The Mango Season (23 page)

READING GROUP QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION

1. What is the significance of the title
   The Mango Season
   ? How about the title of the prologue, “Happiness Is a Mango”? Why does Amulya Malladi constantly refer to mangoes, and how does this symbol resonate within the novel as a whole?
   
2. How is the constant reference to food significant to the unfolding of the story? What does the inclusion of recipes add to the “flavor” of the book?
   
3. In which ways does Priya embrace America upon her arrival there? Which cultural traditions does she eschew?
   
4. Contrast Priya’s relationship to her mother with those she has with her father and brother. Why do you think she finds it easier to relate to the males in her family? What sets Priya and her mother at odds?
   
5. Do you think that Priya should have told her family about her engagement right away, perhaps even before her arrival in India? Why doesn’t she? What larger problems does her reluctance to discuss her romance indicate about Priya’s relationship with her family?
   
6. What is your impression of Nick through Priya’s rendering of him via her memories and their e-mail correspondence? What characteristics are appealing about him?
   
7. What are Nick’s fears about Priya returning to India? Why does he want to go with her? How are his worries borne out?
   
8. Why does Malladi disclose Nick’s race only at the end of
   The
   Mango Season
   ? What hints does she sprinkle throughout the book that he is black? Does this disclosure make a difference in your understanding and perception of the novel?
   
9. How are Priya’s female relatives constrained by their places in society? How do they chafe under these restrictions? Do any rebel, and if so, how? What effect does Priya have on them, and in turn, how do they influence her?
   
10. What spurs Sowmya to exact promises from her future husband before she’s married? Does this surprise you, based on Sowmya’s characterization at the beginning of the book?
    
11. “What can we do when someone takes your trust and throws it away?” asks Priya’s mother (p. 39). How does this theme of establishing—and losing—trust thread through the book? How do Priya’s relatives trust and distrust her? In which ways has their attitude infantilized her, and how has it made her stronger and more independent?
    
12. “Happiness is such a relative term that it sometimes loses definition,” Malladi writes (p. 56). How does Priya’s definition of happiness evolve as the book unfolds? How would her parents define happiness differently from her?
    
13. Priya refers to the “two people inside me” (p. 69). How does Priya seek to reconcile the two halves of her personality? Which aspects of her character derive from her Indian upbringing? Which from her choice to embrace America?
    
14. Is Nate indulged more than Priya by their parents? How does he adapt to the strictures of Indian society, and within the family structure in particular? How is he a modern figure, and how does he feel a link to the past?
    
15. “Behind the façade . . . we were strangers to each other,” Priya says of her family (p. 98). Is this statement an accurate representation of her familial relationships? With whom in the family is Priya most herself?
    
16. Why does Priya go through with the bride-seeing ceremony? What about her might be attractive to Adarsh? What are the benefits and disadvantages to having an arranged marriage?
    
17. How does Priya envision love and marriage? In which ways is this an “American” view, and how is it influenced by her Indian heritage? How does it contrast with the vision of her family in India?
    
18. How does Thatha view Priya’s refusal to marry a handpicked Indian beau? Do you believe that their relationship will ever recover? Why were they close in the first place, despite their differences?
    
19. “You cannot make mango pickle with tomatoes,” Thatha says to Priya (p. 170). How does this sum up his view of her relationship with Nick? Does it also apply to any other relationships in the book?
    
20. “I had to start living my own life on my own terms,” Priya says (p. 142). Is this goal easier to accomplish when Priya is in the United States? Why? Does being in India stifle her sense of self?
    
21. How does the theme of sacrifice thread throughout the book? What sacrifices is Priya prepared to make for love? How does her mother hold up her sacrifices to Priya, to force her daughter to accede to her wishes? Ultimately, is this an effective technique?
    
22. How does racism, both against Indians and within the Indian culture itself, influence the perceptions that the Indian characters in the novel have of Americans? What else informs their perception of blacks, whites, and “foreigners”? What slights do you think Indians have felt based on the color of their skin?
    
23. Malladi deliberately leaves the ending of the novel ambiguous. Why? What do you envision occurring once Priya’s family receives the photograph of Nick?
    

Read on for a taste of Amulya Malladi’s new novel

Serving Crazy with Curry

available now as a Ballantine Reader’s Circle selection
from Ballantine Books.

The Beginning or The End

The DOW was down almost 600 points the week Devi decided to commit suicide. The NASDAQ also crashed as two big tech companies warned Wall Street of their dismal next quarter estimates. But the only reason Devi was half-heartedly listening to some perky CNN Sunday news anchor prattle on about the lousy week on the stock exchange was habit. A long time ago she’d kept track, listened eagerly, checked the stock of her company online on Yahoo!, but that was when she had stock options that could have been worth something. The last two start ups she hooked up with hadn’t even made it as far as the IPO.

