The Mango Season (7 page)

He stepped inside his plot of land and opened his arms wide. I raced into them and felt like a little girl again, little Priya with her big old grandfather.

“I was not here to welcome you,” he apologized. His eyes wandered to Neelima who had stood up and his sharp gaze I’m sure didn’t miss the tears on her cheeks. “What is with her?” he asked me, and nodded at Neelima who scurried inside the house.

“Everyone is being perfectly mean to her,” I told him, and inhaled the smell of tobacco and cement that hung on him.
Thatha
chewed tobacco, a nasty habit in any man but him. He made it look dignified; or maybe I was just biased.

“She is imagining it,”
Thatha
said, putting his arm around me. We walked inside the veranda and he groaned comically at the voices coming from the hall. “They are
all
here?”

“Mango
pachadi
,” I supplied laughing. It was good to see the old man and it was good to be this comfortable with him even after seven years.

He looked around mischievously and then winked at me. “The pomegranate tree has some red, red fruit; let’s go,” he whispered, and we both sneaked out holding hands.

The pomegranate tree and a few mango trees were scattered in the area between my grandparents’ house and the house they gave up for rent. As a child I was not allowed to wander around the fruit trees because more than once I had fallen sick eating too many not so ripe pomegranate seeds.

It was a ritual. We would come for a visit and
Thatha
would sneak me away to eat the forbidden fruit. We would usually get caught because I would end up with some fruit stains on my clothes. My mother would never let it slide. She would kick up a fuss and
Thatha
would apologize and the next time we came for a visit, he would take me to the pomegranate tree again. We were partners in crime. We were pals.

“Here.”
Thatha
peeled a pomegranate fruit with his pocket-knife, broke it open, and handed me a piece of the fruit. We sat down on the stairs that led to the apartment upstairs and watched the traffic go past the metal gate of his house.

“So how is my American-returned granddaughter?” he asked amicably.

“Doing well. But things here don’t seem that . . . well,” I said, slurping over juicy pomegranate seeds.

He sighed. “Anand . . .” He paused thoughtfully, then continued, “made a mistake. . . . But what do they say in English? To err is human?”

I shook my head. “He married the woman he loves; that’s a blessing, not a mistake.”

Thatha
’s eyes twinkled. “Love isn’t all that it is cracked up to be, Priya. Marriage needs a lot more than love.”

“But love is essential,” I argued.

“You fall in love later,” he said with a patriarchal wave of his hand, “
after
you get married and have children ”

I wanted to argue the point with him, even though I knew it was futile. He was set in his ways and I in mine. We lived by a different set of philosophies. In his rulebook, duty was high on the list, and in mine, personal happiness was a priority.

“What if you
never
fall in love with your wife . . . or husband?” I questioned.

Thatha
gave me another piece of fruit embedded with bright shiny pomegranate seeds. I took it from him and started peeling the seeds off from their rind before popping them into my mouth. It wasn’t the season for pomegranates but this one had ripened early and was sweet.

“You always love your wife . . . or husband, as the case might be,” he said in that authoritarian tone that broached no further dispute.

But he knew just as well as I did that unlike his children and other grandchildren, that tone would not deter me. It had been that way since the beginning. I had had the most arguments with
Thatha
, the most debates, and, ultimately, the most fights. We discussed various subjects and passionately argued our stance; even when I called him from the U.S., we’d get excited talking about something and our tempers would flare. I think he respected me because I was opinionated and not afraid to tell him how I felt and because I openly disagreed with him. Sometimes I felt that I argued a point just to earn his respect. He was important to me; his opinion mattered; he mattered.

The man was a bigot, a racist, a chauvinist, and generally too arrogant for anyone’s liking, yet I loved him. Family never came in neat little packages with warranty signs on them.
Thatha
was all that I disliked in people, but he was also a lot more—he had a backbone of steel and an iron will to make the best of a bad situation. When
Thatha
joined the State Bank of AP right after Independence, he was just a lowly bank teller. When he retired he had been a bank manager of the large Hyderabad branch. His never-say-die spirit was also mine. I was his blood; there was no denying it and when our tempers flared I knew that I was a lot more like him than I would like to admit.

