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