha simply. “When he emailed back.”

  “What? Why?” Ama moaned.

  “Hurry up and change,” said Pashma, interrupting. “You can’t meet him looking like that.”

  That someone who had replied to her father’s online ad for her was actually here? Had actually arranged to meet her? It didn’t seem possible somehow.

  “Tell me this isn’t happening,” said Ama. “How could he do this? I told Papa I wasn’t interested in meeting any of those people, no matter how great they sound.” Her voice was growing too loud, because her mother and Rasha were pulling her upstairs, and away from the dining room. Where, presumably, the guy in question must be talking with her father.

  “Come on, we have to get you fixed up,” said Rasha. “His family’s been waiting for fifteen minutes.”

  “Family?” Oh no. It was even worse than she thought. He had brought his parents along for the first meeting, like an old-fashioned couple meeting to evaluate the match. It was bad enough to be part of an online dating website that matched her with suitable strangers, but even worse to meet her would-be in-laws on the first date. Wasn’t the internet’s modern way of connecting people supposed to eliminate those sort of conventional setups? Who in their family had made the horrible mistake of teaching her father how to use a computer in the first place?

  Are you fixing up my hair and clothes? Or fixing me up with a lifelong commitment? Ama’s heels dug into the stairs. “I don’t think I can meet a stranger without warning like this,” she told them. “Let’s just apologize and find an excuse for them to leave, okay?”

  “Do this for your father, to make him happy,” said Pashma. “He’s so happy that a nice boy answered. Give him this chance, Ama.”

  “He didn’t even give me any warning, though,” said Ama in protest.

  “He’s a nice boy,” her auntie Bendi assured her, as she pushed open the door to Ama’s bedroom. “True, his family is from the south… and a little dark…”

  “I don’t care about that,” Ama assured her, thinking how the same kind of prejudices seemed to crop up in every culture across the world. “I don’t care what he looks like or where he’s from… I just don’t want to meet a stranger to discuss whether or not we should date.”

  “You should appreciate this opportunity to find someone,” her aunt scolded her. “It’s not as if a rich Punjabi boy is going to come beg you to marry him, is it? So we fish in a bigger pond.”

  “His family is from Tamil Nadu, and he has a good job and a college degree,” supplied her mother.

  “He’s in I.T. for one of the major financial firms downtown,” said Rasha excitedly. “It’s a great salary with benefits. Sanjay says it’s the biggest international trader in the city. This is perfect, Ama.”

  Ama waved away the blessing from Rasha’s accountant husband. “Then how come he hasn’t found a nice girl already?” she asked, as her family shoved her onto the bed, with Pashma already opening her closet’s door. “Why do they want to meet me?” Were the groom’s parents so very set on finding a match for him that they would let their son meet a potential wife from a totally different background?

  “He was sick a few years when he was younger. Nothing contagious by now,” assured her mother. “But it put him behind the rest of the young men his age.”

  “Mono,” said Rasha. “Bendi, do something with her hair—the pins are in the box. Ama, the clothes have to go.”

  “What’s wrong with the way I look?” protested Ama. She gestured toward her outfit, which was a perfectly cute embroidered peasant blouse and a blue paisley skirt paired with some wooden-soled Dutch clogs she had found at a secondhand clothing shop.

  Her mother stepped back, she and Rasha holding a sari between them as if unveiling a painting. A bright green one with an orange sari shirt and underskirt, and orange and gold embroidery detailing it to create a garment exactly like the sort her sister would have picked out from an online garment retailer. Which was where it had come from, Ama knew full well.

  Ama shook her head. “It’s not me. I don’t want to wear something just for the sake of impressing someone else.” She held up her hands, defensively warding it off. “Please, just pick something else. Something more casual.”

  “It’s just the one time,” insisted her mother.

  “A cousin of his mother’s goes to the hairdresser my friend Sheeta visits, and she says that his family is very traditional,” Bendi explained. “They will expect us to be traditional at home too. We don’t want to offend them, do we?”

  “You would look soo cute in this!” said Rasha enthusiastically. “Just try it on, Ama. For me. You’ve never worn it, and it’s a perfectly good dress.”

  “Hold still,” said Bendi, slapping Ama’s hand away when she tried to stop her hair from being pinned back. “Pashma, where are the sari pins?”

  “Mine are in the little makeup case on the table,” answered Rasha. “Grab the tube of lipstick too. This is going to be so much fun!”

  “Fun?” echoed Ama.

  “Hurry! We can’t keep them waiting!” said Bendi anxiously.

  Ten minutes later, they were downstairs in the restaurant’s private tearoom, in Ama’s own private dating nightmare.

  It was a scene from Bend It Like Beckham, Ama thought grimly—or maybe a chapter from A Suitable Boy, which her mother had been listening to in audiobook form this past week. Probably in mental preparation for this afternoon, when her family would sit down in the private dining room across from the Devar family with their eligible son.