“In several arranged marriages, couples don’t fall in love with each other, they merely tolerate each other,” I told him. “I know some women who are unhappy with the husband their parents chose . . . but they can’t do anything about it. Why condemn anyone to a lifetime of unhappiness?”

“Lifetime of unhappiness?”
Thatha
said loudly, mockingly. “Priya, you are talking like we marry our children off to rapists and murderers. Parents love their children and do what is best for them.”

I shook my head. “I think a lot of parents don’t know their children very well and if they don’t know their own child, how can they know what would be best for them?”

“You think you’re smarter than your parents?”
Thatha
asked pointedly.

“Sometimes.”

Thatha
laughed, a big booming sound, reverberating from inside his chest. “This hair didn’t get white in the sun,” he said, patting his thick white hair, which refused to give way to baldness despite his age.

“You think you are very smart?” I asked.

Thatha
just grinned.

“Well . . . what do you think about Lata being pregnant for all the wrong reasons?” I asked because it was nagging me.

“I said I was smart, not broad-minded.”
Thatha
arched his right eyebrow, in the way my mother could, I could. “But it also depends upon what your reasons are. I believe the family name has to be carried on.”

“At any cost?”

“Not at
any
cost ”
Thatha
said, and smiled.

“Neelima is pregnant, you know,” I informed him, and saw his eyes darken with anger. “What if she has a son?”

“Then she has a son,” he shrugged.

The calm way in which he declared a grandchild inconsequential to his plans angered me. “What if . . .
Nanna
was not a Brahmin? What if Ma and
Nanna
had fallen in love and had gotten married? Would you not be my
Thatha
?”

He stood up then and I knew I had crossed some imaginary line he had laid down. “We will never know,” he said coolly, and then he broke into a smile. “You are here for another few days,” he urged brightly. “I don’t want to argue over something that does not concern you.”

I was defeated but I knew I had to choose my battles. “Let’s go inside,” I suggested. “It’s time for lunch, maybe I can help cook.”

“Make some
avial
. You make the best
avial
, ” he ordered sweetly.

Avial
was the only South Indian dish I cooked that tasted the way it should.
Thatha
loved my
avial
, even more than he liked Ma’s.

TO: PRIYA RAO
FROM: NICHOLAS COLLINS
SUBJECT: RE: RE: GOOD TRIP?

HAVEN’T HEARD FROM YOU. YOU MUST BE AT YOUR GRANDMA’S PLACE MAKING PICKLE. JUST WANTED TO TELL YOU THAT YOU ARE MISSED.

NICK

Part Two

Oil and Spices

Avial (South Indian)

1 cup sour curds (for yogurt)
150 grams of yam or yellow pumpkin
2 raw bananas
2 drumsticks (an Indian vegetable available fresh or
canned)
1 potato
½ cup shelled peas
½ teaspoon turmeric powder
¼ cup coconut oil
a few curry leaves
salt to taste

For Paste
½ coconut
6 to 7 green chiles
1 teaspoon cumin seeds

Grind together the coconut, green chiles, and cumin seeds to make a fine paste, adding very little water while grinding. Mix the curd with the ground paste and keep aside. Peel and chop all the vegetables and cook separately with a little water. Mix all the cooked vegetables and salt and turmeric powder. Add the paste to the vegetables and heat through—take care to prevent curdling. Remove from heat and add coconut oil and curry leaves, and mix well. Serve hot with rice.

Thatha and His Merry Women

Thatha was not supposed to have married Ammamma in the first place. It had happened by accident. Thatha had gone to
Ammamma’s
village with his parents to see
Ammamma’s
cousin and arrange a marriage with her.

“But I saw
her
,”
Thatha
said, “and I wanted to marry her only. What did I know? I was just fifteen.”

