Authors: Amulya Malladi
Tags: #Fiction, #Contemporary Women, #Literary, #Cultural Heritage, #General
“I’m glad and again, I’m really sorry for having put you through this,” I said.
Adarsh shrugged nonchalantly. “As long as you pay for the
chaat
and provide me with the promised
ganna
juice . . . I have no complaints.”
I tried to call Nick once more and still got the answering machine and voice mail. It was hard not to panic. I checked my email in the hope that he had sent something but I couldn’t access the account as the ISP of the Internet café I was going to was down.
Not wanting to go back to
Thatha’s
where I would have to deal with some unsavory questions, I decided to go to my parents’ house instead. Nate was there and if he wasn’t, I knew the neighbor always had a key to the house. I could sneak in and get some quiet time. And I could check email from Nate’s computer.
Talking to Adarsh had raised some difficult issues; mostly I was feeling the garden variety, old-fashioned guilt. I started to wonder how Nick had felt about me keeping him a secret for the past three years we had been dating. I knew he thought it was silly not to tell my family about him, but now I started to realize that maybe he saw it as an insult as well, just like Adarsh had with his Chinese girlfriend.
But it was still a man’s world and we women had to balance the fine line between familial responsibilities and our own needs.
I waved for an auto rickshaw to take me to my parents’ house from the Internet café. I didn’t barter with the
rickshawwallah
, just agreed to the forty-five rupees he asked for.
Maybe Nick was busy. My mind made up excuses for his not being available on any data line. What if he had had an accident? No, no, I told myself firmly, Frances would know if that happened and Frances had said everything was fine, that she’d just talked to Nick the night before.
What if he was with another woman? As soon as I thought it, I knew it was preposterous. Nick could never be with another woman. Whenever I joked that he should leave me and go away he would say, “Where would I go? No one will have me but you.”
We both really had nowhere to be but with each other. Relationships bound people together to the point that home was a feeling and not a brick structure. I knew where home was and it definitely was not here in Hyderabad. These people were not family. How easily they had decided to give me up. Anger ripped through me. I don’t conform to their rules, I don’t exist, not important to anyone anymore. My own father walks out and doesn’t bother to tell me whether he is dead or alive as if my marrying Nick is the end of the world.
I paid the auto rickshaw driver and opened the rickety metal gate that led to the grilled veranda of my parents’ house.
“Priya?” Mrs. Murthy who lived across the street called out from her veranda.
I nodded and then waved to her. She stood up from the cane chair she was sitting on, fanning herself rapidly with a coconut straw fan. “Is your mother back, too?”
“No,” I said. “She’s still at
Thatha
and
Ammamma’s
house.”
“They took the light off again,” she complained, vigorously fanning herself. “Why don’t you come here and sit with me for a while until the light comes back,
hanh
? It is cooler here than your place. . . . I always told Radha, west-facing house, big mistake.”
It would be rude to say no. On the other hand I could have a nervous breakdown in front of good old Mallika Murthy, mother of a brilliant son who had gone to the best engineering and business school in India and now worked for a big multinational consultancy. She also had a gorgeous daughter who was married to a handsome doctor in Dubai and made an insane amount of money.
Ma hated Murthy Auntie even as she spent all her afternoons gossiping with her. They both talked about their children and tried to one up each other. Nate was in an IIT and he had gotten a better rank than Ravi Murthy in the IIT entrance exam so Ma showed off about that every time Murthy Auntie brought up the topic of her daughter, Sanjana, and her amazing husband. They were expecting a child in six months and Ma was burning with jealousy. Maybe that was why she had tried to hook me up with Adarsh who had gone the BITS Pilani-Stanford-big-company-manager job route, which made him just as desirable as the doctor in Dubai.
“Come, come, Priya,” Murthy Auntie insisted. “I have some
thanda-thanda nimboo pani
.”
Well, cold lemon juice did sound good and there was probably just Nate in the house sweating like a pig. So I made the big mistake of going onto Murthy Auntie’s veranda instead of my parents’. I should’ve known that she’d grill me about my personal life as she gave me the
nimboo pani
. It had never bothered me when I lived in India how everyone nosed around everyone else’s life; now it was inconceivable.
