by Anne Cherian
He even attempted to put on a show at Ashok’s house. Neel had never liked his cousin’s superior attitude, and now Ashok parachuted into their youth, when he had always floated above, acting cocky. This time it was because Ashok had married first—and clearly, to a girl far superior to Leila.
“I tell you, Suneel, you simply have to take a honeymoon. Smita and I went to Singapore. Of course we did not leave the hotel room too often,” he winked at Neel, “but we did do some little shopping.”
Neel politely praised the blue-flowered china (from Japan), the thick glassware (from Taiwan), and Smita even brought out some of the sarees they had purchased. He watched the proud parade with a stoic smile. No one in America opened their cupboards in a display of show and share.
The much-ballyhooed honeymoon surprised Neel. When he was a boy, newlyweds didn’t waste money on hotels and eating out. But according to Ashok, a small class of Indians, equivalent to American yuppies, had progressed. Neel just hadn’t been around to witness it.
“Why not go to Australia?” Ashok recommended. “From there it is easy to take a yakht to New Zealand.”
It took Neel a second to realize his cousin meant a yacht. “Australia? It’s much too far,” Neel declined. Ashok was just like Aunty Vimla, insistent as only Indian relatives know how to be. He was not content to suggest an idea; he had to complete it with an itinerary. Neel didn’t want to go on a honeymoon. He just wanted to get back to the States—and Caroline. He thought of her constantly, and had even tried calling, but the operator could only patch him to Bombay, at which point he heard, “I’m sorry, sir, but the lines they are down. Must be from the monsoon. You must please to try again.”
“Too far,” Ashok scoffed. “You sound just like an old man. Anyway, Australia is on the way to America.”
“I’m not sure what atlas you’ve been looking at, but, at any rate, I’ve already been there. I gave a paper at a conference in Sydney two years ago.” He dangled the tidbit, wondering if Ashok would surprise him and change course.
“Maybe you have seen Australia,” Ashok ignored the last sentence. “But I am quite sure, in fact, hundred percent positive, that Leila has not.” He looked at Neel’s parents and proclaimed, “I think my younger cousin Suneel has become old-fashioned living in America. We are more modern here in India.”
Neel resisted hitting Ashok, who was as pleased with himself as if he were a thoroughbred. Yet all he had was an MBA from XLRI, an American-style college in North India, a desk job with a company headquartered in England, and a wife who was fair, MA-tried-but-failed, from a rich family that had sent them on the “funtahstic” honeymoon. When they were young, Ashok had capitalized on the three-year age difference to strut the part of Mr. Know-It-All. Not anymore. Now everyone except he and Aunty Vimla realized that Neel had surpassed him. Neel didn’t even know why he was having this ridiculous conversation.
He wouldn’t be in this boxy, overstuffed living room but for Aunty Vimla. He would be confirming his ticket to the United States instead of requesting a change as he had this morning. A week ago, he had gone to bed an American (“I’ll be polite when I go see the girl tomorrow”) and had woken up an Indian (“I have to marry her because otherwise it will ruin the family name?”).
Now Aunty Vimla was behaving as if she knew him better than anyone else, ordering Smita to pour Neel more coffee he didn’t want. “Our Suneel misses our cahffee in Ahmerica. My daughter-in-law makes the virry best. No ahrdinary milk. She only uses condensed milk. You must to tell your Leila that.”
Mrs. Krishnan, too, had added a liberal swig of condensed milk to the coffee Leila served him that confusing morning. His teeth were aching from the unaccustomed sugar when they finally left the small house that didn’t want to let go of him. Aunty Vimla, one step behind Neel, couldn’t wait to leave the garden before panting, “So, did you like her? Did you like her?”
Afraid the Krishnan parents, smiling anxiously from the verandah, could hear them, he responded, “Fine, she was fine.”
“I told you,” Aunty Vimla stated loudly, “I only have first-class girls for you. So there is nothing wrong with her?”
There was nothing obviously wrong with the girl, except for her age and the fact that she represented an arranged marriage. She was pretty, fair, and spoke excellent English. He knew she was somewhere in that house, wondering about his answer. But perhaps he had made that clear to her.
