The Mango Season

by Amulya Malladi

  To remove the sweat and the two layers of dust that had deposited on my skin after my trip to Monda Market, I took a quick bath, dipping a plastic mug in an aluminum bucket filled with lukewarm water, heated by the sun in the overhead tank. My mother still had not installed showers in the bathrooms. “Save water,” she said.

  I put on a yellow cotton salwar kameez to appease Ma and looked at myself in the mirror. My skin had turned dark almost as soon as the Indian sun had kissed me and I knew no amount of sunscreen was going to stop my melanin from coming together to give me the ultra-ultra-tanned look. My hair had also become stringy. It was all the extra chlorine in the water. And my . . .

  I winced; I was doing that complaining-about-India thing that all of us America-returned Indians did. I had lived here for twenty years, yet seven years later, the place was a hellhole. Guilt had an ugly taste in my mouth. This is my country, I told myself firmly, and I love my country.

  TO: PRIYA RAO

  FROM: NICHOLAS COLLINS

  SUBJECT: GOOD TRIP?

  HOPE YOU HAD A GOOD FLIGHT. SO SORRY I MISSED YOUR CALL. I WAS IN A MEETING AND I TURNED OFF THE CELL PHONE. AND SO SORRY THAT YOUR MOTHER IS GIVING YOU A HARD TIME ABOUT BEING SINGLE. I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO SAY EXCEPT THAT YOU ARE NOT SINGLE.

  I MISS YOU. THE HOUSE FEELS EMPTY WITHOUT YOU. I SLEPT ON YOUR SIDE OF THE BED LAST NIGHT. I THINK I’M GETTING SAPPY IN MY OLD AGE.

  CALL ME AGAIN, THIS TIME I’LL KEEP THE CELL PHONE TURNED ON, HAIL OR SNOW. JIM AND CINDY INVITED US TO GO CAMPING AT MT. SHASTA. WHAT DO YOU THINK? AND THERE WAS A MESSAGE FROM SUDHIR FOR YOU ON THE ANSWERING MACHINE. HE WANTED TO WISH YOU BON VOYAGE.

  TAKE CARE, SWEETHEART.

  NICK

  TO: NICHOLAS COLLINS

  FROM: PRIYA RAO

  SUBJECT: RE: GOOD TRIP?

  I JUST WISH THEY KNEW I WASN’T SINGLE—WITHOUT MY TELLING THEM. ANYWAY, WE’RE GOING TO GO MANGO PICKLE MAKING AT AMMAMMA’S HOUSE AND I THINK I COULD TELL THEM THEN. I WISH YOU WERE HERE. NO, THAT ISN’T TRUE, I WISH I WASN’T HERE.

  IT’S STRANGE TO BE IN HYDERABAD AGAIN. I LOOK AT MY MOTHER AND I THINK ABOUT ALL MY AUNTS AND MY GRANDMA AND I HAVE TO WONDER HOW THEY STAY AT HOME ALL DAY, EVERY DAY, WITH NO LIFE BESIDES FAMILY. SUDHIR ALWAYS SAID THAT INDIAN WOMEN (HIS MOM ESPECIALLY, I THINK) ARE DEMENTED BECAUSE THEY STAY HOME DOING NOTHING BUT RAISING THEIR KIDS. I DON’T AGREE WITH THE DEMENTIA PART BUT I MUST SAY THAT LIFE SOUNDS EXTREMELY CLAUSTROPHOBIC.

  REGARDLESS, I’M HERE. LOOKING FOR APPROVAL. SOME KIND OF OKAY SIGN FOR MY MARRIAGE PLANS. I NEED THEM TO SAY, “YES, IT’S ALL RIGHT FOR YOU TO MARRY THE MAN YOU’RE IN LOVE WITH.” WHICH IS RIDICULOUS! WHO ELSE SHOULD I MARRY BUT THE MAN I LOVE?

  AT LEAST THEY HAVEN’T THROWN ANY “SUITABLE BOYS” MY WAY . . . YET. THEY HAVEN’T EVEN HINTED, WHICH MAKES ME VERY SUSPICIOUS. COMING HERE MADE ME REALIZE THAT I MISSED INDIA, MY FAMILY, EVEN MA. AND I MISSED NATE. HE HAS GROWN UP. HE’S A MAN NOW AND IT SEEMS SO STRANGE TO SEE HIM ACT LIKE ONE.

  I MISS YOU. I MISS YOU VERY MUCH.

