“All Indians are dark,” Nick pointed out. “Compared to say a Scandinavian . . . what chance does your mother have of being called fair?”
But my mother was fair, fairer than most, and everyone including her talked about how beautiful she had been when she was young. Just like a marble doll, they would tell Nate and me. Then they would look at me, make sad sounds, and sympathize with Ma: “Too bad your daughter didn’t get your looks.” I was raised under the limelight of a mother whose beauty was long gone, but hardly forgotten. Today my mother could not be called beautiful. Her face, along with the rest of her body, had puffed up and any remnants of beauty were submerged by obesity.
Ma blamed her weight problem on birth control pills. They did the damage, she would accuse, as if eating mountains of white rice with lots of fat smeared on it was not responsible for the abundance of fat tissue in her body. She also blamed the doctor who had prescribed the criminal birth control pills to her almost twenty-seven years ago.
“That quack, gave me these awful pills and look . . . When you get married, Priya, no birth control pills, just have those babies and then . . . ask your husband to have a vasectomy, ” she advised.
Unlike most Indian men, Nanna didn’t care that Ma wanted him to get a vasectomy; he had never been that much of a chauvinist but what rankled and even amused him was Ma’s reason.
“In case I die and he marries again, I want to make sure his new wife doesn’t have any kids, so that you both are taken care of and not neglected for the new wife’s children,” she reasoned.
Ma had a twisted mind, Nate and I deduced, but we agreed that her motives were noble. Nanna I am sure felt insulted for being told that he didn’t love his kids and that if Ma wasn’t alive he would discard us as easily as he would marry another woman. “Radha, you just don’t have enough faith in the universe,” he would always say to Ma when she went on her pessimistic rants.
Seeing the family again after seven years was like being slammed in the solar plexus. My center of gravity had shifted and I worried about losing my balance, both physically and emotionally.
It was difficult coming home and facing my parents and now the rest of the family. Especially when I knew that they would not be happy, to understate their feelings, when they found out about Nick.
“Tell them I’m a Brahmin from Tennessee,” Nick had joked when I told him that my family would most probably perform death ceremony rituals for me if we were to get married.
Sometimes I imagined they would accept Nick. Why shouldn’t they? He was well educated, came from a good family, made good money—if my parents were to arrange my marriage it would be to someone like him, only he would be Indian and a Telugu Brahmin.
Marriage was on my parents’ minds as well. I had spent my first night in India crushed in a one-sided conversation with my mother regarding my inability to appreciate the ominous situation I was in by being single at my age; while my father and brother watched a late-night cricket broadcast from England. India versus England, and India was most probably on the way to being thoroughly clobbered as Sachin Tendulkar had just got out on a duck score.
“Has she gone from bad to worse, or what?” I asked Nate when I cornered him alone in the kitchen. He was pouring himself a glass of water during a tea break in the cricket match.
“She has gone from bad to worse,” Nate agreed as he patted my shoulder with little sympathy. “Now if you had a boyfriend . . .” He paused when he saw the look on my face and then shook his head. “American?”
“Yes,” I said glumly, not surprised that Nate should be the one with the golden insight.
“You’re so a dead woman, ” Nate said cheerfully. “When do you plan to tell them?”
“I was thinking at Ammamma’s this Friday when we go to make mango pickle,” I said. “You know, tell the old and the older people all at the same time and get it done with.”
“I’m not sorry I won’t be there for the massacre,” he said grimly. “You know, don’t you, that there will be bloodshed?”
“I know, ” I muttered.
“I mean Thatha will probably try to kill you,” Nate added.
“I know. ”
“Well, good luck. This should make things infinitely easier for me,” Nate said as he gulped down all the water in the glass he was holding. “My girlfriend is from Delhi, north Indian; she is going to look so good in front of your American boyfriend.”
“You’re all heart, Nate,” I said in sibling disgust and walked back into the living room where my mother sat in judgment of my life and me.