Neel pushed open the wrought-iron gate. It creaked forward reluctantly, only moving wider when he pressed his foot on the bottom rung. The idiot driver had parked the car down the road and was sitting under a tree, smoking a cigarette. He hurriedly stubbed it out and started the engine when he saw them emerge. “Aunty, I told you. She’s fine.”
“Not too tall?”
“No, not too tall.”
“Ah, that is because you are also tall. How could I forget? Mr. Basketball Team Captain. Good, good. I told you she will to be extremely virry fine.”
“Mrs. Rajan, your umbrella.” Mrs. Krishnan waved the flowery plastic that burst open in her hands. “So sorry, so sorry,” she apologized as her husband helped her close the bright orange umbrella.
“Not to worry, even if it is broken, our Suneel will bring me another one from Ahmerica. You wait there. I will come and get it. Appa”—Aunty Vimla turned to Tattappa—“maybe I will stay a little more time?”
“It is okay with me. Suneel, what do you have to say?”
Neel was delighted to get rid of Aunty Vimla. If she was this obnoxious outside the car, she would be much worse during the ride home. He had seen the girl and now wanted to enjoy the peace it had procured him. She was probably staying behind to vacuum off the last of the samosas. She wouldn’t, couldn’t tell the Krishnans anything without talking to him first. “Sure, Aunty can stay. As long as she has a ride back to her place,” he added politely, in case he sounded too eager to be rid of her.
“Don’t you worry anything about me. Everything will be okay. You will see.”
What Neel did see one hour later was an even more animated Aunty Vimla, her spittle dotting the Stanford T-shirt he had changed into. She had come flying into the house, breathless, so eager to report her latest handiwork that the words came out in bursts of one syllable: “They have a-greed to the match, Ap-pa.” That one sentence brought a big smile to Tattappa’s face. He congratulated Neel, who immediately demanded, “What are you talking about?”
“You said the girl was fine.” Aunty Vimla beat her index finger in the air. “You said it. They heard you. So I made the arrangements with her family.”
“I’m not getting married!”
“They have accepted it. Now only you are telling me you do not want to marry her? No, no, I cannot allow that.”
Dabbing the wet stains off his T-shirt, Neel thought she looked like a blowfish, cheeks swollen in outrage. “Tattappa, please tell Aunty to calm down. I never said I would marry the girl.”
“Ah, but you did not say you did not want to marry her. I asked you. I asked you right in front of their house, and you did not say that,” Aunty Vimla reiterated, her voice gaining in volume.
“What did you expect me to say after that brief meeting? And with her parents within hearing distance? This is ridiculous. We leave you behind to get your umbrella and you go ahead and get me engaged? Without even talking to me about it? Tattappa, please tell Aunty to go and undo the mess she has just created.”
“Suneel,” Tattappa shook his head. “That is not possible. Your aunty has already given the word of our family.”
“Tattappa, I never gave my word that I wanted to marry this girl.”
“Your aunty gave you the chance to say there was something wrong with the girl. But you said she was fine. I asked you if Aunty should stay behind. Surely you knew the meaning of that?”
“No, I did not. I just thought Aunty wanted to eat some more samosas.” He could not control his nasty tone.
“But this was not a visit, Suneel. It
was to see a girl. And afterwards you have to tell the girl’s family what the boy thinks.”
“I assumed we would discuss my answer—which you already knew, Tattappa—when we got home.”
“Yes, yes, that is the way it is sometimes. But not when your aunty is staying behind. That is a sure sign of our interest.”
“Our interest? What’s ‘our’ about this, suddenly? It’s my life. My decision.”
“My this, my that.” Aunty Vimla narrowed her eyes. “Mr. Ahmerica you are suddenly. How can you be forgetting our customs so quickly?”
“Tattappa, are you telling me I have to get married now?”
“Surely yes. Otherwise our family name will be shamed. Your aunty has already given our word. It is like a vow. How can we go back on it?”