“My father agreed to the proposal immediately,”
Ammamma
would say, giggling as if she were indeed thirteen years old and a blushing bride. “Ratna, (the poor cousin), didn’t speak to me for five years after that. But she got married, too, and her husband . . . He is a doctor, owns his own clinic in Vaisakh. What luck, enh?”

I was never sure if the story indicated that
Thatha
and
Ammamma
were pleased about being married to each other or if
Thatha
felt he had been too young to have made the right decision and
Ammamma
thought she could have married the doctor if Ratna had married
Thatha
.

In any case, happiness and love was not the point of their marriage. They had two sons and two daughters and now they were trying to have a son’s son; they were living the righteous life and no one could tell them otherwise.

“Eating pomegranates again?” Ma asked, as soon as
Thatha
and I entered the hall.

While I had been sneaking around fruit trees with
Thatha
, the others had done some major damage with the mangoes. Slices of mango were spread out evenly for different purposes. There were thick slices of peeled mangoes in a bucket alongside a big sheet of white muslin cloth. These I assumed were for making another type of mango pickle,
maggai
.

For
maggai
, slices of mango covered with turmeric, salt, and oil had to be dried for two days in the hot sun. After they were dry and almost brittle, they were marinated in a mixture of oil and spices. Another set of chopped mangoes languished in colored plastic buckets. The dark pink and yellow buckets were Lata’s, the neon green and light pink ones were Ma’s, the three red ones were
Ammamma’s
, and the blue one was Neelima’s.

The mangoes used for making
avakai
still had their skin and stone casing intact. My lips twitched into a smile as I remembered how the remnants of mango pickle lay on discarded plates of food after a meal—the core of the mango stones lay in bloody red oil like dead and mutilated soldiers in a battlefield of yogurt and rice. I used to think it was barbaric, eating the pickle with bare hands, tearing into the fleshy part of the mango that stuck to the core. Now I thought it was exotic, as if from a different culture and therefore tolerable.

“Oh come on, Radha, I am seeing my granddaughter after seven years.”
Thatha
put his arm around me. “And the pomegranates were ripe, she won’t fall sick.”

My mother smiled to my utter shock. There were perks to seeing my parents once in seven years—everything was easily forgiven, within limits, of course. Wanting to marry an American probably did not fall in the easy to forgive category. I smiled uneasily and
Thatha
tightened his arm around me.

“So, when are you going to get her married?” he asked as if he could read my mind and I shifted in his grip.

My mother’s smile turned into a pout. “As soon as we find a nice boy. . . . Someone she can’t find anything wrong with. Every boy we sent to her, she doesn’t like. Like they have horns growing out of their heads or something.” She sighed deeply. “
Nanna
, you have to talk to her now,” she said as if he was her last hope in convincing me to get married. I wasn’t listening to my own father, what made her think I would listen to hers?

Sowmya tucked the edge of her sari around her waist and picked up a bucket filled with thick slices of peeled mango, lying listlessly, squished against each other. Seeing it as a chance to avoid talking about my marriage I picked up the other bucket, which was filled with oil, turmeric, and salt.

“Neelima, can you bring the muslin cloth upstairs?” Sowmya called out when we reached the stairs to go up to the terrace. “So much to be done and Lata
and
your mother do absolutely nothing. They just sit around giving orders. Must’ve been queens,
maharanis
, in some past life.”

I grinned. “
And
they take all the credit for the
pachadi.
”

Sowmya snorted. “I make better
avakai
than both of them. You think they would come upstairs and strain their backs a little? Nothing. They will sit downstairs under the fan while we sweat up here.”

On the terrace there was a coconut-straw bed that was used for the purpose of drying mangoes or any other fruit or vegetable that needed to get some sun. And it was a good place to get some sun—heat scorched the cement floor, burning everything in its wake.

