The Mango Season (4 page)

Ma came out of the house hurriedly, responding to the honks, wearing a red and yellow cotton sari, and my eyes took time to adjust to the bright colors. I didn’t like knowing that I had to adjust to India—it was absurd. I
was
Indian, yet everything seemed only vaguely familiar. I couldn’t remember how I used to feel when my mother wore a sari that made her look like a large Tequila Sunrise.

With the help of the auto rickshaw driver we put the twenty kilos of raw mangoes in the auto rickshaw. Ma and I squeezed on the slightly torn brown vinyl seat with difficulty, our legs hanging limply on the side of the large straw basket. I put a cotton bag with a change of clothes between us, along with a bag of gifts I brought for the family, and got ready for a bumpy and uncomfortable ride.

“Now, if
Ammamma
wants to give you something, just take it, okay? ” Ma told me. “But if she gives you something very expensive, like jewelry, then,”—she paused and shrugged—“ask me if you can take it.”

“And what’ll you say?”

“I will ask you to take it,” Ma told me irritably. “But that doesn’t mean you have to take it right away. Nothing wrong in showing some reluctance.”

Familial politics always made me want to be without family. I never understood the intricacies. It was like facing a complex math problem that had numerous ways to solve it and you didn’t know which one was the right way because the answer to the problem changed randomly. When was it right to look reluctant and when was it right to look eager? I didn’t have a clue seven years ago and I was not any wiser now.

“And if anyone asks you about marriage, just ask them to talk to me,” she further instructed.

My marriage, but she wants to talk to them, whoever they were—typical Ma. “And what will
you
tell them?” I asked patiently.

“If they have a good U.S. boy in mind and he is in India on leave like you, we can probably arrange something,” she explained. “If it works out, you will be married and happy. It will be a load off my chest. An unmarried daughter . . . What must the neighbors think?”

I glared at my mother. She was holding tightly to an iron handle on her side of the auto rickshaw and her naked potbelly heaved through her sari’s
pallu
as the auto rickshaw went through bad roads and worse roads.

There was this misconception my mother refused to discard. According to her, a woman was happy only if she was married. She had not once asked me if I was happy
now
. The question was moot; how could I be happy if I wasn’t married?

I wanted to lash out, tell her that I was getting married very soon, but I knew now was hardly the time. Maybe at dinner, I told myself nervously. Dinner would be a good time. Everyone would be there and we would be spending the night at my grandma’s house. There would be safety in numbers.

“If anyone tells you that you are too old to be unmarried”— my mother paused dramatically—“it is your fault.”

If I expected Ma to be compassionate, I was living in a fool’s paradise. And I was anything but a fool.

“That nice boy in Cheee-cah-go,” she continued, “he was perfect. But you didn’t want him. You don’t want anyone, all
nakhras
you have.”

Here we go!

“Ma, the nice
boy
in Chicago had a girlfriend, an American girlfriend. He didn’t want to get married and was only agreeing to talk to girls to get
his
parents off his back.” I repeated what I had told her three years ago when the same matter had come up.

Ma shook her head. “All boys wander a little and I am not saying that being with one of those Christian girls is good, but he would have said yes.”

“I wouldn’t want him to, ” I exploded. “He was living with this woman. They had a relationship going on for
three years
. I wasn’t going to marry a man who was in love with another woman.”

“Love, it seems, is very important,” Ma said sarcastically. “He was making eighty thousand dollars a year. Do you know how much that is in rupees?”

“I make eighty-five; do you know how much that is in rupees?” I countered.

“You didn’t three years ago,” she shot back. “He must be making so much more now. All that money . . .” She clicked her tongue and started giving directions to the driver instead.

I leaned back and closed my eyes. Another week and a half, just another eleven days, and I’ll be out of here. I repeated it to myself like a mantra.

My grandmother’s house had always been a home away from home, a place where my mother couldn’t always dominate and coerce. A home where I was spoiled often and where not all of Ma’s rules applied. I had played in this house since I was born, and as we got close to it, I immediately recognized the smells emanating from the streets and the surroundings. It was a blow to my olfactory senses that even after seven years I still knew how this place smelled and how the air tasted.

The house stood on a large premium plot of land in the center of the city. Coconut trees grew around it and there was a well that had been used for years in the old-fashioned way to draw water. The well now had a motor pump that extracted water from the ground and filled the overhead tanks, but evidence of the old ways hung on the well in the form of a piece of old frayed coconut rope dragged over a rusty metal pulley.