“I’ll tell you how. I’ll go there right now and tell them it’s all been a mistake. She’s too tall, she’s too old, and she doesn’t have a dowry. Isn’t that what you told me when you suggested I see her?”
“Yes, I was giving to you all the reasons why you may wish not to marry her. But you never said any such things to your aunty. I was virry much surprised. Then I was thinking that maybe you liked the girl.”
“It is done.” Aunty Vimla patted a handkerchief on her sweating face. “The marriage is to be in fourteen days.”
“Not my marriage, Aunty. Ashok is your son and he had to listen to you. But I don’t have to.” Neel could have throttled the pleased look out of Aunty Vimla’s face. He started out the door.
“Where are you going?” His mother spoke for the first time.
Mummy had never taken up for him in the old days and he couldn’t expect her to now. Tradition meant she had to bow to her older sister-in-law, and though she could lead Father around, she never interfered with Aunty Vimla. Father, as usual, was keeping himself out of the fight, just sitting in his chair. Neel thought his eyes were sympathetic, felt that he wanted to say something, but years of capitulation had castrated his ability to express his opinions. “I’m going to the Krishnans. To tell them that Aunty Vimla made a mistake.”
Neel didn’t know Aunty Vimla could move so fast. She catapulted her two hundred and twenty pounds out of the chair, and only stopped when they were face-to-face. “You will not to use my name like that,” she hissed. “I have done for you a big favor and you are going to spoil my good name?”
Neel knew Aunty Vimla had only done herself a big favor. She wanted him to marry Leila to increase the worth of her own daughter-in-law. She was making a fuss about her good name to ensure that he didn’t get a good girl. “Fine. I’ll tell them that I don’t want to marry the girl. Frankly, I don’t care what I say just as long as I get out of this.”
He had one foot on the verandah when Aunty Vimla screamed: “Appa!” Neel swung around to see his grandfather fall to the floor. The next hour was a mixture of wringing hands and worried faces staring down at a hospital bed. He never went to the Krishnans.
Now here he was, seven days later, sitting in his cousin’s house holding a cup of sweet coffee he didn’t want, while a sick Tattappa recovered in bed.
“No thank you,” he said firmly. “I don’t want more coffee.” He placed the cup on the side table, right under Aunty Vimla’s offended eyes. Too bad it would go to waste. But he had to take some control over his life.
He felt as if he had metamorphosed into a character from Kafka’s novel. One day he was Dr. Neel Sarath, a man whose only obligation was work, who ate beef when he wanted to and spent nights with a white woman outside the bounds of marriage. The next day, without his permission, he had been forced back into his discarded skin. He was Suneel once again—grandson, son, nephew, consummate Indian male. People he didn’t recognize thumped his back in congratulations, proffering unsolicited advice, demanding more and more of him. Suddenly he was both the most important person and, conversely, the one least respected.
Giving in to that initial guilt shove had created a buffet of other obligations. His afternoons and evenings were a blur of faces and food. He didn’t bother asking his mother their destination. He simply got into the car, smiled at people he didn’t know, and ate with his fingers because Mummy would keep apologizing to their host if he asked for a fork. Just yesterday he had reluctantly agreed to bare-chest himself and wear the traditional white silk veshti for the wedding ceremony.
Now Mr. Honeymoon was building another obstacle in the race Aunty Vimla had signed him up for. Everybody, he was assured, would consider him an out-of-date miser if he didn’t take Leila somewhere. He was America-returned. People expected him to want a honeymoon.
Aunty Vimla, Mummy, Ashok, Smita—he didn’t need to hear their voices to know what they were saying. His pulse beat in time to their rapid, go, go, go words. Nags, the lot of them.
“Suneel,” Aunty Vimla kept up the pestering, “I simply cannot understand why you are refusing to make a nice honeymoon.”
