Amulya Malladi - The Mango Season

Be a good father.

Avoid fighting with Radha.

Get Priya married before she becomes an old maid.

Die in a painless way.

Nanna was a meticulous man. When he packed something, it was done neatly and tightly. If he planned a vacation, he would plan everything, leave nothing to chance. He made notes constantly, and when I gifted him a PalmPilot for his fiftieth birthday, he had been deliriously happy. He never left home without the Palm and he always told anyone who’d listen that his daughter who was in America had given the wonderful electronic gadget to him.

He was very proud of me. Even when I was in high school and I would win silly awards for elocution or debate, he’d be on cloud nine, calling his parents in whichever country they were to tell them what a wonderful daughter he had. He would even call Thatha, who he rarely phoned, to gloat.

If I asked him for anything, his answer would always be “yes,” regardless of whether he could comply with my wishes or not. “If your Nanna doesn’t say yes, who’ll say yes?” he would say. A father’s job according to my father was to keep his children happy.

“When you were a baby,” Nanna once told me, “all I wanted to do was make you laugh. You liked pulling my moustache a lot and whenever you did I would yelp and that would make you laugh out loud.” Apparently, I pulled out several of Nanna’s moustache hairs when he and I were young.

Nanna ran a finger over his moustache, smoothing it, and looked at Nate’s lifeless body. He picked up Nate’s left hand and let it drop. It fell limply on the side of the sofa.

“The boy can’t handle his liquor,” he announced, and stumbled as he tried to stand up.

“So you both got nice and drunk… Do you do this often?” I asked, and picked up the day’s newspaper to fan myself. “How can he sleep in this heat?”

“Your Ma keeps asking me to get a generator and an AC. I think it’s too decadent for us simple folk,” Nanna said with a lazy smile, as he leaned back into the sofa, giving up his feeble attempts to stand.

“If it wasn’t this hot, I’d suggest coffee,” I said, furiously fanning around my neck. I sat down on the rocking chair by the telephone and rocked gently as I fanned.

“Your Ma is looking for you,” Nanna said after a little while. “She called. Very angry, she is. Mahadevan Uncle just called. Adarsh is very impressed with your honesty.”

“Nanna-” I began.

“No, no, Priya Ma, you did what your generation always does, stab us in our hearts,” Nanna said, clapping the left side of his chest with his right hand before letting it drop. “Adarsh said he holds no hard feelings, but you have left me with no leg to stand on with Mahadevan Uncle or Mr. Sarma.”

“I was trying not to hurt Adarsh’s feelings,” I said. “And he was quite forthcoming about his ex-relationship with a Chinese woman.”

Nanna shook his head. “Kids these days. I never thought I would say it, but I am: kids these days have no idea what is good for them. It will not work out, Priya.” He used the exact same words as Thatha had. “Marrying someone who does not understand your culture, your roots, your traditions, it will not work out.”

Before I could answer the ceiling fan began to whirr again and we both sighed in relief. “Someone needs to be shot for cutting power off like this,” Nanna said, and got up to stand right under the fan.

As he pulled the cotton kurta that was plastered to his skin away from it, I contemplated how much I should tell him. Even as the thought came to me I decided that I had done enough filtering and that now was not the time to shield him or anyone else anymore.

“It has been working out for three years, Nanna,” I said. “We’ve been living together for a while… Two years, we’re… together and we’re happy.”

Nanna stood still and then looked at me with his lips pursed. “You share a home with this man?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, and curbed the impulse to fall on my knees and apologize.

Nanna shook his head again. “And you’ve been living with him for two whole years?”

“Yes.”

“And you didn’t feel the need up until now to tell us about this important person in your life? Even when I asked you to your face you didn’t tell me. Why? What’s to hide?” Nanna asked angrily.

They were all valid questions and I realized then how much I had botched this entire announcement business. I should’ve told them before I came and I should’ve brought Nick along. I should’ve introduced him to the family instead of dropping a bomb on them.

“I was afraid,” I told him frankly. “I’m still afraid that you all don’t love me anymore, that you hate me. But there’s nothing to hide… I mean, he’s a good man. He loves me, he takes very good care of me. And he wanted to be here, he didn’t want to do it this way. I want you to know that this is on me. I made the mistake.”

Nanna sighed, and sat down on an armchair on the other side of the telephone and turned to face me. “What’s his name?”

“Nicholas, Nick. He’s an accountant with Deloit & Touche. He… What else do you want to know?” I asked.

“His family? What’s his family like?”

“They’re good people. His father passed away five years ago. He used to coach football at a high school in Memphis, that’s where Nick was born and raised. His mother, Frances, is a pediatric nurse; she works with children who have cancer at St. Jude’s. It’s a big children’s hospital in Memphis. He has a brother, Douglas, Doug, who is a sous-chef at a very trendy restaurant in New Orleans.” I gave him the list.

“How did you meet him… this Nicholas?” Nanna asked, his voice, cool, nonjudgmental, almost interrogatory.

“We met at a party,” I told him. “A friend of mine knows a friend of his kind of thing. We met and we started seeing each other and… Nanna, I really didn’t want to date or love or marry an American. I truly never believed I could have anything in common with someone like Nick.”

Growing up, the West and Westerners were almost surreal beings. It was a given that “they” had different morals and values than “we” did and “we” were morally superior. Most first-generation Indians in the United States only had friends who were Indian. I had never thought I would be any different. I had started out with only Indian friends but my circle grew as I grew. Now I was in a place where I didn’t think in terms of Indian friends and American friends, just friends. I had somewhere down the line stopped looking at skin color.

“He is a very, very nice person,” I said. “He… makes me happy.”

“I can’t accept it, Priya,” Nanna told me seriously. “Probably in a few years, maybe, but right now, I am very angry with you and I am very hurt, but I don’t hate you. I am your father, I will always love you.”

“And that’s enough for now,” I said. “I want more, but I understand, perfectly. In trying to protect you from Nick and Nick from you, I think I’ve ruined this big time.”

We were quiet for a while and then Nanna shrugged. “I think you did what anyone in your place would do.”

“It’s hard,” I said softly. “I wanted to be the perfect daughter, but I realized that in trying to be the perfect daughter, I wasn’t trying to be happy.”

“I never asked for perfection, Priya Ma,” Nanna said.

I nodded. “Yes, you never did but I wanted to give it to you anyway. I wanted to have your love and have Nick’s love and Thatha’s love. I’m selfish, maybe a little greedy; I didn’t want to lose anything or anybody. But I find that it’s not as easy as I thought it would be and maybe not as difficult as I told Nick it would be either.