“Ouch, ouch, ouch.” Sowmya and I danced on the cement floor as the heat burned our bare feet. We reached the coconut-straw bed next to which tall coconut trees threw some shade on the floor, making it cooler, bearable to touch with the soles of our feet.

“Should’ve worn slippers,” I said. “I’d forgotten how hot it gets.”

“Ah, slippers are for babies,” Sowmya said, laughing. “I don’t know how you can stand the cold in the States. It gets very cold, doesn’t it?”

I shrugged. “In San Francisco I think it’s always cold. But it gets quite hot in the summers in the Bay Area and yes, a little cold, nothing drastic. It doesn’t snow or anything.”

“Why is it always cold in San Francisco?”

“It’s by the bay. Lots of people joke that the coldest winter they endured was a summer in San Francisco.”

“Then why do you live there?” Sowmya asked.

“Because I like the city,” I said. I didn’t tell her that it was Nick who liked the city a lot more than I did. I wouldn’t mind living in the South Bay with the Indian restaurants and Indian movie theaters in arm’s reach. But Nick liked the way he could just walk from our apartment and find a café to get a cup of coffee and a croissant.

“Can’t have
tandoori
chicken early in the morning,” Nick would say when I would complain about San Francisco, and how I hated to find parking when I got home every day from working in the South Bay, and how wonderful it would be to live close to all those Indian restaurants.

But my bitching and moaning aside, I liked living in San Francisco as well; not as much as Nick, but I certainly liked being able to live amidst the bustle of the city. I liked having an apartment from where I could look at San Francisco and know that I was
here
, in the U.S., in the land of opportunities. I had worked so hard to get here and nothing said America as clearly to me as standing in the balcony with a cup of coffee looking at the city of San Francisco.

Neelima came upstairs and spread the muslin cloth on the coconut straw bed. We dunked the mangoes in the bucket filled with oil, salt, and turmeric.

It was great fun, just like the olden times when I was a child visiting my grandparents. My hands would smell of turmeric and stay yellow for days. I hadn’t done this for so long and I was stung by the loss. I had lost so much since I had left India and I hadn’t even thought about it. I had become so much a part of America that the small joys of dunking pieces of mango inside gooey paste were forgotten and not even missed.

It was as if there were two people inside me: Indian Priya and American Priya, Ma’s Priya and Nick’s Priya. I wondered who the real Priya was.

I had always thought that self-evaluation was nonsense. It didn’t really mean anything. How could you not know yourself? I believe we know who we are, we know the exact truth about ourselves, and it is when this truth is not palatable that we want to dig deeper within our conscience to find something better, something we can live with. Did I need to dig deeper now, to explore who I was beyond Nick’s Priya and Ma’s Priya?

We laid the oil- and spice-coated pieces of mango on the cloth, our yellow fingerprints marking the pristine white muslin.

“Did you tell your
Thatha
?” Neelima asked without looking at me, and suddenly I was face to face with familial politics again.

Everything was so complicated and it struck me like a sack of mangoes—I couldn’t live here. Nostalgia for a mango and HAPPINESS was one thing, living here on a day-to-day basis was impossible. I didn’t want to live close to my family anymore. I had been in
Thatha’s
house just a few hours and I was already seething with feminine rage over half a dozen things.

I wanted to distance myself from India and my family; I wanted to feel nothing, pretend this was happening to someone else, not me; but I couldn’t. I knew these people and they knew me; however dark and ugly it might get, I would still know them and they me. There was no delusional escape, this was the here and now, and whether I liked it or not, I was here now.

“I told him,” I murmured softly.

Neelima wanted
Ammamma
and
Thatha’s
approval but she was never going to get it, not complete and total approval. For that she would have to die and come back as a Telugu Brahmin. I felt sorry for her even as I felt annoyance. Why was she here? If Nick’s family treated me the way
Ammamma
and
Thatha
treated Neelima, I would give Nick hell and make sure I didn’t deal with his family.