Ammamma’s living room, the hall, was large. It could, during festivals and other celebratory occasions, hold at least sixty seated people for a meal, and it had, several times.
The floor was stone, polished and weathered by time. It glistened beautifully when Parvati mopped it and it was cool to touch, which was a blessing during the hot summer days.
At home Nick and I had hardwood floors and carpet and I could never walk barefoot on either since neither was as cold as stone. It was just one of those things I had brought along with me to the United States, like my inability to eat beef, no matter how many times I told myself that the cow in America was probably not sacred.
I sat down on the floor next to mounds of mangoes. Sowmya sat next to me, while Ammamma was settled comfortably on a new sofa, which was a step up from the old one that had springs coming out from the fabric and needed to be covered with thick towels to prevent bottoms from being pierced. Lata sat on a chair and immediately Ma demanded a chair for herself and Sowmya got one for her from the dining room.
I had no idea how to break the ice with people I had known for a good part of my life. The saving grace was my grandmother. Ammamma could talk anyone under the table and she almost always did. She usually launched into vitriolic tirades about something or the other. This time the spotlight was on my younger uncle and his “elopement.” Anand, to everyone’s surprise, had a love marriage. He fell in love with a colleague, Neelima, at the company he worked for. Neelima was a Maharashtrian and they got married in secret without telling anyone about it until after the three knots of the mangala sutra had been tied.
Their marriage had been the subject of numerous phone conversations between my parents, grandparents, and me for the past year. The conversations always ended with someone warning me against a love marriage. It was because of how Anand’s secret marriage had broken everyone’s heart that I decided to tell my family before doing the deed, though it was very tempting to take the easy way out and tell them after the fact.
My grandparents and most of my family members did not have high hopes for Anand’s marriage and they all were convinced that Neelima was not the right woman for him. They also believed that Neelima was actually a witch who had brewed a nasty potion to ensnare their poor little innocent son into her web.
“She is fair-skinned . . . but . . .”—Ammamma shrugged and tied the edge of her sari around her potbelly—“not like our Lata.” She smiled at her daughter-in-law, who returned the smile.
Something was going on, I noted suspiciously. Lata and Ammamma had never really gotten along. Ammamma and Thatha had expected Jayant to follow the archaic joint family system and live with them after his marriage.
It didn’t work out that way.
Six months after the wedding, Lata didn’t say anything to anyone, just packed her bags and Jayant’s, found a flat, and left. The family went into total cerebral shock. Thatha argued, begged, and pleaded for her to come back, but Lata stood her ground. She told him she was tired of living with people to whom she was merely a cook and a maid. (Who could really blame her for that?) She also said that she wanted her own home, where she was the mistress. Jayant quietly followed his wife and broke my grandparents’ hearts. But now Ammamma was being nice to the traitorous daughter-in-law. It was more than enough to bring out the Sherlock Holmes in me.
“Don’t listen to them, Priya, Neelima is a nice girl,” Sowmya interjected. “And s
he is a Brahmin, ” she added for good measure.
“But not our type,” Ammamma argued. “She is a Maharashtrian Brahmin, not Telugu.”
And being Telugu was very, very essential. Telugu was the official language of my state, Andhra Pradesh, and we were called Telugu or Telugu people. Being of the same caste was not enough to sanctify a marriage. To marry someone, that someone had to also be from the same state. It was very simple: “they” were somehow lower because “they” were not Telugu.
At least “they” were Indian, I thought unhappily; my “they” was American and an un-devout Christian to boot.
“Neelima is a very good person,” Sowmya pointed out. “And her family has lived in Hyderabad for generations. She speaks Telugu fluently and cooks our food.”
Food was also very, very essential. But not as essential as the caste.
“But she brought no dowry,” Lata said calmly as she looked over the pile of mangoes my mother and I had bought today at Monda market. “Where will the money for your dowry come from?” she taunted softly, her eyes downcast as she arranged the pleats in her sari, and I saw all fight abandon Sowmya.