  AND YES, TELL JIM AND CINDY THAT WE’D LOVE TO GO CAMPING. I GUESS ONCE I’M BACK I’LL BE READY FOR A VACATION.

  I’LL TRY AND CALL AGAIN, BUT IT COULD BE TRICKY. I CAN CERTAINLY SEND EMAIL. MA DOESN’T UNDERSTAND COMPUTERS SO SHE’LL NOT SNOOP AROUND NATE’S COMPUTER AND HE’LL DEFINITELY CHEW HER OUT IF SHE TRIES.

  I LOVE YOU,

  PRIYA

  I went downstairs and found my mother lying haphazardly on the couch, snoring harshly. Her thin hair, which had been through repeated bad dye jobs, lay lifelessly against the maroon fabric of the sofa. Her lumpy stomach went up and down and I could see the flesh at her midriff spill each time she breathed out. I never understood why Indian women wore saris in this day and age when alternatives like salwar kameez would not be frowned upon. A sari was uncomfortable, and the midriff—the area where most of the battles of the bulge were fought and lost—stood exposed like an unraveled guilty secret.

  I looked at my wristwatch and frowned. She had made me hurry up but had fallen asleep herself.

  “Ma,” I called out. She stirred a little, so I called out again and this time her eyes opened. They were bloodshot and she looked at me, slightly disoriented. Her gaze then fell on the clock. She sat up groggily.

  “Go and get an auto,” she told me, then stood up yawning and stretching. “And not one paisa more than fifteen rupees. Tell the auto rickshawwallah that and if he does any kitch-kitch , I will deal with him.”

  I slipped on my sunglasses, took my purse, and went through rows of houses to reach the main road. A buffalo strolled on the newly laid asphalt street and I tiptoed around it in fear. I was always afraid of stray animals on the road. The fear of buffaloes was deep-rooted, probably embossed onto my consciousness because of a “bad childhood experience” as the shrinks in all the movies say about serial killers. According to my father (my mother tells a slightly different version of the same story), when I was just seven months old we went to visit some relatives in Kavali, a small town in the same state as Hyderabad. My mother left me in the open veranda on a straw mat, while she went inside the house for something or the other. All of a sudden a buffalo came charging through the street, inside the gate, and onto the veranda. By the time my mother called out and my father came rushing outside, the buffalo was towering over me, sharp horns pointed toward me, a leaky snout dropping mucus close to where I lay unaware of the perilous situation I was in.

  “God knows why, but the bull went away, though for a while we thought it would hurt you,” my father said.

  My mother’s version of the story was mostly the same as my father’s, only in her story it was my father who had left me on the veranda, not she. “I never left any of my children anywhere without supervision. It is your father . . . always wants this and that and leaves children where they are without any thought,” she explained.

  I reached the main road and found an auto rickshaw. The driver was smoking a bidi, lounging on the vinyl-covered seat of his three-wheeler, while a small radio at his feet was playing the latest hit song from a Telugu film. “Come and take me in your arms, come and take me and make me yours. You are gone I know but I wait you know, for you to come and make me yours,” a female voice sang to an oft-used melody.

  “Himayatnagar,” I said loudly to be heard over the song, and the auto rickshaw guy nodded and turned the radio off just as a woman’s heartbroken voice begged her lover yet again not to leave.

  “Chalis rupya,” he said, and I shook my head. I hated to barter, but even I knew forty rupees was too much.

  “Thees,” I countered, holding up three fingers, and he agreed without any resistance, which underscored the point that forty rupees was too much and probably even thirty was excessive, but I didn’t have the stomach to go on.

  I pulled out fifteen rupees from my purse and gave it to him. “I will give this to you now and my mother will give you another fifteen,” I told him and he looked at me quizzically. I got into the rickshaw and asked him to drive to my parents’ house. “And don’t tell my mother that the price is thirty, just fifteen. Accha?”

  The auto rickshaw driver winked at me. “Take it easy, Amma, apun can keep secret,” he said as he hitched his pants up to his knees and started the scooter of the auto. “Vroom-vroom . . . to your castle, hain?”

  I gave the man directions and he drove, chuckling to himself. When we reached the gate of my parents’ house, I asked him to wait while I went to get my mother. The rickshawwallah didn’t listen to me and even before I had set foot on the road, he honked three times, loudly enough to wake up the dead.