I remember Sowmya asking me, when I first got a job, how much I was getting paid. After two years of graduate school in the United States I flinched at the question and didn’t give her a number. I couldn’t be coy with Ma who would beat the number out of me, but if I had been working in India, I would’ve probably not even thought twice about telling anyone who asked.
The
nimboo pani
was a little too sweet, but it was cold enough that I didn’t complain. The heat was getting to me in more than one way. My
salwar kameez
had wet patches at my armpits, my back, and my stomach, and my thighs felt like they were plastered to any chair I sat on. My hair was matted against my skull and my head was starting to slowly ache because it had forgotten the taste and smell of a Hyderabad summer.
“Radha tells me that she has
the
perfect boy for you.” Murthy Auntie didn’t even bother to mask her curiosity. “So,” she demanded, her eyes wide, “how was this Sarma boy? Did you see him? What did he say?”
I licked my lips and stifled a scream that was lodged in my throat, waiting to get out. “He was okay,” I said, digging my nose into the lemon juice, trying not to look at her when I spoke.
“Really . . . just okay?” Murthy Auntie persisted. “Radha said that he was . . . as good-looking as Venkatesh. Personally, I don’t even think Venkatesh is that good-looking. Aamir Khan any day for me. What do you think,
hanh
?”
“About Aamir Khan?” I looked up at her with innocent, wide-eyed confusion.
Murthy Auntie sighed. “So, he wasn’t good-looking,
hanh
?”
“He was fine looking,” I told her casually.
“So”—she cocked an eyebrow—“did they refuse the match? You can tell me, really. There is no shame. It happens all the time. Of course, with Sanjana, as soon as Mahesh saw her . . . clean bowled, he was. Married her within two weeks, would not let us delay an extra day.”
“I heard Sanjana is pregnant. Congratulations,” I said politely, hoping that this would veer her off my marriage path.
Murthy Auntie glowed. “It is a boy, they found out just two days ago. Mahesh is the only son so his parents are very happy that he is also having a son. Very rich family . . . The boy will be born with a silver spoon in his mouth.”
“That’s nice,” I said, now uncomfortable. Added to the heat was the fact I had nothing in common with this woman and I had, really, nothing to say to her.
“So they refused,
hanh
? Did they?” she asked, her eyes jumping out of her skull, wanting to peep inside my head to find out the truth.
“No,” I said in irritation.
“They said yes?”
“Yes.”
“And you said no?” Murthy Auntie asked in disbelief. “You can tell me the truth, Priya. If they said no, that is fine, it is okay to tell me. I am not a gossip like all the—”
“I can’t marry him, Auntie,” I interrupted her and gulped down the whole glass of lemon juice. I put the glass on the cool marble floor and stood up.
“Why not? Sit, Priya, what’s the hurry?” she said, tugging at my hand.
Just seven years and all this seemed alien. This browbeating and digging into personal lives seemed alien. But inside me I knew that this was the Indian way. I could turn my nose up at it and think it was uncouth but this was how I was raised, this was how things were. It was bloody high time I accepted it and did what needed to be done.
“No,” I said and smiled at her. I was just about to make her day. “I’m already engaged. My fiancé is an American. We’re getting married this fall, hopefully in October. I will definitely send you an invitation but the wedding will probably be in the U.S.”
Her mouth stayed wide open for almost fifteen seconds. But for the fact that I had just ruined my mother’s reputation and my apparent good name, I would’ve found it comical. It felt good, though, to have told her. I had stepped into the light, the light of truth, and it was a nice place to be.
I knew that even before I got inside my parents’ house, Mallika Murthy would be dialing the phone number of ten of her and Ma’s closest friends to inform them about my fall from grace.
I was smiling when I knocked on my parents’ front door. The power was still off and the doorbell was useless. I was fully expecting Nate to open the door and was surprised to see my father, red-eyed, looking slightly sloshed at his doorstep.
“
Nanna
?” I asked, and he sighed deeply.
“I was hiding, but everyone seems to find me,” he said, and stepped away from the door.
“Hiding in your own house,
Nanna
?”
Nanna
shrugged. “Best place I could think of.”
“Have you been drinking?” I asked, as I smelled whiskey in the air.