After Devi was laid off (yet again) a week ago, it started to dawn on her that she was not going to be able to change her life. Everything she ever wanted had become elusive and the decision to end her life, she realized, was not only a good decision, but her only option.

As a good tactician, her mind laid down two categories on a spreadsheet: the reasons to die and the reasons not to die. After filling the columns she very practically went through all the reasons, struck out those that didn’t make sense, kept those that did.

Ultimately, it didn’t matter what the entries on the spreadsheet of her unbalanced mind were, because the decision was already made. She already knew that the losses she incurred had eaten away everything joyous within her. In the past six months she went from being just slightly depressed to so sad and fragile that the passing of every day seemed like a wasted opportunity; an opportunity to not live through the day.

Devi’s fingers moved over the remote control of the television and flipped through images, faces and vacuum cleaners.

Wanting to delay her impending decision of death, she picked up the telephone and sat down on her sand-colored sofa (the one she couldn’t afford), her white silk robe tightly secured at her waist. She’d been tightening her robe ever since she put it on at seven that morning, hoping it would settle her down, secure her mind and the uneasiness roiling inside her stomach. All night she had tossed and turned, going over the decision one way and then another. When finally sleep claimed her it was five in the morning and then sleep abandoned her again after just two hours.

Suicide was stressful business.

First, there was the question of how, which she’d pretty much decided on, but there were lingering doubts. Second, there was the question of when. Last night she thought she’d do it at night, in the quiet, but doubts kept her awake, alive. Now it was morning and even though there had been several such mornings in the past months that followed empty, contemplative nights, this morning was different. This morning nothing had changed with the break of dawn as it usually did. This morning her heart was as heavy as it was last night when she started to think seriously, once again, about death. And that’s why she could feel that this was the day it would happen, the day she would make it happen.

Devi stared at the telephone and her fingers automatically tapped the numbers that would conjure up someone on the other end of the line at her parents’ home.

She turned the television off as soon as she heard her father’s hello. “Daddy, Devi,” she said.

“What’s going on,
beta
?” Avi asked in a groggy voice, like he’d just woken up, which he probably had since it was eight o’clock on a Sunday morning, too early for any of his children to call, definitely too early for party-all-night Devi to call.

“Just wanted to say hello,” Devi said, tears brimming in her eyes. She desperately wanted him to say that everything would be okay, that the world would not collapse around her, but that meant asking him for help, and the way things were she was too ashamed to hold out her hand.

This was her life, she was responsible for it, and the mess she had made of it was not something he could clean up for her. As much as she wanted to be held in the secure circle of Daddy’s arms, she knew that would just underscore her failure. At least in this, she wanted to succeed, not back out like a wimp who could neither live nor die.

“How’s work?” her father asked next.

“Great,” she lied instead of telling him that the company had closed its doors. She was out of a job again and this time there was no way around the facts. She was a loser. Had always been, especially compared to the successes in her family. Her father, Avi Veturi, had started a successful technology company with a friend and now was semi-retired, enjoying a privileged life in Silicon Valley. Her older sister, Shobha, was Vice President of engineering for a software company. Her grandmother, Vasu, had been a doctor in the Indian Army, and retired as a Brigadier. Talk about overachievers; her family was loaded with them.

Even her mother, who’d spent her entire life in the house, was still in some ways better off than her. But Saroj had no solid successes to her credit and maybe that was why Devi could compare herself only to her. That was a scary thought. Saroj never held a job, spent all her time in the kitchen cooking and pretending to take care of her family. She was a fairly good cook and a lousy mother. Her relationship with her husband seemed extra strained since he’d semi-retired a few years ago. Marriage to Avi had been Saroj’s biggest accomplishment and now that marriage was also fading away, rotting in apathy and some disdain. If they were not Indian, Devi was sure they’d be divorced.

“G’ma,” she told her grandmother, who lived in India, on the telephone just a few years ago, “they sleep in separate beds and now Daddy is talking about moving into the guest room, to avoid all the Hindi movies Mama watches at night.”

Her grandmother had been honest as she always was and told Devi that some marriages simply don’t work and they should be ended, but not too many people had the courage to do so. G’ma was not one of those cowards. She divorced her crazy husband when divorce was unheard of in India. She took that chance and so many others. She lived her life on her own terms and no one could ever call Vasu a loser.

Tears filled Devi’s eyes again and regret flooded inside her. She wanted to be like her grandmother: strong, independent, and smart. Instead she was more like her mother: a complete failure at everything she ever attempted—life, love, children, job, relationships, finances, everything.

“Is G’ma up?” Devi asked her father. Vasu was visiting as she always did during the summer to get some relief from the scorching Indian heat.

“I don’t know,
beta
. Probably not, we were up until three in the morning playing chess. But I can . . .”

“Who’s on the phone, Avi?” Devi heard her mother call out.

