The Mango Season (22 page)

“I hope that you will one day feel better about this,” I told
Thatha
. “I’m happy with this man. I thought that would be important to you.”

Thatha
shook his head, defeated. He didn’t say anything. He was coming to terms with the fact that he was not master of my father’s house, that when push came to shove, Ma would always stand by her husband and they both would stand by me, regardless of my decision and their consequences.

“And at least,”
Ammamma
said with a broad shrug, “he is white, not some
kallu
.”

I froze.

Damn it!

Had I forgotten to mention Nick was black?

TO: PRIYA RAO
FROM: NICHOLAS COLLINS
SUBJECT: SORRY!

I AM SO SORRY FOR BEING OUT OF TOUCH ALL DAY YESTERDAY BUT THINGS HAVE BEEN A TOTAL MESS. I WENT TO LUNCH WITH STEVEN AND SUSAN TO THIS PUB IN THE CITY AND SOMEONE GOT AWAY WITH MY LEATHER BAG AND MY LEATHER JACKET. MY CELL PHONE WAS IN THE JACKET AND MY PALM ALONG WITH MY COMPUTER WAS IN MY BAG . . . I AM COMPLETELY FUCKED!

I THINK I HAVE SOME OLD STUFF ON YOUR LAPTOP SO ONCE YOU’RE BACK YOU CAN HAVE A LOOK AND LET ME KNOW. FOR NOW, I HAVE LOST ALL MY CONTACTS BUT AT LEAST I HAVE SOME CDS THAT I USED TO BACKUP MY HARD DRIVE TWO MONTHS AGO.

I SPOKE WITH FRANCES AND SHE TOLD ME YOU WERE WORRIED. I’M RIGHT HERE . . . A LITTLE LIGHT ON HI-TECH TOYS BUT RIGHT HERE.

HOW WAS EVERYTHING? ARE YOUR GRANDFATHER AND FATHER FEELING ANY BETTER?

I CAN’T WAIT FOR YOU TO COME BACK HOME. AND FRANCES TOLD ME THAT YOU AGREED TO GET MARRIED THIS FALL IN MEMPHIS? ARE YOU SURE ABOUT THAT? I THOUGHT YOUR HEART WAS SET ON MONTEREY OR CARMEL, SOMEWHERE BY THE OCEAN. AND SHE SAID THAT YOU WANT TO GET PREGNANT BY THE END OF THE YEAR? I’M ASSUMING THAT A LOT OF THIS IS WISHFUL THINKING ON HER PART, IN ANY CASE, WE’LL TALK ABOUT IT WHEN YOU GET HOME.

OH AND I HOPE YOU HATED THAT GUY THEY TRIED TO HOOK YOU UP WITH.

I LOVE YOU AND I MISS YOU, SO COME HOME SOON
NICK

Epilogue Ready to Eat

The avakai arrived with an Indian who was coming to the Bay Area and whose parents Ma and Nanna knew. Raghunath Reddy didn’t seem to mind carrying the midsized glass jar. “One amongst the many,” he told me when he dropped the mango pickle off at my office, which was right next to his. “I have two more jars and one sari to deliver,” he added.

Nick thought the pickle was too spicy but continued to eat it without
ghee
or rice, which was as close to killing yourself as you could come with the hot-hot pickle.

My experience with India in the summer had left me with a better understanding of Nick and my relationship with him and my family. Nick was pleased that I didn’t end up marrying a nice Indian boy and assured me that he had never thought about leaving me because I couldn’t tell my family about him.

“We come from different cultures, I understand that,” he said. “I was frustrated at times but never enough to not want to be with you. This is who you are; you’d not be you if you didn’t care about your family.”

It was a relief to be back in the U.S. This was familiar territory and I didn’t feel like a cross between a delinquent teenager and a bad daughter anymore. That feeling had passed when Ma, at the Hyderabad International Airport, had waved good-bye with tears in her eyes.

I got an email from Nate with all the family gossip.
Thatha
was not speaking with
Nanna
anymore as the last time they talked, which was just a week ago, they ended up talking about me and almost came to blows. Ma was back to normal, bitching and moaning that I didn’t call enough and when I did, she bitched and moaned that I talked too long with
Nanna
and wasted my money.

“Write long letters, tell everything there, don’t waste money on phone calls,” she said. “Send email, send us a picture of Nick. We still haven’t seen him.”

Lata had ballooned up with her advancing pregnancy and couldn’t wait for the baby to get out. Despite Jayant’s insistence she refused to have an ultrasound done. When I called her, she told me that she thought it was another girl and that she was just fine with that. She even had a name picked out, Nithila, which meant “pearl” in Telugu. If it was a boy, she said, she would go with Abhay, “the one without fear.”

Sowmya was getting married on September 21 and was very sorry that Nick and I couldn’t make it to the wedding. She understood our predicament as our wedding date was set for October 3.

Nanna
and Ma were coming and even Nate had decided to make an appearance.

“Your wedding and I won’t be there?” Nate had written in his email. “Are you trying to be funny or something? So, are you going to introduce me to some hot chicks?”