  Ma came out of the house hurriedly, responding to the honks, wearing a red and yellow cotton sari, and my eyes took time to adjust to the bright colors. I didn’t like knowing that I had to adjust to India—it was absurd. I was Indian, yet everything seemed only vaguely familiar. I couldn’t remember how I used to feel when my mother w
ore a sari that made her look like a large Tequila Sunrise.

  With the help of the auto rickshaw driver we put the twenty kilos of raw mangoes in the auto rickshaw. Ma and I squeezed on the slightly torn brown vinyl seat with difficulty, our legs hanging limply on the side of the large straw basket. I put a cotton bag with a change of clothes between us, along with a bag of gifts I brought for the family, and got ready for a bumpy and uncomfortable ride.

  “Now, if Ammamma wants to give you something, just take it, okay? ” Ma told me. “But if she gives you something very expensive, like jewelry, then,”—she paused and shrugged—“ask me if you can take it.”

  “And what’ll you say?”

  “I will ask you to take it,” Ma told me irritably. “But that doesn’t mean you have to take it right away. Nothing wrong in showing some reluctance.”

  Familial politics always made me want to be without family. I never understood the intricacies. It was like facing a complex math problem that had numerous ways to solve it and you didn’t know which one was the right way because the answer to the problem changed randomly. When was it right to look reluctant and when was it right to look eager? I didn’t have a clue seven years ago and I was not any wiser now.

  “And if anyone asks you about marriage, just ask them to talk to me,” she further instructed.

  My marriage, but she wants to talk to them, whoever they were—typical Ma. “And what will you tell them?” I asked patiently.

  “If they have a good U.S. boy in mind and he is in India on leave like you, we can probably arrange something,” she explained. “If it works out, you will be married and happy. It will be a load off my chest. An unmarried daughter . . . What must the neighbors think?”

  I glared at my mother. She was holding tightly to an iron handle on her side of the auto rickshaw and her naked potbelly heaved through her sari’s pallu as the auto rickshaw went through bad roads and worse roads.

  There was this misconception my mother refused to discard. According to her, a woman was happy only if she was married. She had not once asked me if I was happy now. The question was moot; how could I be happy if I wasn’t married?

  I wanted to lash out, tell her that I was getting married very soon, but I knew now was hardly the time. Maybe at dinner, I told myself nervously. Dinner would be a good time. Everyone would be there and we would be spending the night at my grandma’s house. There would be safety in numbers.

  “If anyone tells you that you are too old to be unmarried”— my mother paused dramatically—“it is your fault.”

  If I expected Ma to be compassionate, I was living in a fool’s paradise. And I was anything but a fool.

  “That nice boy in Cheee-cah-go,” she continued, “he was perfect. But you didn’t want him. You don’t want anyone, all nakhras you have.”

  Here we go!

  “Ma, the nice boy in Chicago had a girlfriend, an American girlfriend. He didn’t want to get married and was only agreeing to talk to girls to get his parents off his back.” I repeated what I had told her three years ago when the same matter had come up.

  Ma shook her head. “All boys wander a little and I am not saying that being with one of those Christian girls is good, but he would have said yes.”

  “I wouldn’t want him to, ” I exploded. “He was living with this woman. They had a relationship going on for three years . I wasn’t going to marry a man who was in love with another woman.”

  “Love, it seems, is very important,” Ma said sarcastically. “He was making eighty thousand dollars a year. Do you know how much that is in rupees?”

  “I make eighty-five; do you know how much that is in rupees?” I countered.

  “You didn’t three years ago,” she shot back. “He must be making so much more now. All that money . . .” She clicked her tongue and started giving directions to the driver instead.

  I leaned back and closed my eyes. Another week and a half, just another eleven days, and I’ll be out of here. I repeated it to myself like a mantra.

  My grandmother’s house had always been a home away from home, a place where my mother couldn’t always dominate and coerce. A home where I was spoiled often and where not all of Ma’s rules applied. I had played in this house since I was born, and as we got close to it, I immediately recognized the smells emanating from the streets and the surroundings. It was a blow to my olfactory senses that even after seven years I still knew how this place smelled and how the air tasted.

  The house stood on a large premium plot of land in the center of the city. Coconut trees grew around it and there was a well that had been used for years in the old-fashioned way to draw water. The well now had a motor pump that extracted water from the ground and filled the overhead tanks, but evidence of the old ways hung on the well in the form of a piece of old frayed coconut rope dragged over a rusty metal pulley.

