Amulya Malladi - The Mango Season

“You’ll look better,” I said.

“You think he’ll like me the way Adarsh liked you?” she asked, her eyes glittering behind her thick glasses. “Maybe I shouldn’t wear my glasses, huh?”

“Wear them, don’t wear them, it doesn’t matter,” I told her. “And Adarsh does not like me. There’s nothing to like,” I added.

Sowmya put the sari down and picked up the sapphire jewelry I had also worn to parade in front of Adarsh and his parents. “Amma said that she will give these to me when I get married. If this boy likes me, you and I can have a double wedding. What do you think?”

She was trying so hard to make Nick disappear that I couldn’t take offense, but I couldn’t let it slide either. Guilt sat steadily in my throat like the taste of the bitter soft stone of a raw mango; no matter what I ate or drank after biting the soft stone, its taste stayed with me.

“I’m not going to marry Adarsh, Sowmya,” I said quietly.

She sighed and put the jewelry away and turned from the mirror in Ammamma’s room to face me. “You can’t marry a foreigner, Priya,” she told me calmly as she picked up the blue sari again. “You just can’t. They will all disown you. You will have to choose.”

I shrugged. “It’s no contest, Sowmya,” I said with certainty. “I will always pick Nick.”

As soon as I said it, I wondered. If push came to shove, which it would when I told my parents and Thatha about Nick, would I just walk out and fly away to the United States to be Nick’s wife? What about the daughter, granddaughter, cousin, niece inside me? Would I happily sacrifice all those identities to be Nick’s wife? I knew I would, I was sure I would, but it would be a sacrifice, and a big one. And did relationships based upon sacrifices truly work?

Maybe in a few years I would miss my family and they still wouldn’t want me; would that make me resent Nick? No, I told myself confidently, nothing would make me resent Nick. He was everything I wanted in a man, a husband, a friend. He was it. If he were Indian instead of American, or even better, if he were a Telugu Brahmin, my parents and grandparents would’ve jumped at the idea of our marriage and would’ve paid for a lavish wedding, inviting everyone they knew.

None of that would happen now. My wedding would be an almost clandestine affair that’d take place far away from India and its mores in the United States, which my family would believe to be more suited for our unholy matrimony. There wouldn’t be hundreds of Ma’s and Nanna’s and Thatha’s friends and my family, there would be Nick and his family and our friends. Would it matter that I would be without my family, the family, which had been part of my weekends by phone for the past seven years?

Every weekend I would call home, or if my parents were at Thatha’s house, I’d call there and we’d talk. I looked forward to calling my family on Saturday nights, sometimes on Friday nights if Nick and I were home. Would I miss that large telephone bill at the end of the month?

Ma walked into Ammamma’s room and threw her hands up in exasperation. “You also want to wear that hideous sari, Sowmya?” she asked. “She looked like someone’s grandma; you will look like her grandma’s grandma. Wear that yellow sari with the red border.”

Sowmya’s face fell. “But, Akka, I like the blue-”

“Wear that red border one,” Ma said forcefully. “Or do you want to go through another sixty-five of these?”

“Ma!” I cried out at her rudeness, but Ma just waved a hand and said, “Hush, what do you know? You just got here, maharani, and you are lucky that Rice Sarma’s son was in India at the same time. Sowmya doesn’t have those benefits.”

Sowmya pushed her sliding glasses up her nose.

“Ma,” I protested again, now embarrassed, and Ma shushed me again.

“Mahadevan Uncle called your father. Looks like they will make a proposal by tomorrow morning,” Ma said, gleeful triumph in her eyes coupled with a challenge for me to refuse this prize stud she’d found me.

I looked at her with wide eyes. “What proposal?”

“Farming proposal!” Ma said indignantly. “Marriage proposal, Priya. That is what we do. We see a family and the boy and then they make a marriage proposal and we accept.”

“Whoa… who said anything about accepting?” I demanded.

Sowmya raised both her hands. “Akka, they’ll be here soon and I need Priya to help me get ready. Neelima left with Anand, and they won’t be back until tomorrow, so I really need Priya.”

Ma looked at me and then at Sowmya. “I told you, Priya, no nakhras, your father might tolerate that nonsense, but I will take my slipper and beat the living daylights out of you if you continue to misbehave.”

I blinked and shook my head. I was not going to dignify that lame threat with a response.

“Remember that,” Ma added ominously before she left.

“She thinks that I’m still ten and she can hit me,” I muttered. “Why do Indian parents think they can beat their children into submission?”

“That is how it is,” Sowmya said wisely. “Now tell me, will I look good in this yellow and red sari?” she asked, as she draped the sari in question over her shoulder.

The “boy” who came to see Sowmya was definitely not a prize stud. His name was Vinay and he was soft-spoken, true to his name, but the rest was a far cry from anyone’s Dream Man. He was extremely dark (even darker than I), a little on the short side (but still taller by at least a couple of inches than Sowmya); he wore glasses, which were as thick as Sowmya’s, and to add to the interesting mix of physical traits was the small patch of balding hair that he was trying to hide with the classic and unsuccessful comb-over.

Sowmya served him and his parents the bajjis and ladoos while I served them tea, happy to be of help, since Vinay was Sowmya’s suitor, not mine. Vinay’s parents seemed like very nice people, polite and nonconfrontational. Vinay was thirty-five years old and was looking for someone who was homely and religious. Not too religious, though, just enough-should know how to do puja and keep madhi. Sowmya was par excellence at both. While Sowmya’s grandmother, my great-grandmother, was alive, Sowmya was asked time and again to keep madhi; that is, to cook right after she took a bath before touching or doing anything else and preferably in wet clothes. Sowmya flat out refused to cook in wet clothes as great-grandma expected, but she knew the ins and outs of all the religious nooks and crannies.

They didn’t want a working daughter-in-law, Vinay’s parents said. They wanted grandchildren soon. Oh, Vinay is still single because he was so busy with his career. Couldn’t be that busy, I thought cynically, after all he was just a small-time lecturer at some out of the way engineering college.

While I served tea, Sowmya sat demurely looking at her painted nails as her fingers fondled the yellow tassels at the edge of the red border of her sari.

“Do you play any instrument?” Vinay asked Sowmya and she nodded.

“I play the veena,” she said.

Jayant had brought the veena out from storage just that morning and Sowmya and I had dusted it clean. Thatha had been informed from a good source that the “boy” liked music and since Sowmya could play the veena, everyone thought it would be a good idea to keep it handy.

I slipped out of the living room into the backyard when Sowmya started playing. As the notes filtered through the house, it was obvious that the veena idea was a bad one. It had been almost three years since Sowmya had touched the musical instrument; she needed practice and a lot of it.

I found Nate in the backyard tying his shoelaces by the tulasi plant.

“Where’re you going?” I asked.