Apparently, Tara, the girl from Delhi Ma would have hated, proved to be unsuitable as she had kissed another boy at a cousin’s wedding in Madras.

“It was
just
a kiss, she said,” Nate wrote in yet another email where he told me the entire sob story and how much her betrayal had hurt him. “I go for lots of weddings, don’t catch me kissing anyone,
just
.” But at Nate’s age, relationships come and go with little pain and Tara had already faded into a forgotten yesterday.

Frances was planning our wedding with great pleasure. Nick and I’d caved in and had agreed to a Memphis wedding (a Hindu ceremony followed by a Baptist one) and a San Francisco reception.

It was going to be a small wedding, Frances told me, just three hundred of her closest family and friends and
then
we could add to that with our close friends and my family.

The invitations were to go out in a few days and I wanted to make sure I sent my parents a personal letter along with the invitation.

The envelope with the wedding invitation, a note from me, and a picture of Nick had been ready for days but I kept forgetting about it. It wasn’t deliberate. Finally, with just a month left to our wedding I dropped the letter off at my company mailroom. The mailroom guy assured me that the letter would reach its destination in five to seven days. . . .

THE MANGO SEASON

A Reader’s Guide

AMULYA MALLADI

A CONVERSATION WITH AMULYA MALLADI

Amulya Malladi and
Priya Raghupathi,
a business analyst from New Jersey,
have known each other for many, many years. They went to engineering school
together in India and have remained friends, through job changes, moves to
different countries, marriage, and children. Amulya borrowed Priya’s
name for the protagonist of
The Mango Season,
as well as some
of her emotions, though that is still murky.

Amulya Malladi:
Well, this is vaguely uncomfortable, talking about something that must make sense after the conversation is over.

Priya Raghupathi:
Oh, I don’t know, I’ll turn the floor over to you, as the phrase goes.

AM:
Ah, but
you
have to talk about the book and ask me questions about it, because I already did my job. I wrote the book.

PR:
Okay, let’s start with the names in
The Mango Season
. They were all very familiar.

AM:
Names as in, the names of the people?

PR:
Yes.

AM:
Hmm, I did notice that . . . but later on. I know different writers write differently, but I need to have the title of the book in place. I can think about the book, even write a few pages but if I don’t have a title, I can’t move on. And the title just comes; I don’t work very hard at it. Same with names of characters, my fingers just type the names and I settle down with them. I don’t second-guess myself too much.

PR:
We’ve heard all these names in our close circles.

AM:
I think I borrowed a lot of names from people I knew. I didn’t realize that I was borrowing your name for Priya until later when I started to read the blurb of the book and saw that she went to Texas A&M and so did you. I did get some hints when Priya’s brother’s name started out to be your brother’s name but I changed it without thinking much. And maybe there were connections that came from our time together in Hyderabad, as Neelima was also the name of your roommate (and I didn’t realize that until right now). I did quote another classmate of ours, Sudhir, in the book and used his name. Ashwin, Priya’s father’s name, came from an ex-boyfriend’s brother’s name. Ah . . . the list is endless.

Even, Priya’s boyfriend’s name came from an unusual place. One of my husband’s friends had a baby boy and they didn’t give the kid a name until he was almost six months old. And I think I was working on the book when my husband told me they finally named their son Nicholas. And I used it.

I don’t “steal” names consciously. Later on I can draw lines and make sense of it, but right then and there . . . it’s just something that works out.

PR:
You also have a lot of references to the Bay Area and Hyderabad, places you’ve been. Do you write only about places you’ve been to? Even in your first book, you wrote about Bhopal, a place you were familiar with.

AM:
I think it’s easier to write about a place you’ve lived in. The research element definitely shrinks and you can write more confidently. I also feel I have an obligation to write about a place I’ve lived in. I have moved a lot in my life, as a child and even as an adult, and I just feel that it would be such a waste if I wouldn’t write about the places I have lived in.

My third book,
Serving Crazy with Curry
is set completely in the Bay Area, while the book after that is going to be set entirely in India in this small town by the Bay of Bengal that I was familiar with when I was a child. And now that I live in Denmark, I feel I must write a book set in Denmark with Danes. After all, I am so intimate with this society, not just because I live here, but also because I’m married to a Dane.

PR:
And I also think because you’ve lived in these places you relate with them and don’t make up stuff.

AM:
I don’t mind making up stuff, especially about a place. After all, I’m writing fiction, not a travel book. But I’d rather not make up stuff.

PR:
I guess writers do write about places they know. Hemingway did go to Spain a lot when he wrote his books with that backdrop.

AM:
Even Naipaul does that. He writes about Africa and Indian immigrants who live there. Amy Tan writes about American Chinese characters who live in China and the San Francisco Bay Area. Maybe writers like to revisit the places they have lived in, the experiences they have had there.

For me writing
The Mango Season
was like taking a trip to India. I’d forgotten how good
chaat
tastes, or how good
ganna
juice tastes and when I was writing about it I could all but smell that sugarcane juice. I miss sugarcane juice! I remember how you and I would get off the bus from college and eat roadside
chaat
and indulge in a tall glass of sugarcane juice. Our mothers were never too pleased about us eating and drinking that junk. Never stopped us, though, even when we fell sick because of it.

