Amulya Malladi - The Mango Season

I didn’t bother to tell him that I was not going to change my mind. Like my father had just a while ago, I walked out of Thatha’s house into the warm night. No one called out after me to warn me how dangerous it was to be out at night, but it was just nine o’clock and the sky was still not completely black; hints of the sun still lurked in crimson streaks around sparse sickly clouds.

I went to the telephone booth from where I had called Nick just a few hours ago and dialed my parents’ home number. Nate picked up the phone on the fourth ring.

I was sobbing and couldn’t get any words out.

Nate was in front of the telephone booth on his motorbike within twenty minutes of my hysterical phone call. It was a Yamaha, which my father and paternal grandfather had given him for his eighteenth birthday a year ago against Ma’s vehement objection. She was convinced that Nate would die in an accident on his Yamaha and hated it with a passion. I had shipped a helmet for him, which had annoyed Ma because she thought I was encouraging him but had pleased her as well, because she knew a helmet would keep her son safe.

“I know this great place where they serve very good ice cream,” Nate said when I sat behind him on the bike.

“Nate, drive carefully or we’ll die,” I all but shrieked when Nate started driving on the bumpy roads of Hyderabad. Maybe Ma had a point!

The ice cream parlor was a cozy copy of a ’50s Hollywood movie. There was a jukebox, a red jalopy in a corner, and Enrique Iglesias was telling some woman she couldn’t escape his love at the top of his weepy lungs.

“Nate,” I said mortified, “You’ve brought me to some teenage hangout?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I thought you’d like to meet Tara.”

I sniffled. “ Tara?”

“My girl…”

“I know who Tara is,” I said, not wanting him to think I had forgotten. “But I’m all blubbery and she’ll think I’m a weepy hag.”

“She already does,” Nate said with a wink, and waved at a pretty girl sitting at a table right ahead of us. “Isn’t she lovely?” he asked dramatically in a fake British accent.

“Yes, dear,” I said with a grin. This was a side of Nate I had never seen before and it was charming.

“Hi, I am Tara,” Tara said enthusiastically.

“Hello, Priya,” I said, unsure of what I was supposed to say to her. I held out my hand and she shook it.

“So, how are you doing?” Tara asked. “Are your parents mad as hell about your American fiancé?”

Well, she sure got to the point, I thought critically. Now, as an older sister, it was my job to dislike any woman/girl Nate liked, was involved with, and/or wanted to marry

“Screw them,” Tara said before I could respond. “You’ve got one life… no second chances, you know. Kis-kis ka khyaal rakhenge, haan? Who, who will we keep happy? So we have to make choices. You have to keep you happy.”

“It isn’t that simple,” I repeated what I had been telling Ma all evening.

“Of course not, that would make it too easy,” she said with a grin. “So, Nate tells me that you love pista kulfi. They make a wicked kulfi here. Why don’t I get you one while you tell Nate what you think about me?”

Nate looked at me, his eyebrows raised. “She’s very nervous. She blabs when she’s nervous.”

“She seems super-duper confident to me,” I said. “And perky as hell,” I added.

Nate’s face fell. “You don’t like her.”

I smiled. “I don’t know her and I have yet to make up my mind. So far so good.”

Tara came back with kulfi for everyone and I got a chance to see how Nate was with a woman. It was a learning experience. He was so much my father in the way he talked and carried himself, always well behaved, always the gentleman.

“I don’t want to argue about this, Tara,” he said when Tara insisted that Nate wanted to go to the United States to do his masters.

“Well, why not,” I said, finishing the kulfi. “It’s a very beautiful place and you could do your masters in a really nice school there.”

“See,” Tara said, and put her hand on Nate’s. “ Arrey, yaar, it will be mast, a lot of fun.”

“Why can’t I just stay in India?” Nate asked belligerently. “Not everyone wants to run and join the Americans, yaar. I definitely don’t.”

“Well, I do,” Tara said.

“Then you should find a nice boy… Hey, why don’t we hook her up with Adarsh Sarma?” Nate suggested jokingly and Tara threw her paper napkin at him.

“You dog,” she complained. “But I can come and visit you, right, Priya?”

“Absolutely,” I said.

They were so young, I thought. So very young! Was I ever that young? When I was in college, I didn’t have any boyfriends. Well, I did have a crush on someone once in a while but no relationships. I had friends. Even now I had a good relationship with a couple of boys I went to engineering college with. With other classmates my relationship was limited to an occasional phone call.

I never had the easygoing teenage years that Nate was indulging in. There were no teenage hangouts, none that I visited, nor was Britney Spears part of my vocabulary. In fact, when I was in India I didn’t know much about the pop music of the United States. Nate and Tara were aware of it all, their feet tapped to the music and Tara hummed to the lyrics. This was already another generation and in this generation girls could meet boys at a place like this after nine in the night. My mother would’ve hung me out to dry if I had tried to leave the house this late and especially to meet a boy.

“My parents adore Nate,” Tara told me. “They think he is amazing. They want to meet your parents but Nate keeps avoiding it. But sooner or later, Nate, it will have to happen.”

Nate shifted in his red plastic chair uncomfortably.

“You wouldn’t like our mother,” I said, and thought that Ma would simply hate Tara. Tara was what Ma would call a girl without a mother.

When Nate flipped through television channels to land on MTV, Ma would look at the gyrating, bikini-clad women in the videos and shake her head. “If you had shown up on television like that,” she told me, “I would skin you alive. These girls… cheechee, they don’t have mothers; if they did, no mother, no mother and I don’t care which country she is from, would allow this.”

Tara definitely fell in the no-mother category in her tight yellow blouse and small black skirt. She wasn’t different from a typical girl her age in the U.S. but for me it was a shock to see how much things had changed here in India. When I was this young, there was no way I could’ve walked out of my mother’s house alive wearing what she was wearing. Ma would never have permitted me to bring a boyfriend home or even to have one to start with.

Nate and Tara were holding hands, touching each other with a familiarity I had not experienced until I met Nick. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that these two teenagers had had sex, even though it would make me queasy.

Yes, this was a different generation and they made me uneasy with their progressive ways. But who was I to speak? I was planning to marry an American who I’d been living in sin with for the past two years. I most probably made my parents’ generation queasy with what they thought were my progressive ways.

“I’m going to put some money in the jukebox,” Tara said, and walked toward the glittering music box.

“She is nice,” I said because I knew Nate wanted me to like her.

“Yes, she is,” Nate said. “Ma will absolutely hate her.”

“Yes,” I nodded, and we both laughed.

“You feeling better?” Nate asked.

I grinned and patted his hand. “This was a good idea, Nate. Thanks. I feel better. Thatha was… brutal. He said that we can’t make mango pickle with tomatoes, that if I married Nick, our marriage would end in divorce.”