  World’s most awkward tea. She had heard stories before from friends of hers who had modern arranged marriages—how the first meeting between families of the prospective couple would feel stiff and be only polite small talk until somebody managed to break the ice of formality. They all laughed about it later—and Ama laughed with them—but always with the secret resolution it would never be her in that scenario. And they probably hadn’t been forced into a traditional dress just to appeal to strangers, either.

  “He’s cute,” Rasha had whispered a moment ago, peering into the tearoom through the doorway curtain’s crack, as Pashma tweaked a few of Ama’s hairpins in place. “This is so exciting. It’s just like that scene from The Namesake, Ama—think, this could be your perfect match!”

  “Yeah. Right.” Sarcasm, although Ama was almost never sarcast
ic. She could hear her father’s voice, getting too loud in his usual fashion when he was nervous. This was going to be horrible.

  Feeling uncomfortable in the formal sari and with a hairpin sticking her in the scalp, Ama resisted the urge to squirm a little, sandwiched between her mother and auntie on the little love seat. Across from her sat the dignified-looking parents of her prospective suitor: a man with a medium skin tone in a nice suit and tie, and a woman in a redesigned modern salwar kameez that could almost pass for business casual.

  Clearly, ‘traditional’ for the Devars was sensible, sedate, and modern with a touch of India, and nothing like the impression her aunt had painted from a friend’s words. Ama knew they, too, probably hadn’t pictured her or her family like this—in their flashiest choice of saris and too much lipstick, her father in his embroidered cotton linen and Jaidev the same. Jaidev, who smelled strongly of masala dosa and whatever spice he had used to rub down the meat this morning, which blended with the fragrance of her mother’s tea. They seemed to have morphed into a giant Punjabi cliché from a Bollywood movie for this occasion.

  What had her father put in that online ad about her prospects? Did he say her family was secretly Punjabi royalty? That they owned a chain of Indian restaurants across the U.S.?

  Her suitor sat next to his parents, and appeared to be deep in thought as he listened to their relatives bantering about American food and traffic. Or maybe he was conducting a serious study of the loud Oriental carpet beneath his feet, one her mother had insisted on buying for the restaurant at a cheap bazaar sale.

  “Tamir was very bright and gifted as a boy,” his father Narain was now saying. “At the top of his class when we moved to America. Everyone believed he would go to MIT when the time came—but then, the illness delayed his education. He’s now behind in his career goals, but he is working very hard to catch up with the other young men of his age. I’m sure he’ll achieve a promotion very soon.”

  Narain was in designer retail, Ama had learned, managing two or three different stores for one of the big chains. His wife Deevana was only a semi-traditional Indian housewife, who taught classes in classical artwork at a cultural studies center. Tamir was their bright and only son, the engineer who’d graduated from a respectable northeastern university a few years ago.

  His complexion was a little dark by Indian caste standards, which could explain why his successful parents were having trouble finding him a wife, since Ama knew that some families might be prejudiced against darker skin tones. Plus, the fact that he had fallen behind academically would be a problem for others from his social sphere, who would expect a young man of his age to have climbed higher on the corporate ladder.

  Not with her family, though, who had no degrees, only a knack for running restaurants successfully. Her matrimony-hungry auntie would be willing to embrace him as family right now, even if he were fourth in line for promotion at the nearest dry cleaner’s.

  “Do you work in the restaurant?” Deevana asked Ama.

  “Yes, but—” Ama began, before Pashma gave her a quick poke in the side.

  “Ama is a wonderful cook,” said Pashma, who obviously still believed in the ‘traditional’ description as given by Bendi’s friend. “She makes good curd rice.”

  “You should taste her kadamba sambar, and her dosa with chutney,” volunteered Rasha.

  She had never cooked kadamba sambar in her life, and her dosa was weak at best—Ama knew these were dishes selected to appeal to the prospective culinary tastes of their Tamil Nadu guests.

  “And her chicken curry,” contributed Jaidev, who winked subtly at Ama. She stopped herself from glaring at him.

  “We are vegetarian,” announced Deevana. An awkward pause from Ama’s family after this.

  “She can make good curry with vegetable too,” supplied her father Ranjit, coming to the rescue. “Put it on a banana leaf, and Ama can make it seem like a feast for the tongue.”

  He looked thrilled, beaming at his daughter whenever he thought their guests were busy with their tea. He had been dying for years to have tea with a nice young boy interested in her, she knew. Finally, he had an official prospective suitor materialize on the scene, meeting her in a traditional Indian family setting, right down to the Darjeeling tea poured in the saucers and the ‘no shoes indoors’ policy.

  If it wouldn’t have broken his heart, Ama would have been tempted to run from the room—and not just because the parents across from her did not look overly excited at the prospect of the Bhaguts as their in-laws.