“I better get the knives and the chopping boards,” Sowmya said hastily, and disappeared into the kitchen.
Everyone squirmed a little after that. The subjects of dowry and marriage were a soft spot for Sowmya. She had been twenty-seven years old for the past three years and those “three years” made her feel a little less like an old maid. It also made a difference to the suitors Thatha managed to find for her. After all, a girl in her late twenties had a chance at making a better match than one who was thirty.
Objectively speaking, Sowmya would be considered plump; she wore thick glasses and had dark skin—even darker than mine. Her hair was curly and thin and she was not a beauty by anyone’s standards. But what no one saw was that Sowmya’s heart was as big as the pot she used to make payasam in during festivals.
Arranged marriage is not just a crapshoot, as many believe it to be. It is a planned and business-like approach to marriage. A man’s parents want certain qualities in their daughter-in-law, and a woman’s parents want certain qualities in their son-in-law. What the children want usually does not figure in the equation. The parents try to find the perfect match and hope for the best.
Women like Sowmya get caught in no-man’s-land. They have no qualities that anyone is looking for, which means that they have to settle for someone who is in the exact same position, someone who has been rejected by numerous suitors for being less qualified. It’s like finding a job. The job you get is equivalent to your qualifications and what you want does not really matter.
Despite having a bachelor’s in Telugu literature, Sowmya had never held a job in her life. Working, my illustrious and narrow-minded Thatha said, was not for women of our class. And what job could she get anyway? With her education, at best, she could be a secretary or a clerk. Unacceptable to Thatha. Those were careers and jobs for people with a lower socioeconomic status than his.
In the food chain of the Indian academic world, doctors and engineers took the top spots. Ma had been pleased when I got through the entrance exam to get into an engineering school. After all, that ensured a good marriage match for me. It also meant that I could get a job that would not embarrass my parents and would be appropriate for a woman of my social station.
However, Sowmya could not get a job equivalent to her social status because she was not academically qualified, just as she couldn’t get the life partner she fantasized about because she was not physically qualified.
The sad part of it was that Sowmya accepted it as her fate and did nothing to change any part of it and write her own destiny. She probably didn’t fantasize anymore, didn’t even dream about a husband and family anymore. She had sat through many ceremonies during which the prospective groom and his family visited my grandparents’ house to see the prospective bride. Earlier, Sowmya had kept count, but now, almost ten years since the whole drama had begun, she had stopped. My mother, however, hadn’t.
“Sixty-four matches and not one worked out,” she told me during my current visit.
In the beginning, Thatha had refused to budge from his goal of getting a good-looking doctor or engineer for Sowmya. Even when it became evident that the matches he was finding were not going to pan out, he continued. It was when Sowmya turned twenty-five that Thatha started to realize he may have been aiming too high. He started looking at bank managers and the like, but again nothing worked out because he wanted a young man for Sowmya, but men who were twenty-seven years old were looking at girls who were twenty-one, not twenty-five. Now Thatha was looking at lecturers and older men. While Thatha looked for a suitable boy, Sowmya sat through bride-seeing ceremonies and rejections.
“God knows when she will get married,” Ma complained bitterly. “An unmarried daughter, Priya, is like a noose around the neck that is slowly tightening with every passing day.”
I sometimes imagined how it would be to live with my parents and be constantly reminded of how lacking I was. I would slit my wrists in no time and I was amazed that Sowmya hadn’t. She was still the same person I had grown up with; the bitterness that no one would blame her for having seemed to have never touched her.
“Maybe you shouldn’t say things like that,” I said to Lata, wanting to defend my nonconfrontational aunt against the harsh dowry remark. “It isn’t fair to turn this on Sowmya because she likes Anand’s wife.”
Lata quirked an eyebrow. “You are back, what, half an hour, and already you are taking sides?”