“Not really,” he said, and pointed to Nate who was lying on a sofa sleeping, despite the heat. “We just drank a few pegs of whiskey last night.”
“A few pegs?” I picked up an empty bottle of Johnny Walker lying on the coffee table, surrounded with a few empty soda bottles.
“Well, after the first three pegs we lost count,”
Nanna
said and sat down by Nate’s feet on the sofa.
Nanna
usually didn’t drink like this, maybe a peg socially and never with his own son. Looked like they were connecting on the alcohol level—a whole new kind of closeness?
“How’re you feeling?” I asked lamely.
“Hung over,”
Nanna
said, leaning against the backrest and closing his eyes.
Father of the Bride
When Nate was little he had lots of ear infections. They plagued him until he was almost four years old and caused him such pain that to this day he remembers the earaches with fear.
I used to sit with him when he was a baby and sometimes even cry with him. Once, when I was nine years old, I couldn’t watch Nate suffer and wished I could take some of his pain on me. I asked
Nanna
why we couldn’t share pain. He told me, “If we could share other people’s pain, mummies and daddies all over the world would die of pain because they would take all their children’s pain.”
Nanna
always wanted to be a good father. I think it was one of the goals of his life. He probably had it written down somewhere:
Nanna
was a meticulous man. When he packed something, it was done neatly and tightly. If he planned a vacation, he would plan everything, leave nothing to chance. He made notes constantly, and when I gifted him a PalmPilot for his fiftieth birthday, he had been deliriously happy. He never left home without the Palm and he always told anyone who’d listen that his daughter who was in America had given the wonderful electronic gadget to him.
He was very proud of me. Even when I was in high school and I would win silly awards for elocution or debate, he’d be on cloud nine, calling his parents in whichever country they were to tell them what a wonderful daughter he had. He would even call
Thatha
, who he rarely phoned, to gloat.
If I asked him for anything, his answer would always be “yes,” regardless of whether he could comply with my wishes or not. “If your
Nanna
doesn’t say yes, who’ll say yes?” he would say. A father’s job according to my father was to keep his children happy.
“When you were a baby,”
Nanna
once told me, “all I wanted to do was make you laugh. You liked pulling my moustache a lot and whenever you did I would yelp and that would make you laugh out loud.” Apparently, I pulled out several of
Nanna
’s moustache hairs when he and I were young.
Nanna
ran a finger over his moustache, smoothing it, and looked at Nate’s lifeless body. He picked up Nate’s left hand and let it drop. It fell limply on the side of the sofa.
“The boy can’t handle his liquor,” he announced, and stumbled as he tried to stand up.
“So you both got nice and drunk. . . . Do you do this often?” I asked, and picked up the day’s newspaper to fan myself. “How can he sleep in this heat?”
“Your Ma keeps asking me to get a generator and an AC. I think it’s too decadent for us simple folk,”
Nanna
said with a lazy smile, as he leaned back into the sofa, giving up his feeble attempts to stand.
“If it wasn’t this hot, I’d suggest coffee,” I said, furiously fanning around my neck. I sat down on the rocking chair by the telephone and rocked gently as I fanned.
“Your Ma is looking for you,”
Nanna
said after a little while. “She called. Very angry, she is. Mahadevan Uncle just called. Adarsh is very impressed with your honesty.”
“
Nanna
—” I began.
“No, no, Priya Ma, you did what your generation always does, stab us in our hearts,”
Nanna
said, clapping the left side of his chest with his right hand before letting it drop. “Adarsh said he holds no hard feelings, but you have left me with no leg to stand on with Mahadevan Uncle or Mr. Sarma.”
“I was trying not to hurt Adarsh’s feelings,” I said. “And he was quite forthcoming about his ex-relationship with a Chinese woman.”
Nanna
shook his head. “Kids these days. I never thought I would say it, but I am: kids these days have no idea what is good for them. It will not work out, Priya.” He used the exact same words as
Thatha
had. “Marrying someone who does not understand your culture, your roots, your traditions, it will not work out.”
Before I could answer the ceiling fan began to whirr again and we both sighed in relief. “Someone needs to be shot for cutting power off like this,”
Nanna
said, and got up to stand right under the fan.
