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.
A friend of mine, who had now been relegated to being only an acquaintance, had been appalled when I told him about Nick. His instant reaction was “How can you, Priya? He’s not even Indian” as if that made him a cat or a dog.
“If your sister had an arranged marriage, why didn’t you?” Lata asked Neelima. “You married Anand in a great hurry. Did you think what would happen to Sowmya here? Who will marry her now? The brother got married and the sister is still sitting at home.”
“She hasn’t gotten married for ten years,” Neelima cried out. “How long were we supposed to wait? We waited two years but she was not getting a match. That isn’t my fault.” She stood up and rushed outside to the veranda.
Sowmya used the edge of her sari to wipe her face of sweat and probably tears. The heat in the room was increasing by the minute and the fact that all the windows and doors were left open was not helping. Added to that, the slow creaky fan on the ceiling was barely moving the air around.
I stood up nervously and went to check on my new aunt. She was sitting on the steps that led to the well from the veranda, her face buried in her hands.
I sat down beside her and put a hand on her shoulder tentatively. “Are you okay?” I asked, as I swallowed the paan.
She reared her head up. “I hate them all,” she said passionately. “Anand married me. He asked me to marry him; he pursued me. And now they are blaming me for Sowmya?”
“There’s no one to blame,” I told her. “But I think what you said really hurt Sowmya.”
If anyone could understand what Sowmya was going through it would be Neelima. After all, Sowmya was alienated by her own family for being unmarried and she had nowhere to go. All through my life I had heard people say things to put her down. First, it had been because she was overweight and then because her hair was falling out, which made my grandparents nervous that she would soon go bald. She took care of Ammamma and Thatha , ran their house for them, and they treated her as if she were a burden. Forget gratitude, Ammamma and Thatha made her feel like she was a load they couldn’t wait to dump on some unsuspecting “boy.” I wondered how they would survive once Sowmya did get married. Who would cook and clean? Who would make sure the maid came and did her work properly?
“I didn’t mean to hurt Sowmya,” Neelima apologized. “But I am going to have a baby and no happiness from their side. Why?”
“If you have a son, you will have them kissing the floor you walk on—they will have their heir then,” I joked but I also knew it was true. My grandfather was obsessed with perpetuating the line of Somayajulas. He wanted a son’s son and that was why Nate, the only grandson, was not qualified to be heir.
Neelima wept some more at my joke. “They told Anand that our son would never be the rightful heir because of me. I am not the right woman to bear their heir,” she sighed sadly. “That is why Lata is pregnant again.”
“What?” It was preposterous. How could Lata be pregnant again?
“They are hoping she will have a son and he will be the grandchild to carry on the family name.”
For an instant I wanted to tell her that she was mistaken, that Thatha was not such a chauvinist, or so old-fashioned, and then I remembered that he was all those things, that he was capable of asking his “pure-blooded” daughter-in-law to bear another child, to bear a son. Burgeoning hope crushed, I realized that he would never accept Nick; he would never accept even the idea of Nick and me. What was I going to do?
“So she’s pregnant . . . like, now?” I asked, wanting to be absolutely certain.
Neelima’s head bobbed. “Almost four months gone and they want to do a test soon to find out the sex of the baby. Have you seen the way she treats your grandparents? She doesn’t even let her children come here to see them. But now”—she took a deep breath—“now they are all best friends. And my baby has no right to be born. She says that I might have a miscarriage.”
I patted her shoulder in a weak attempt to assuage her. It was an impossible situation, a pointless one. What difference would it make to my seventy-plus-year-old grandfather if he had a grandson or not?
But the Indian in me understood him. You were measured in heaven by the blood of your heirs and Thatha didn’t want to fall short. At his age, where life was not ahead of him but behind him, it was more important than ever that the Somayajula family name be carried on.
I loved my grandfather dearly despite his anachronistic ways. Thatha was a man from an era lo
ng gone. A white burly moustache on his creased face made him look distinguished and his eyes were bright as if he couldn’t wait for the next day. Unlike Ammamma, Thatha was always ready with a quick joke, some smart repartee, and mischief. He was also one manipulating son of a bitch and I was now old enough to see it, but it didn’t change how I felt about him. I had seen Thatha twist and turn people around to suit his needs; I still adored him.