When I was twelve years old it had been a rite of passage for me to be allowed by my grandfather to bring up a bucket of water from the well. Ma had been scared that I wouldn’t be able to pull the heavy bucket and that it would pull me inside the well instead. She wanted me to have help, but
Thatha
had been adamant that I do it all by myself. I had rope burns on my soft palms but I strutted around like a proud peacock for days after that.

There was a small two-room house for the servants in one far corner of the plot and on another corner there was a large house that my grandparents rented. They had even constructed a second floor to their house. It was a modern three-bedroom apartment, which my grandparents rented out, too. They lived downstairs with my aunt Sowmya. Sowmya was three years older than I, and like me was not married, but unlike me had always wanted very much to be.

Ma paid off the auto rickshaw driver who winked at me as he told my mother with a straight face that the fare was only
pandrah
rupiya
. We carried the basketful of mangoes to the house gate. Ma opened the gate and yelled for my grandparents’ servant.

Badri was my grandparents’ new servant. He and his wife Parvati had taken residence in the servant quarters just a year ago. Badri did all the gardenwork and cleaned the yard, while Parvati did the dishes and swept and mopped the floors in the house.

The old maidservant I grew up with, Rajni, was as much a part of my childhood as my grandparents’ house. She had left a year after I went to the United States, to go back to her village to live with her son.

Rajni was not a Brahmin and so she was not allowed inside the kitchen, but my grandparents had given her access to pretty much everything else. Sowmya cooked and left the dishes outside where Rajni cleaned them. Sowmya would take the clean dishes back inside the kitchen to put them in their rightful places. I used to think Rajni was a slacker because she didn’t do that part.

It had been a rainy day when my grandmother explained to me that Rajni was from a lower caste and we were from the highest caste. She couldn’t enter our kitchens; in fact, in the good old days, lower caste people wouldn’t even be allowed inside the house and Rajni would be untouchable, in every sense of the word. Things were apparently better now,
Ammamma
had said. “We Brahmins have become more tolerant, what with the days being so
mordern
and everything.” She hadn’t sounded too happy about the modern days.

I picked up our bags and helped Badri put the basket of mangoes on his head. My mother walked into the house like a queen as Badri and I followed like servile courtiers.

I smiled when I entered the grilled veranda on which a huge wooden swing swayed, covering it almost entirely—an obvious hazard for children. The swing had always been on the veranda. I probably wouldn’t recognize the veranda without it.

I removed my sandals and peeped inside. The living room was empty, but I could hear sounds coming from the womb of the house, resonating with my memories as if a tuning fork had been put into motion.

One could see to the other end of the house from the front door. All the rooms lay on opposite sides of my line of vision and I saw a smiling Sowmya step outside the dining area next to the kitchen.

She ran to me and we hugged.

The Politics of Giving and Receiving Gifts

My grandmother hugged me so hard that I almost cracked a rib. Ammamma had this strange notion that the harder the hug, the more the love. Despite the discomfort, the subtle smell of betel leaves and cloves that clung to her body pervaded my senses and I soaked the smells in. This was familiar territory and at that instant it didn’t seem so bad to be back.

I knew that today or tomorrow, literally, I would have to tell them all about my plans for the future, and about the man in my life of whom they would wholeheartedly disapprove. But for now
Ammamma
was hugging me the way she always did and it was enough.

My aunt gave me a perfunctory hug. Lata and I never got along, to a great extent because of the cold war between Ma and her. I didn’t have any feelings toward her, good or bad—I just thought of her as my very beautiful aunt about whom I didn’t feel one way or the other. I remember, when I was around fourteen years old, my uncle Jayant got married and I had showed off to all my friends that I was getting a very beautiful aunt.

I was not wrong; Lata was beautiful. She was tall and walked like a “graceful deer”—so everyone said—and she was fair. Unlike me, she was very fair. Fair somehow always meant beautiful and having darker skin was a flaw. I got my father’s dark color, my mother always said, clicking her tongue disapprovingly, and Nate got her fairer skin. According to Ma, that was my bad karma. A boy could get a good wife irrespective of how he looked if he was financially viable; for a woman, however, physical appearance was important. My dark skin color, Ma felt, could pose a problem when the time came to find me a suitable husband.

Nick was heartily amused when I told him how my own mother had discriminated against me because I was dark. He couldn’t see the subtle differences between the various shades of Indian dark, which made the situation even more preposterous to him.

“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 she 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.