As he pulled the cotton
kurta
that was plastered to his skin away from it, I contemplated how much I should tell him. Even as the thought came to me I decided that I had done enough filtering and that now was not the time to shield him or anyone else anymore.
“It has been working out for three years,
Nanna
,” I said. “We’ve been living together for a while. . . . Two years, we’re . . . together and we’re happy.”
Nanna
stood still and then looked at me with his lips pursed. “You share a home with this man?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, and curbed the impulse to fall on my knees and apologize.
Nanna
shook his head again. “And you’ve been living with him for two whole years?”
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t feel the need up until now to tell us about this important person in your life? Even when I asked you to your face you didn’t tell me. Why? What’s to hide?”
Nanna
asked angrily.
They were all valid questions and I realized then how much I had botched this entire announcement business. I should’ve told them before I came and I should’ve brought Nick along. I should’ve introduced him to the family instead of dropping a bomb on them.
“I was afraid,” I told him frankly. “I’m still afraid that you all don’t love me anymore, that you hate me. But there’s nothing to hide. . . . I mean, he’s a good man. He loves me, he takes very good care of me. And he wanted to be here, he didn’t want to do it this way. I want you to know that this is on me. I made the mistake.”
Nanna
sighed, and sat down on an armchair on the other side of the telephone and turned to face me. “What’s his name?”
“Nicholas, Nick. He’s an accountant with Deloit & Touche. He . . . What else do you want to know?” I asked.
“His family? What’s his family like?”
“They’re good people. His father passed away five years ago. He used to coach football at a high school in Memphis, that’s where Nick was born and raised. His mother, Frances, is a pediatric nurse; she works with children who have cancer at St. Jude’s. It’s a big children’s hospital in Memphis. He has a brother, Douglas, Doug, who is a sous-chef at a very trendy restaurant in New Orleans.” I gave him the list.
“How did you meet him . . . this Nicholas?”
Nanna
asked, his voice, cool, nonjudgmental, almost interrogatory.
“We met at a party,” I told him. “A friend of mine knows a friend of his kind of thing. We met and we started seeing each other and . . .
Nanna
, I really didn’t want to date or love or marry an American. I truly never believed I could have anything in common with someone like Nick.”
Growing up, the West and Westerners were almost surreal beings. It was a given that “they” had different morals and values than “we” did and “we” were morally superior. Most first-generation Indians in the United States only had friends who were Indian. I had never thought I would be any different. I had started out with only Indian friends but my circle grew as I grew. Now I was in a place where I didn’t think in terms of Indian friends and American friends, just friends. I had somewhere down the line stopped looking at skin color.
“He is a very, very nice person,” I said. “He . . . makes me happy.”
“I can’t accept it, Priya,”
Nanna
told me seriously. “Probably in a few years, maybe, but right now, I am very angry with you and I am very hurt, but I don’t hate you. I am your father, I will always love you.”
“And that’s enough for now,” I said. “I want more, but I understand, perfectly. In trying to protect you from Nick and Nick from you, I think I’ve ruined this big time.”
We were quiet for a while and then
Nanna
shrugged. “I think you did what anyone in your place would do.”
“It’s hard,” I said softly. “I wanted to be the perfect daughter, but I realized that in trying to be the perfect daughter, I wasn’t trying to be happy.”
“I never asked for perfection, Priya Ma,”
Nanna
said.
I nodded. “Yes, you never did but I wanted to give it to you anyway. I wanted to have your love and have Nick’s love and
Thatha’s
love. I’m selfish, maybe a little greedy; I didn’t want to lose anything or anybody. But I find that it’s not as easy as I thought it would be and maybe not as difficult as I told Nick it would be either.
“You are my favorite man,
Nanna
. I just didn’t want to lose you because I was in love with another man, the man with the wrong nationality and race. I know
Thatha
is going to disown me and—”
“He is?”
Nanna
interrupted me.
“It’s a gut feeling, not anything he said, but I know him and I know that this is not what he wants for me. That’s a battle I have lost. I’m worried that Ma will turn her back on me as well,” I confessed. “And even though she and I have never been best of friends, I came here to tell you all. I wanted so much for you to accept Nick, to accept Nick and me as a couple.”