PR:
Speaking of food, you know I found something similar between your book and
Like Water for Chocolate,
that you put recipes before every chapter, or almost every chapter.

AM:
Well, food is an integral part of Indian society. When we go to visit my parents, my mother will ask us to sit and eat even before we have set our bags down. Whenever I’d go to visit relatives, I’d find myself spending a lot of time in the kitchen with someone or the other, watching them cook or helping them cook.

And I love to cook. So, even though Priya (not you, the book one) isn’t a great cook, I think she appreciates good food because she grew up with it. And I wanted to show the kitchen dynamics and politics as well. A lot of women in one kitchen, there has to be some masala there.

The Mango Season
is nowhere as brilliant as
Like Water for
Chocolate,
which is one of those books where the lines between reality and fantasy blur and the end result is a beautifully written story.

PR:
Like Water for Chocolate
is like a water painting with no defined lines. When you look at something, you think it’s sort of a tree but it could also be part of the mountain behind it.

AM:
That’s a fabulous way of putting it. Laura Esquivel does have that magic touch. I’d like to be like her when I grow up.

PR:
When I first read
The Mango Season,
I thought, “Why is everybody sounding so emotional? Do we really talk like this in India? We definitely don’t talk like this in the U.S.” And then I thought about it some. In the U.S. you try to stay politically correct and calm and balanced. Even with family and friends. But when you go back to India you realize that people say exactly what they think. They do tend to get more visibly upset. And the bad part is if you stay there long enough it can start rubbing off on you.

AM:
Was everyone emotional in the book? Probably.

Well, it’s a matter of time and place. Priya has come home after seven years and she has something to say that no one is going to like to hear. Her parents want her to get married and they’d prefer to somehow do it without her permission. At Priya’s grandparents’ house there is a lot of tension because of what the sex of Lata’s baby will be, and they’re trying to get their youngest daughter, Sowmya, married. After years of trying and not succeeding, that is a matter of constant concern. And then there is the continuing battle over Anand and the fact that he married a woman out of his caste. They are all emotional because of the conflict-laden atmosphere they are in.

I don’t think it’s a matter of being politically correct or not, it’s just a matter of what the situation is. People are not extra polite with family because of the societal need to be PC. I think families are families and every family has a different dynamic. I know several American and Danish families where the conversations get loud and direct; feelings are bruised and mended, same as any other family.

But you’re absolutely right about Indians being direct and emotional. I feel that most Indians don’t have filters. They say what they mean and what they feel, without paying much heed to who will be hurt and how much. And yes, Indians are very emotional as well and I have seen it very clearly depicted when I interact with Americans and Europeans. We feel too much and we react so strongly. My Danish family probably thinks I am a little cuckoo because I go off the deep end very easily and often.

PR:
Another thought I had was that things seemed to tie up a bit too nicely at the end. Do you feel like books are better when there is sorting out at the end? Do you foresee writing a book where you stop at “Well. So that’s how things are. They didn’t get any better or change and there you have it. Such is life.” Not necessarily a sad ending but rather a non ending.

AM:
I don’t know if things did get tied up too nicely. Her grandparents and parents are still fighting over Priya’s choice of a husband. She’s still not able to tell them that Nick is black and when they find out, it’s obviously going to be considered yet another betrayal. I actually wanted to leave things to show that this is how it’s going to continue. She’ll never have her parents’ full support and they will always find something to complain about, and she will probably give them enough reason.

From personal experience, I know that my marrying a Dane was not well received by my parents and even though, finally, it came down to, “You have to do what you have to do and you don’t listen to us anyway,” we’re not all living like one big happy family. Sure, there are other reasons why my parents and I don’t get along, but I think one of the reasons is that I’m married to a man they didn’t approve of. And I think Priya will probably have the same experience.

Regarding if books should have a nicely wrapped-up ending or not, it depends upon the book. Sometimes I read a book and the ending is left hanging and I feel it’s done for effect and not because the story demanded it. Sometimes it’s nice that the author didn’t tie it all up. But again that is a personal choice based on how a reader reacts to a story.

Take
Gone with the Wind
. I’m sure there were readers who wished that at the end Rhett and Scarlet would hold hands and walk into the sunset, while I was pretty happy with the ending and thought that was the only way the book could end.

PR:
Strange isn’t it? After all those years, so many things have changed—our lives, our careers, and yet here we are . . .

AM:
We’ve known each other . . . oh, since we were in diapers. I think it’s rather nice that you and I can still have a conversation about this or anything else. I have found that I have lost touch with many of my friends from the old college days, yet you and I have managed to hold on and have some semblance of a friendship. Thank you so much for doing this with me. When my editor said that I could do the Q&A with you, I was quite thrilled that we could work on a joint project like this and it has been absolutely wonderful!

PR:
I agree. This has been fun. I’m really happy for you, and as always, my love and best wishes are with you.

AM:
Well, that’s a wrap!