  When I was twelve years old it had been a rite of passage for me to be allowed by my grandfather to bring up a bucket of water from the well. Ma had been scared that I wouldn’t be able to pull the heavy bucket and that it would pull me inside the well instead. She wanted me to have help, but Thatha had been adamant that I do it all by myself. I had rope burns on my soft palms but I strutted around like a proud peacock for days after that.

  There was a small two-room house for the servants in one far corner of the plot and on another corner there was a large house that my grandparents rented. They had even constructed a second floor to their house. It was a modern three-bedroom apartment, which my grandparents rented out, too. They lived downstairs with my aunt Sowmya. Sowmya was three years older than I, and like me was not married, but unlike me had always wanted very much to be.

  Ma paid off the auto rickshaw driver who winked at me as he told my mother with a straight face that the fare was only pandrah rupiya. We carried the basketful of mangoes to the house gate. Ma opened the gate and yelled for my grandparents’ servant.

  Badri was my grandparents’ new servant. He and his wife Parvati had taken residence in the servant quarters just a year ago. Badri did all the gardenwork and cleaned the yard, while Parvati did the dishes and swept and mopped the floors in the house.

  The old maidservant I grew up with, Rajni, was as much a part of my childhood as my grandparents’ house. She had left a year after I went to the United States, to go back to her village to live with her son.

  Rajni was not a Brahmin and so she was not allowed inside the kitchen, but my grandparents had given her access to pretty much everything else. Sowmya cooked and left the dishes outside where Rajni cleaned them. Sowmya would take the clean dishes back inside the kitchen to put them in their rightful places. I used to think Rajni was a slacker because she didn’t do that part.

  It had been a rainy day when my grandmother explained to me that Rajni was from a lower caste and we were from the highest caste. She couldn’t enter our kitchens; in fact, in the good old days, lower caste people wouldn’t even be allowed inside the house and Rajni would be untouchable, in every sense of the word. Things were apparently better now, Ammamma had said. “We Brahmins have become more tolerant, what with the days being so mordern and everything.” She hadn’t sounded too happy about the modern days.

  I picked up our bags and helped Badri put the basket of mangoes on his head. My mother walked into the house like a queen as Badri and I followed like servile courtiers.

  I smiled when I entered the grilled veranda on which a huge wooden swing swayed, covering it almost entirely—an obvious hazard for children. The swing had always been on the veranda. I probably wouldn’t recognize the veranda without it.

  I removed my sandals and peeped inside. The living room was empty, but I could hear sounds coming from the womb of the house, resonating with my memories as if a tuning fork had been put into motion.

  One could see to the other end of the house from the front door. All the rooms lay on opposite sides of my line of vision and I saw a smiling Sowmya step outside the dining area next to the kitchen.<
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  She ran to me and we hugged.

  The Politics of Giving and Receiving Gifts

  My grandmother hugged me so hard that I almost cracked a rib. Ammamma had this strange notion that the harder the hug, the more the love. Despite the discomfort, the subtle smell of betel leaves and cloves that clung to her body pervaded my senses and I soaked the smells in. This was familiar territory and at that instant it didn’t seem so bad to be back.

  I knew that today or tomorrow, literally, I would have to tell them all about my plans for the future, and about the man in my life of whom they would wholeheartedly disapprove. But for now Ammamma was hugging me the way she always did and it was enough.

  My aunt gave me a perfunctory hug. Lata and I never got along, to a great extent because of the cold war between Ma and her. I didn’t have any feelings toward her, good or bad—I just thought of her as my very beautiful aunt about whom I didn’t feel one way or the other. I remember, when I was around fourteen years old, my uncle Jayant got married and I had showed off to all my friends that I was getting a very beautiful aunt.

  I was not wrong; Lata was beautiful. She was tall and walked like a “graceful deer”—so everyone said—and she was fair. Unlike me, she was very fair. Fair somehow always meant beautiful and having darker skin was a flaw. I got my father’s dark color, my mother always said, clicking her tongue disapprovingly, and Nate got her fairer skin. According to Ma, that was my bad karma. A boy could get a good wife irrespective of how he looked if he was financially viable; for a woman, however, physical appearance was important. My dark skin color, Ma felt, could pose a problem when the time came to find me a suitable husband.

  Nick was heartily amused when I told him how my own mother had discriminated against me because I was dark. He couldn’t see the subtle differences between the various shades of Indian dark, which made the situation even more preposterous to him.