“Don’t worry about Ma. She’s going to do what I’m going to do,”
Nanna
said with a small smile. “She’s your mother and she will always love you, no matter what you do. That’s a mother’s job.”
We looked at each other for a while, accepting each other, flaws and all, yet again. Some relationships you can’t sever.
“I am glad though that you didn’t marry him in the dark, like Anand married Neelima,”
Nanna
said quietly. “I am glad you had the courage to tell us. I would have preferred to hear about it earlier but at least you told us, so many others just wouldn’t have. This colleague of mine, his son lives in Europe, married a British girl and called them after the wedding . . . broke his heart.”
“I thought I broke yours.”
Nanna
laughed. “Cracked it a little, but it is not broken. I am proud that you are who you are. I am happy that I raised you . . . because I raised you well.”
“I thought you were angry, felt that I stabbed you in the back, cheated you,” I told him.
“Well, last night I felt that way,”
Nanna
admitted. “But now . . . after drinking all night, I can see the light.”
“The clarity of the drunk?” I joked, and he laughed again. Yesterday night I had thought that he would never laugh again, at least never with me.
“We’re thinking of getting married this fall. Will you come?” I asked impulsively.
“Are
you
inviting me to your wedding?”
Nanna
asked, incredulous.
“Times have changed,” I said, realizing how ridiculous the situation was. My father had forever planned to marry me off and now when the time was here I was marrying myself off, while he was being invited as a guest.
“We will see,” he said, and I understood that he couldn’t commit himself.
“I should go to
Thatha’s
and tell them that I’m not going to be the next Mrs. Sarma,” I said, standing up.
“I’ll drive you,”
Nanna
said. “The liquor has worn off. . . . Your daughter marrying a
firangi
is bad for the buzz.”
“What about him?” I asked, pointing to the sleeping Nate whose mouth was just a little open and drool was pooling, slowly trickling down his chin.
“He’ll be fine,”
Nanna
said. “Probably not the first time he is drunk and hung over. Now, on our way to
Thatha’s
, I want you to tell me all about Nate’s girlfriend. Is she at least Telugu?”
I hugged
Nanna
tightly then, let the floodgates open and sobbed in relief. He rubbed his cheek against my hair and I wasn’t sure if the wetness I felt was sweat or
Nanna’s
tears.
Sowmya was making buttermilk instead of coffee for the early-evening
tiffin
along with some almond biscuits. “Too hot for coffee,” she told me, as she poured water into the earthen pot in which she made yogurt every day.
“Where did
Thatha
go?” I asked, annoyed that he wasn’t there when I was ready to explain to him why I couldn’t marry Adarsh and why I had to tell him the truth.
“Something happened at the house construction. . . . Some wall was put up that shouldn’t have been put up or something like that,” Sowmya said as she added powdered cumin and coriander along with a teaspoon of chili powder and salt to the earthen pot.
She churned the yogurt with a wooden mixer, tasting as she churned. “Will you drink this,” she asked, “or should I make some separate with sugar?”
“This is fine,” I said, smiling at the fact that she remembered I always drank buttermilk with sugar in it.
Lata strolled into the kitchen then, a slight waddle creeping into her walk as she massaged her back. “None of my previous pregnancies gave me this much trouble,” she muttered and then sighed when she saw me. “Why did you have to tell Adarsh everything? Your mother is waiting to kill you.”
It annoyed me that Adarsh had gone home and been a good boy, telling his parents the truth about my personal life, something I thought I had revealed to him to ease his hurt. I had believed there was a tacit understanding between us not to reveal our conversation to any of the elders. I felt cheated out of the money I paid for his
chaat
and
ganna
juice.
“Well, he told me that he had a Chinese girlfriend,” I countered, deliberately keeping the ex-girlfriend part out.
“Chinese?” Lata’s eyes widened, and she came and leaned against the wall beside me. “What, are there no Indians in the States for you all to meet?”
Neelima came into the kitchen right then, her eyes slightly puffed up and lethargy swirling around her like an irritating mosquito. “Can you make me some coffee, Sowmya?” she asked as soon as she was in. She sat down on the floor next to the large stone grinder. “I am so sleepy,” she complained.