“Do you want to talk to your mother?” Avi asked and Devi whispered an unsteady “no” and hung up quickly. She didn’t want to talk to her mother, and on second thought she didn’t even want to talk to Vasu. She felt she had said her good-byes the week before when the entire family met for dinner at her parents’ house.

Girish, Shobha’s husband, was unable to make it because of some “thing” at the university, but no one believed those stories anymore. Ever since they’d found out that Shobha couldn’t get pregnant it had become more evident than ever that their marriage was not working, at any level.

For a very long time Devi had been jealous of Shobha; part of her still was. Shobha had it all. A vice president of engineering at a software company at the young age of thirty-two was quite an achievement. Marrying a Stanford professor and excellent man, Girish, was another one. Devi was perversely (and guiltily) glad that Shobha couldn’t put down “perfect mother” on her list of achievements.

Just two years after marrying Girish, Shobha had surgery for endometriosis and was told that she could not conceive. Shobha was shocked that at the age of twenty-nine she couldn’t have children.

“They have a billion people in India and I can’t have a baby? Those crack addicts who can’t take care of themselves get knocked up, so why the hell can’t I?” Shobha demanded angrily. Even then angry. Not sad, not devastated, like the rest of the family. Shobha was angry, always angry. That was Shobha’s trademark emotion, her way of dealing with the world at large. Anger, Shobha said, was not a bad thing.

“Fuck them who say . . . and yes, Mama, I can say
fuck,
I’m twenty-nine years old and barren, I can say
fuck
even if fucking doesn’t get me anywhere anymore . . . so what was I saying?”

“You were saying that anger is a good thing,” Girish filled in patiently. “Maybe you got endometriosis because you’re so angry all the time.”

Girish had been a broken man when he heard the news, and tried to convince Shobha that adoption would be the solution. She wouldn’t hear of it. “If I can’t have my own child then maybe this is nature’s way of saying that I shouldn’t have children. Not mine, not anyone else’s.” Their relationship deteriorated after that.

Devi wondered if she should call Shobha to say good-bye. They never really got along, not like sisters did in movies, in other people’s families, in books. They were distant, and Devi had a strong inkling that Shobha genuinely disliked her.

She dialed Shobha’s cell phone number, always a reliable way of getting in touch with her and the best way to avoid speaking with Girish, who could answer if she called their home phone. The fewer people she had to say good-bye to, the easier this would be. But even as Shobha’s cell phone rang, Devi knew she was procrastinating. On the sixth ring, right before Shobha’s voice mail would click in, Devi hung up, threw the phone down on the couch, and stood up. It was time, she told herself firmly. It had been time for a while now.

Devi was not the first person in her family to attempt suicide. Thirty-eight years ago Ramakant, Devi’s grandfather, hung himself from the ceiling fan in his brother’s house with one of his exwife’s silk saris. Vasu had never forgiven Ramakant for killing himself just three months after the divorce. The blame fell squarely on her, and everyone merrily overlooked the fact that Ramakant was obviously unbalanced. Adding insult to injury was the suicide note, in which Ramakant took great pains to specifically explain how his ex-wife was not the reason why he was doing himself in and that he loved and respected Vasu very much.

Devi decided in the beginning that if she ever killed herself it would be without a suicide note—no melodrama for the damned. This was a personal business, a private affair, no one needed to know why. Sure, her family may think she owed them an explanation, but that was an unreasonable expectation compounded by Devi’s perverse desire to keep them guessing. Her parents may have brought her into the world (and that, too, without her permission), but it was her choice when she left.

She wanted to leave now.

It wasn’t like she woke up one day and thought,
Oh, it’s a good
idea if I kill myself today.
No, it took several months before she reached this point. It started like a spark of electricity, something that happens when wiring goes bad. And once the idea popped into her head, she couldn’t unpop it, no matter how hard she tried. No matter how hard she shook her head to clear it away, it stayed, and soon became a constant companion.

Everything seemed to be an omen, giving her the green
go-ahead
signal to die.

The computer crashed again. Damn, if only I was dead, I
wouldn’t have to deal with this shit.

I locked the car keys inside the car. Damn, if only I was dead, I
wouldn’t have to call Triple A.

It’s a Friday night and I have no one to go out with. If only I’d
killed myself in the morning then I wouldn’t have to deal with this
loneliness in the evening.

So on and so forth.

Devi had it all planned, the method (this after some serious pondering), the time of day (though this kept changing), and the place. But in all her planning, Devi didn’t account for one mistake she had made a year ago. She gave Saroj a spare set of keys to her town house in Redwood City. Saroj had virtually beaten the keys out of Devi when she’d rented the place; nagged the hell out of her until Devi relented.

“You have to give us a spare set of keys. If you lose yours you will have to pay your landlord all that money to get new keys . . . this way, everything will be nice and easy.”