  She could bet they really wished their son had picked somebody else from his matches.

  “Are you a graduate from a college or university, Ama?” inquired Deevana politely. “Your father’s email did not mention your education.” An email crafted with lots of backspaces and single-digit tapping by Ranjit, undoubtedly, with Pashma hovering over his shoulder to contribute and correct.

  “No,” answered Ama honestly, and couldn’t help but see the subtle exchange of glances between this boy’s parents—doubtful ones. “I decided against college a few years ago. I preferred baking.”

  “I am sure you are a very bright young woman, nonetheless,” contributed Narain, still polite. But Ama knew that it was probably a stigma for him, her lack of a degree, just like it was for a lot of affluent multi-generational Americans too.

  There must be an auntie really pushing Tamir to find a wife.

  “I thought about culinary school for a while. But I own my own business now,” she added, before Pashma or Ranjit could stop her. “I’m the baker and cake designer for an event planning service.”

  “That sounds very interesting,” said Narain, who didn’t look particularly interested at all.

  The young man, Tamir, glanced directly at Ama for the second time, and twitched his lips into a smile—polite, bland, and with a touch of shyness that suggested all that recuperation, studying, and career scrambling hadn’t left him with much time for dating, via matchmaking or personal choice.

  He was probably a nice, polite boy. He was dressed in a perfectly pressed business suit of modest price and sensible style, accented by perfectly sensible eyeglasses in smart, modern frames. He looked as bland and boring as the kind of boy that Bendi had been dying to find for her for years.

  “Is this all of your family?” said Narain. “They all work in the restaurant?”

  To own a business was considered successful in America—but in India, the caste system made this matter tricky to judge. How strict would this family be when it came to judging hers? Neither of her brothers had been interested in college—not a prayer of it for Rasha, either, who had practically skipped high school in her eagerness to move on. And her father’s plans for the second branch of their restaurant were still on hold due to her mother’s fears of spending profits irresponsibly.

  “Oh no,” said Ranjit hastily. “I have an older daughter married. To a very successful engineer.”

  “Our other son Nikil has his own business,” spoke up Pashma. “Jaidev will take Ranjit’s place someday in this restaurant.”

  Nikil’s business was running a butcher’s shop in one of Bellegrove’s nearby ethnic districts—probably not the kind of trade likely to impress the couple sitting across from them, Ama thought. She wanted to smile at their possible reaction, but it wasn’t all that funny, really. Surely this boy was going to see right away that she wasn’t his ideal match and end this thing.

  “What do you bake, Ama?” Tamir addressed a polite question her way, the first since their initial introduction. There was a little trace of an Indian accent in his voice, hardly noticeable in its presence. When did his family move to America? Twenty years ago or so—Ama hadn’t been paying enough attention.

  “Cupcakes,” she said. “Mostly. And wedding cakes.”

  “She put a beautiful sari design on the one for her sister Nalia’s wedding,” supplied Bendi. “She’s had so much practice in the kitchen, she is ready to bake her own!” She laughed—so d
id everyone else, although it was only polite laughter from Tamir’s side.

  Would it help them abandon this if they knew her mother was from a relatively poor Rajasthani family? Or that the Bhagut family’s previous restaurant was a tourist trap in Himachal Pradesh? Ama racked her brain for every possible stereotype that could be cast against her as a marriage prospect by them, as if their impression of her weren’t enough to make up their minds already.

  “Don’t worry about the American desserts—the important thing is she makes good gulab jamun,” her father assured Tamir.

  “I’ve eaten it before. It’s a little sweet for me,” confessed Tamir. “I guess I’m used to my grandmother’s cooking. She was very… traditional.”

  “Did we mention that Tamir has been in India for the past year?” asked Deevana. “He helped my father in our family’s business, designing its website. He also helped his cousin come to America, with a good scholarship at one of the schools. Tamir has a very respected influence in his university’s technology department.”

  Was he hunting for a wife all that time in the prospective candidates of Tamil Nadu—and no interest from possible brides there? Ama’s brain was picking up on the wavelengths from her auntie Bendi, maybe, who would be thinking this exact thought by now. That Tamir was discounted goods that could be had for a relative bargain, thanks to the disinterest among his cousin’s eligible friends.

  She made herself venture a nice smile toward him. “Do you have any hobbies?” Ama asked.

  “He has no time for hobbies,” said Narain with a laugh. “The boy works ten hours per day. And weekends. He’s very dedicated to his career.”

  Tamir cleared his throat. “I like to read,” he said. “I used to play sports, before I got sick, of course. That was around the time I started college.”

  “Sounds nice,” said Ama politely.

  “And before the accident. It made it hard to kick a football.”

  “Did we mention the car accident?” said Narain. “Three years ago a driver on his phone crashed into the car of Tamir’s friend, when he was sitting in the passenger seat. He had surgery for the fractured bones—months of recovery for it.”