“Why give the rest to her? I am your flesh and blood, ” Ma said sourly. “Maybe I should just take Priya home and-”
“Ma,” I interrupted calmly before my mother could finish threatening my grandmother into submission. “Ammamma, why don’t you taste the mango and see? I helped Ma pick them out, you know,” I said, putting on my best granddaughter face.
My being the oldest and most doted on grandchild and the fact that I was there for only another week and a half propelled my grandmother to do as I asked.
Ammamma swallowed the piece of mango and smacked her lips. “They will do,” she said and my mother raised an eyebrow. “They are not bad,” my grandmother added grudgingly. “Now let us cut these mangoes before lunch,” she ordered.
TO: PRIYA RAO ‹PRIYA_RAO@YYYY.COM›
FROM: NICHOLAS COLLINS ‹NICK_COLLINS@XXXX.COM›
SUBJECT: RE: RE: GOOD TRIP?
AT 11:05 PM, FRIDAY, PRIYA RAO WROTE:
›AT LEAST THEY HAVEN’T THROWN ANY “SUITABLE BOYS”
MY WAY… YET.
I HAVE NO IDEA WHY YOU CONTINUE TO CALL THEM “BOYS” WHEN THEY’RE ACTUALLY GROWN, ADULT, READY-TO-MARRY MEN. VERY PERPLEXING, I MUST SAY.
I’M GLAD YOUR PARENTS ARE NOT THROWING ELIGIBLE MEN YOUR WAY. I HAVE TO ADMIT A PART OF ME IS/WAS AFRAID THAT YOUR FAMILY WILL/WOULD CONVINCE YOU TO MARRY A NICE INDIAN BOY. RATIONALLY, I KNOW YOU’RE COMING HOME TO ME BUT THERE IS THIS IRRATIONAL PART OF MY BRAIN THAT’S CONVINCED YOUR FAMILY CAN MANIPULATE YOU.
I MISS YOU. THIS TRIP FEELS LONGER THAN YOUR NORMAL BUSINESS TRIPS. USUALLY, YOU’RE GONE TWO-THREE DAYS OR MAXIMUM A WEEK AND IT’S IN THE U.S. THIS FEELS DIFFERENT. I FEEL THAT I CAN’T REACH YOU.
NICK
Chopping Mangoes and Egos
Cutting mangoes for making pickle is a skill that is honed over years of practice, under the critical eye of one’s mother or mother-in-law, aunt, or some other anal older female relative. In the olden days when joint families were the norm and women didn’t work out of the home, wives and daughters were trained in cutting mangoes as they were in everything else that pertained to keeping order in the household.
There is a certain precision to cutting pickle mangoes, a certain methodology, and I was sorely lacking in both.
A sharp and rather heavy knife is used to cut mangoes so that the blade easily sinks into and then past the mango stone. Since the knife is sharp and heavy it’s not prudent to hold the mango in place with one hand-unless you are an expert-and slam the sharp object with the other; a small miscalculation and you may be missing a few fingers.
With this in mind, I stationed the mango on the wooden cutting board, a board on which generations of my mother’s family had chopped mangoes in the pickle season, and took aim. The mango flew and struck me on the forehead before falling into my lap.
My mother made a disgruntled sound and looked at the now half-squished mango lying unceremoniously on my yellow salwar kameez.
“You have to hold the mango, Priya, ” my mother said, and proceeded to demonstrate with expertise how a mango should be cut. I narrowed my eyes in frustration, but she didn’t seem to notice. She was busy cutting me into size along with the mango.
The first slash of the knife split the mango in two halves. Then Ma used a paring knife and removed the stone, but let its hard casing stay stuck to the flesh of the mango.
“Now you have to cut it again,” she told me and did so. Four pieces of the mango lay in front of her, their proportions hideously the same. They were mocking me, just as my mother had wanted them to. “If the mango is small”-she picked up an example-“then only one-half is enough.”
Lata snickered softly and muttered something about modern girls. My shoulders slumped. I didn’t want to get defensive, but I would like to see any of these women manipulate databases the way I could. So, they could cut some measly mangoes. So what?
Being competitive by nature and having the need to prove to the world around me that I was not only a good database programmer but also a good mango chopper, I wielded the knife one more time. This time I cut the mango, not in two clean halves but two squishy portions. After the fourth mango had gone to waste, my grandmother asked me to come and sit next to her and watch and learn. I didn’t want to watch and learn, but the writing was on Ammamma’s polished floor. It was pathetic to admit defeat to a lousy piece of fruit but I did it as gracefully as I could.
Between the sound of knives coming down on wooden boards and paring knives scraping against the hard coating of the mango stone, the house seemed like a mango pickle sweatshop. They were good at what they did and they all did it with ease. Their eyes focused on green fleshy fruit and the knives in their hands gleamed with juice while their mouths gossiped.
“When is the boy coming to see Sowmya?” Lata asked conversationally.
This would be boy number 65 according to Ma’s scoreboard.
“Tomorrow evening,” Ammamma said, as she opened her brass betel-leaves box.
That box had fascinated me since I was a little girl. I liked paan, when it was sweet, but my grandmother liked it bitter. She was an expert at making it and I watched in childlike fascination all over again as she put together a paan. She opened a green betel leaf that was slightly darker on the edges because of sitting in an uncomfortable position in the box. Then she opened a small box of light pink paste and applied it on the betel leaf with her leathery fingers.
“So, he is some lecturer at some college?” Lata asked mockingly. I couldn’t understand why Lata was being so antagonistic toward Sowmya. Granted Lata and Sowmya were not good friends, but Lata usually didn’t go off quite like this. What was really shocking was how my grandmother was not supporting Sowmya anymore.
Had they given up? When Anand got married it had been a blow, not only because he had married a woman from another state, but because he had married before his younger sister had. The rules were clear about this, too. The brother closest in age to a sister has to wait to marry until his sister does. If that doesn’t happen, the chances of the sister getting married are pretty slim. In the olden days when girls were married before they hit puberty this rule was put into place so that the brothers would not spend all the dowry money set aside for their sisters.
“Not at some college, at CBIT,” Sowmya blurted out. “And he has already seen my picture,” she added.
“So did that homeopathy doctor,” Lata countered.
“Hush,” my mother said. “Just because you are pretty and married doesn’t mean you have to talk like this. She will get married when it is time. God has it all planned. ”
Yeah, right! Poor Sowmya, caught in a society where she couldn’t step out of the house and couldn’t stay in.
A crackling sound dragged my attention back to my grandmother who was crushing betel nuts with a small brass nutcracker. She spread the nuts on the betel leaf, wrapped it up, and popped it inside her mouth.
“Want one?” she asked me, her mouth dripping with red saliva.
I nodded gleefully and ignored the look Ma gave me. When I was a child there was no way she would have allowed me to eat paan, but now I was twenty-seven years old and I could have betel nuts and more.
“My older sister didn’t get married until she was thirty-one,” Neelima offered in support.
“In our family we don’t let our daughters chase and marry men from other castes,” Ammamma said as she chewed noisily on the paan. “Here. ” She gave me a paan that I stuck inside my mouth with the hope that I would not speak up against the injustice.
“She had an arranged marriage,” Neelima countered, and let her knife drop on the wooden cutting board. I saw the tears in her eyes and once again forced myself not to say anything. I was here for just a few days and I didn’t want to get into any unnecessary fights. In any case once they heard about Nick, Neelima would start looking really good to the family. At least she was Indian and I knew that counted for something.