My father disliked my grandfather and disliked him immensely. Nanna always had a tough time fitting into my mother’s family, but he tried and I commended him for that. My father didn’t have a large family and his parents were always traveling— my paternal grandfather worked in the Indian Foreign Services— and Nanna’s only sister, a doctor, was single and lived in Australia; we hardly ever saw her.
Thatha didn’t like my father either. He would always say, but never to Nanna’s face, “Radha liked him and we said yes, but children make mistakes sometimes.”
And maybe it was a mistake. My mother and father were unsuited in so many ways, yet they had managed to stay married for over twenty-eight years. In some sense of the word, they were probably even “happy.” But happiness is such a relative term that it sometimes loses definition.
When my father turned twenty-five his family pressured him to get married and four years later he relented. His first arranged proposal was with my mother and he agreed to the match immediately. I think it was because he didn’t want to go through any more bride-seeing ceremonies. My father had probably not anticipated the problems that came of living close to his wife’s family. Many a fight ended with Ma bringing Nate and me to my grandparents’ house. Then Nanna would come to get us and there would be a drama of theatrical proportions. All through that drama, Thatha would play the villain, at least in Nanna’s eyes.
During the elaborate fights, Nate and I would pretend that we were on just another trip to Ammamma’s house. We wouldn’t talk about how we felt, but it was there, a lurking fear that Ma would not take us back home and we would never see Nanna again.
My parents fought; they always had. But there would be special fights when the argument would escalate to the point where Ma would yell and scream and drag us out of the house. She would be either carrying Nate or dragging him along on one side and on the other she would have my hand in hers in a firm grasp. There would be no running back to Evil Nanna.
The gate crackled open and I lifted my eyes. Thatha was home from the construction site where he was building a new house that he could rent out. When he had told me that they were building yet another house, I had joked he was becoming a regular slum-lord. But for Thatha, building houses on the land he had purchased years ago was an investment, a future for his heirs, the ones yet to be born.
He stepped inside his plot of land and opened his arms wide. I raced into them and felt like a little girl again, little Priya with her big old grandfather.
“I was not here to welcome you,” he apologized. His eyes wandered to Neelima who had stood up and his sharp gaze I’m sure didn’t miss the tears on her cheeks. “What is with her?” he asked me, and nodded at Neelima who scurried inside the house.
“Everyone is being perfectly mean to her,” I told him, and inhaled the smell of tobacco and cement that hung on him. Thatha chewed tobacco, a nasty habit in any man but him. He made it look dignified; or maybe I was just biased.
“She is imagining it,” Thatha said, putting his arm around me. We walked inside the veranda and he groaned comically at the voices coming from the hall. “They are all here?”
“Mango pachadi,” I supplied laughing. It was good to see the old man and it was good to be this comfortable with him even after seven years.
He looked around mischievously and then winked at me. “The pomegranate tree has some red, red fruit; let’s go,” he whispered, and we both sneaked out holding hands.
The pomegranate tree and a few mango trees were scattered in the area between my grandparents’ house and the house they gave up for rent. As a child I was not allowed to wander around the fruit trees because more than once I had fallen sick eating too many not so ripe pomegranate seeds.
It was a ritual. We would come for a visit and Thatha would sneak me away to eat the forbidden fruit. We would usually get caught because I would end up with some fruit stains on my clothes. My mother would never let it slide. She would kick up a fuss and Thatha would apologize and the next time we came for a visit, he would take me to the pomegranate tree again. We were partners in crime. We were pals.
“Here.” Thatha peeled a pomegranate fruit with his pocket-knife, broke it open, and handed me a piece of the fruit. We sat down on the stairs that led to the apartment upstairs and watched the traffic go past the metal gate of his house.
“So how is my American-returned granddaughter?” he asked amicably.
“Doing well. But things here don’t seem that . . . well,” I said, slurping over juicy pomegranate seeds.
He sighed. “Anand . . .” He paused thoughtfully, then continued, “made a mistake. . . . But what do they say in English? To err is human?”