It was the thought of getting away from her, from the hopelessness and anger, from the manic preparations and winking eyes, that decided Neel. He gave the locale as much deliberation as he had given his decision to see Leila. He wasn’t about to ratify the bogus marriage by going to an Indian equivalent of Hawaii. When his friends in the United States began getting married and sailing away to Maui, Mexico, the Bahamas, they had openly envied Neel’s easy access to India, for them an exotic honeymoon spot. But he thought it boring and backward, and never imagined that one day he would pick an Indian town for his honeymoon. If a fortuneteller had predicted the events of the past week, he would have laughed and demanded his money back.
When he finally settled on a place, Ashok immediately found fault.
“Ooty? Ooty?” Ashok repeated, voice high with astonishment. “It’s for school kids, yaar. When I went there, it still only had one cheapo Chinese restaurant. If you want to stay in India, why not at least go to the Lake Palace in Udaipur? Now that is a very fine, very first-class hotel.”
Neel had never been to Ooty, and as a young boy had yearned to study in any one of its prestigious boarding schools. But though he had begged and pleaded, Tattappa told him they simply could not afford the tuition. It was for rich people and diplomats who wanted to send their children to Indian schools that weren’t too “Indian.” Now he was a rich man who could easily afford this onetime summer haven of Indian kings.
Ooty had been home to the Todas long before the British carved it into a resort. They dotted the hills with tea estates where Englishwomen, the so-called grass widows, gratefully spent the summers while their husbands remained on active duty in the hot plains below. Until the 1970s it was still possible to see old Britishers, ghostly remnants of the Raj, tapping their canes along the streets. Like so many cities, Ooty had reclaimed its old name: Udhagamandalam. The king was long gone, but his palace was open to the public, and boating on the large lake was still the main activity.
He did not discuss the honeymoon with Leila. He did not discuss anything with her. There was no time for the two of them to meet, what with the wedding taking place two weeks after their only meeting. He was relieved not to see her. The closest he came to her were Aunty Vimla’s reports of activities in the Krishnan household. He had no interest in those, either. What did he care that the family had decided to hold the wedding and reception in their garden? He had not lived in America so long that he could not decipher the underlying meaning: the Krishnans did not have the money for a hotel. He retained a vague recollection of the house and garden and hoped there would be no cow dung patties on the wall. He barely remembered Leila.
Knowing he could not put it off any longer, he cabled the hospital to inform them he was extending his trip. Sanjay would know what that meant. Would Caroline, too, guess that he was returning a married man? Would she realize, though, that that would be the only change?
Relatives began descending a week before the wedding and he had to give up his bedroom. He suggested putting them up in a hotel, but no one would hear of that. It was Indian hospital
ity over American common sense. It gave his mother more work, but she did not mind. She was anyway collapsing from the sheer happiness of preparing for his wedding.
She had become an unexpected ally since Tattappa’s fall, the only one in the family who didn’t blame him. Even Father had told Neel that if he’d behaved in a proper way it wouldn’t have happened. That fateful day had become a tragedy of interlocking mishaps, with Neel at the center of every episode, but the final act belonged to Tattappa.
He remembered being riveted by Aunty Vimla’s close-faced anger even as he tried to distance himself from her spouting, shouting mouth. Anxious to get away from her, he strode toward the verandah. His back was to the living room and he couldn’t see Tattappa hurrying to come between his daughter and his grandson. Aunty Vimla, eyes like Cerberus, turned and tried to catch her father, but was too late. Tattappa hit his knee against an end table and fell to the floor.
The room went from screaming anger to deafening silence. Aunty Vimla was the first to move. “Appa, Appa!” Her screams were heard by the neighbors as she extended her arms in front of her father, guarding him against Neel.
“You,” she accused Neel, “you are the cause of this! Go, go away now before you make more damage.”
“I am a doctor, Aunty. Let me check him.”
“First you make him fall, then you want to see what you have done. Go and get a taxi,” she ordered her brother. “Appa must go to the hospital.”
Tattappa lay like a question mark on the cold mosaic. His chest rose and fell heavily, as if he had just run a marathon. Neel walked around Aunty Vimla and her protestations and took his grandfather’s pulse, checking the thin body for broken bones.
“He hasn’t broken anything,” he told his mother. “Where’s Father? We should get Tattappa to bed.”