My mother held up her hand to silence me before I could respond, her posture clearly saying that she would take care of this one for me, with pleasure. “Lata, my daughter is not taking sides, just trying to be considerate of other people’s feelings.”
The only way to prevent World War III, now that I had spilled pearls of wisdom unwisely, was to change the topic. So I pulled my gift bag close to me—it was time to play Santa Claus.
“I have gifts for everyone,” I said cheerfully, before Lata could tell my mother what she thought about my being considerate of other people’s feelings.
Sowmya blushed when she saw the makeup kit I got for her. She touched the plastic-covered blush and eye shadow and picked up the lipstick and unrolled it to see what color it was. She closed it and put the cap on and shrugged. “What am I going to do with this, Priya?” she asked, I think just to sound reluctant.
“Wear it, ” Lata suggested lightly, but with just enough dabs of sarcasm, and I wondered again. Usually Ammamma protected Sowmya from barbs like that, but the dynamics seemed to have changed. Lata was ruling the roost. First it was the mangoes and now this.
“Ammamma.” I put a blue and white cashmere shawl on her lap and she touched it with curious fingers. She hugged me once again, this time a little lightly, and kissed me on the forehead. “You shouldn’t have. You are here and that is all we care about.”
I agreed with that notion, but I also knew the ritual. Oh yes, there was a ritual: the homecoming ritual. The cardinal law was that “you cannot come home without a substantial amount of gifts, irrespective of your financial predicament.”
The gifts also cannot be bought and dispensed of without drama. Every gift will be analyzed. For example, I cannot give Ammamma a less expensive gift than the one I would give to Neelima. That would offend Ammamma because she was senior to Neelima. Similarly, I cannot buy Lata something more expensive than what I would get for my mother. I also cannot buy something so cheap that Lata would be offended.
With all the opposing and contradicting rules, buying a gift for Lata had been a grueling task.
“Just pick out something womanly,” Nick suggested. “Works for my aunt who hates my mother’s guts. I just buy her perfume every year for Christmas and she’s happy.”
I explained to him that it was not quite that simple. I was buying my mother a bottle of perfume along with other assorted gifts. Ma had specifically asked me to get he
r some perfume and that was why I couldn’t buy Lata perfume, too. I had to buy her something that I hadn’t given my mother but it also should be something that my mother would not want.
“This doesn’t sound like buying gifts but more like a diplomatic mission to the Mideast. I’m very confused,” Nick confessed, and I agreed wholeheartedly with him.
I handed a gift-wrapped box to Lata. “For you.”
She looked at the box and took it with a negligent shrug. “You didn’t have to bring me anything,” she remarked. “My brother who lives in Los Angeles gets me whatever I want.”
My mother’s jaw tightened and she glared at Lata. “If you don’t like it, Priya can take it back,” she retorted smoothly.
I gave Ma a warning look and put on my most winsome smile for Lata. “I couldn’t not buy you something. I spent a lot of time looking for the right thing. . . . Now if you don’t open it, I will feel bad.”
Lata opened the box and I could see surprise and pleasure glimmer in her eyes. She pulled out shimmering silk—a delicately embroidered shawl of Navajo design. “It is beautiful,” she murmured.
Ma seemed to agree but wasn’t too happy about it. “It is just like the one she sent me last year,” she said peevishly.
I didn’t argue and moved on to the next batch of goodies.
“I also got something for Apoorva and Shalini,” I told Lata, and gave her two gift-wrapped boxes for her daughters. “I got them identical things—don’t want them to fight over whose is better.”
“What did you bring for them?” Ma asked nosily.
“Just some stuff, ” I said, not wanting to give the surprise away. “I think they’ll like it.”
“Thanks, ” Lata said, beaming now. “This is so nice of you, Priya.”
I was relieved. The gifts had been given without a hitch. I had some more gifts for my grandfather and uncles and one for my new aunt. I suspected the family was treating Neelima like used bath water and I wanted to welcome her—Anand would definitely want that.
The Mango Season Page 4