I shook my head. “He married the woman he loves; that’s a blessing, not a mistake.”
Thatha’s eyes twinkled. “Love isn’t all that it is cracked up to be, Priya. Marriage needs a lot more than love.”
“But love is essential,” I argued.
“You fall in love later,” he said with a patriarchal wave of his hand, “after you get married and have children ”
I wanted to argue the point with him, even though I knew it was futile. He was set in his ways and I in mine. We lived by a different set of philosophies. In his rulebook, duty was high on the list, and in mine, personal happiness was a priority.
“What if you never fall in love with your wife . . . or husband?” I questioned.
Thatha gave me another piece of fruit embedded with bright shiny pomegranate seeds. I took it from him and started peeling the seeds off from their rind before popping them into my mouth. It wasn’t the season for pomegranates but this one had ripened early and was sweet.
“You always love your wife . . . or husband, as the case might be,” he said in that authoritarian tone that broached no further dispute.
But he knew just as well as I did that unlike his children and other grandchildren, that tone would not deter me. It had been that way since the beginning. I had had the most arguments with Thatha , the most debates, and, ultimately, the most fights. We discussed various subjects and passionately argued our stance; even when I called him from the U.S., we’d get excited talking about something and our tempers would flare. I think he respected me because I was opinionated and not afraid to tell him how I felt and because I openly disagreed with him. Sometimes I felt that I argued a point just to earn his respect. He was important to me; his opinion mattered; he mattered.
The man was a bigot, a racist, a chauvinist, and generally too arrogant for anyone’s liking, yet I loved him. Family never came in neat little packages with warranty signs on them. Thatha was all that I disliked in people, but he was also a lot more—he had a backbone of steel and an iron will to make the best of a bad situation. When Thatha joined the State Bank of AP right after Independence, he was just a lowly bank teller. When he retired he had been a bank manager of the large Hyderabad branch. His never-say-die spirit was also mine. I was his blood; there was no denying it and when our tempers flared I knew that I was a lot more like him than I would like to admit.
“In several arranged marriages, couples don’t fall in love with each other, they merely tolerate each other,” I told him. “I know some women who are unhappy with the husband their parents chose . . . but they can’t do anything about it. Why condemn anyone to a lifetime of unhappiness?”
“Lifetime of unhappiness?” Thatha said loudly, mockingly. “Priya, you are talking like we marry our children off to rapists and murderers. Parents love their children and do what is best for them.”
I shook my head. “I think a lot of par
ents don’t know their children very well and if they don’t know their own child, how can they know what would be best for them?”
“You think you’re smarter than your parents?” Thatha asked pointedly.
“Sometimes.”
Thatha laughed, a big booming sound, reverberating from inside his chest. “This hair didn’t get white in the sun,” he said, patting his thick white hair, which refused to give way to baldness despite his age.
“You think you are very smart?” I asked.
Thatha just grinned.
“Well . . . what do you think about Lata being pregnant for all the wrong reasons?” I asked because it was nagging me.
“I said I was smart, not broad-minded.” Thatha arched his right eyebrow, in the way my mother could, I could. “But it also depends upon what your reasons are. I believe the family name has to be carried on.”
“At any cost?”
“Not at any cost ” Thatha said, and smiled.
“Neelima is pregnant, you know,” I informed him, and saw his eyes darken with anger. “What if she has a son?”
“Then she has a son,” he shrugged.
The calm way in which he declared a grandchild inconsequential to his plans angered me. “What if . . . Nanna was not a Brahmin? What if Ma and Nanna had fallen in love and had gotten married? Would you not be my Thatha?”
He stood up then and I knew I had crossed some imaginary line he had laid down. “We will never know,” he said coolly, and then he broke into a smile. “You are here for another few days,” he urged brightly. “I don’t want to argue over something that does not concern you.”
I was defeated but I knew I had to choose my battles. “Let’s go inside,” I suggested. “It’s time for lunch, maybe I can help cook.”
“Make some avial. You make the best avial, ” he ordered sweetly.
Avial was the only South Indian dish I cooked that tasted the way it should. Thatha loved my avial, even more than he liked Ma’s.
TO: PRIYA RAO
The Mango Season Page 6