As it was, Nick’s family was wonderful. Whenever we went to visit them in Memphis, they were all hugs and acceptance. When I went with Nick the first time, it was for Thanksgiving and I was very nervous. What if they didn’t like me? I was an Indian and I wondered if they would hate me for that as my parents would hate Nick for being American.

Nick’s mother didn’t care about my ethnicity but she was undoubtedly fascinated by my Indianness. When we met for the first time she told me, “I’ve never spoken to an Indian before, but I love curry.”

And over curry powder and turkey, Nick’s mother— Frances—and I became friends. She was an adorable woman who always remembered my birthday and sent me a gift, something she knew I wanted. She would investigate, harass Nick for information and try to find out from conversations with me what I wanted and then she would ensure that the birthday gift reached me wrapped and packed and on the mark. She always talked about our “impending” wedding and changed the reception dinner menu regularly—her way of asking us to hurry up and tie the knot and of course give her grandchildren.

Nick’s father had died five years ago and from what Nick told me about him, I was sorry to have not met him. He used to be a high school football coach and apparently never held a grudge when Nick became an accountant and his brother, Doug, a sous-chef in New Orleans.

“He used to joke that we were sissies,” Nick said when I asked him about his father. “I miss him. He never told us what to do. I think if I wanted to be a ballet dancer, Dad would have called me a sissy and then would have driven me to ballet lessons.”

Frances had called me before I came to India. “Tell them you’re pregnant. They’ll want you to marry my Nick right away, ” she joked when I told her that I was more than a little nervous about telling my family about Nick.

“So what did your
Thatha
say about the baby?” Neelima asked demurely.

“Nothing,” I replied, and sat down cross-legged, my right hand still inside the pink bucket. “Why do you keep coming here, Neelima?” I asked bluntly, and her eyes met mine with shock.

“Priya!” Sowmya gasped.

I shook my head and put my hand on the cloth and made a yellow handprint. “I didn’t mean it that way, ” I said finally. “I mean, they treat you . . . well, they treat you like they don’t like you.”

“How will they like her if they don’t know her?” Sowmya jumped to Neelima’s defense.

“Do you really believe that knowing her will make them like her?” I asked slightly irritated. “Anand keeps sending her here and they . . . they don’t want to like her, Sowmya.”

Neelima sniffled and we both turned our attention to her. Lord! Did the woman have to cry? I disliked women who cried incessantly over one thing or the other. Neelima had been bawling or on the verge of doing so ever since I met her.

“Come, come,” Sowmya nudged her sister-in-law with her elbow because both her hands were drenched in turmeric.

“Crying is not going to solve your problem,” I admonished, and they both looked like two little puppies I had kicked with high-heeled boots.

“Don’t be mean,” Sowmya said sternly. “You don’t know what she has been through.”

I shrugged. “Does it matter? So she has been through hell, I understand, but I don’t see why she should keep coming back here for more of it.”

“Because Anand wants me to,” Neelima said, and wiped her tears with the sleeve of her red blouse. “He keeps making me come here so that his parents will . . . accept us. But they don’t, do they? Priya is right, Sowmya. They just don’t want to.”

“It takes time,” Sowmya said solemnly.

“How much time?” Neelima demanded sarcastically. “We have been married for over a year now; I am going to have a baby soon. How will they treat my child?”

“You may have a son and Lata may have a daughter,” I said, trying to lighten the atmosphere just a little.

Sowmya and Neelima smiled.

“How about your parents?” I asked. “Are they okay with Anand?”

Neelima nodded. “They like him very much. They even tried to get friendly, but they don’t want to have anything to do with my parents. We tried, you know; we called them all to our house so that the parents could meet and everything. But they didn’t even come, called at the last minute making up an excuse about some water problem in the house. My mother was so upset and my father . . . bless that man, he told me to be careful and that he would support me through anything.”

Sowmya glared at her. “Meaning?”

Neelima stuck her hand inside the pink bucket and laid out the remaining fistful of mangoes on the muslin and started to spread them.