When Hari Met His Saali Read Online Free PDF Page A

minute and concluded that it went well. But after walking for a few moments she realized thetears were rolling down her cheeks. But she didn’t understand why she was crying.
    Jenny shouldn’t have mentioned my mom and my sister.
    That whole thing about inviting them to her engagement ceremony — where did that come from? Tia realized it was not Jenny’s fault for mentioning it. In fact, she knew Jenny was right.
    Who wouldn’t invite their only surviving family members to one of the biggest occasions of their lives?
    Tia had blocked out her mother and her sister for as long as she could. The realization made it worse. In the last six years — since she had left India— she had come a long way. Mostly in a good way but in one particular way— when it came to her mother and sister — she had failed spectacularly. The fact that Tia Galhotra was not on speaking terms with her own momwas most hurtful to none other than Tia herself. It was downright shameful. These mistakes didn’t happen to Tia, she had made sure of that. But this one had happened. She just hadn’t done anything about it — she didn’t know how. Tia had cried her eyes out about it, alone, often, sometimes several times a night, but she hadn’t taken any initiative to remedy the situation. And she hated herself for that.
    Tia didn’t like her past. At 25 she had dreamt of, planned and achieved what Jenny often referred to as her
“
fairy tale life”. So far so good. Whenever anyone asked, and people always asked, Tia would explain her past as follows:
    Born in Nagpur, a small town in India; middle-class family; father the least successful in his circle of friends; mother a worrier and a housewife, in that order; she and her sister, Simi, both ambitious; at school she was regarded as a prodigy; she couldn’t wait to leave her small town; at 19 she secured a scholarship to UCLA in California; four months before her departure her father died in an accident; her mother wanted her to cancel her plans to study in America and stay to look after Simi; she thought she would never get out of Nagpur; they fought; after promising her mother she would return after finishing her studies, she left for America.
    But Tia had finished her studies over a year ago. She had not gone back. At all. It was probably the only promise she had not kept in her life. She had not returned to India even once and her relationship with her mother had deteriorated so badly it was almost non-existent. Tia hated herself for it, but consoled herself with the plan that once she had settled down with Hari she would migrate her mother and Simi to America. She comforted herself by believing that was going to happen soon.
    But creating another path of responsilibilty was almost too much for Tia. She was already running more than one track in her life; her career ambitions, her indignant insistence on achieving/experiencing certain things before she was thirty, her future with Hari and her main gripe about him not being a complete man because he lacked all and any thoughtfulness. Everything else — like her ideal life with a posh house in the suburbs with a white picket fence and a small backyard, along with her desire to create the American dream with Hari — was within her reach. All she had to do was not confuse Hari. This was no time to put him in a corner. After all, Tia Galhotra and Hariprasad Malhotra were getting married in three months’ time — or in eighty-eight days to be precise.
    Although Hari had never even brought it up, Tia was excited about taking his last name. She was feeling blessed that all she would have to change was one letter of the alphabet, and so Tia Galhotra would become Tia Malhotra.
    Women die for things like these.
    But before that, her engagement ceremony was in one month’s time — or thirty-four days to be precise. The invitations had been printed, the date, the venue, the
muhurat
had been selected; this was no time to feel sad. Tia’s mood changed