“That quack, gave me these awful pills and look… When you get married, Priya, no birth control pills, just have those babies and then… ask your husband to have a vasectomy, ” she advised.

Unlike most Indian men, Nanna didn’t care that Ma wanted him to get a vasectomy; he had never been that much of a chauvinist but what rankled and even amused him was Ma’s reason.

“In case I die and he marries again, I want to make sure his new wife doesn’t have any kids, so that you both are taken care of and not neglected for the new wife’s children,” she reasoned.

Ma had a twisted mind, Nate and I deduced, but we agreed that her motives were noble. Nanna I am sure felt insulted for being told that he didn’t love his kids and that if Ma wasn’t alive he would discard us as easily as he would marry another woman. “Radha, you just don’t have enough faith in the universe,” he would always say to Ma when she went on her pessimistic rants.

Seeing the family again after seven years was like being slammed in the solar plexus. My center of gravity had shifted and I worried about losing my balance, both physically and emotionally.

It was difficult coming home and facing my parents and now the rest of the family. Especially when I knew that they would not be happy, to understate their feelings, when they found out about Nick.

“Tell them I’m a Brahmin from Tennessee,” Nick had joked when I told him that my family would most probably perform death ceremony rituals for me if we were to get married.

Sometimes I imagined they would accept Nick. Why shouldn’t they? He was well educated, came from a good family, made good money-if my parents were to arrange my marriage it would be to someone like him, only he would be Indian and a Telugu Brahmin.

Marriage was on my parents’ minds as well. I had spent my first night in India crushed in a one-sided conversation with my mother regarding my inability to appreciate the ominous situation I was in by being single at my age; while my father and brother watched a late-night cricket broadcast from England. India versus England, and India was most probably on the way to being thoroughly clobbered as Sachin Tendulkar had just got out on a duck score.

“Has she gone from bad to worse, or what?” I asked Nate when I cornered him alone in the kitchen. He was pouring himself a glass of water during a tea break in the cricket match.

“She has gone from bad to worse,” Nate agreed as he patted my shoulder with little sympathy. “Now if you had a boyfriend…” He paused when he saw the look on my face and then shook his head. “American?”

“Yes,” I said glumly, not surprised that Nate should be the one with the golden insight.

“You’re so a dead woman, ” Nate said cheerfully. “When do you plan to tell them?”

“I was thinking at Ammamma’s this Friday when we go to make mango pickle,” I said. “You know, tell the old and the older people all at the same time and get it done with.”

“I’m not sorry I won’t be there for the massacre,” he said grimly. “You know, don’t you, that there will be bloodshed?”

“I know, ” I muttered.

“I mean Thatha will probably try to kill you,” Nate added.

“I know. ”

“Well, good luck. This should make things infinitely easier for me,” Nate said as he gulped down all the water in the glass he was holding. “My girlfriend is from Delhi, north Indian; she is going to look so good in front of your American boyfriend.”

“You’re all heart, Nate,” I said in sibling disgust and walked back into the living room where my mother sat in judgment of my life and me.

Ammamma’s living room, the hall, was large. It could, during festivals and other celebratory occasions, hold at least sixty seated people for a meal, and it had, several times.

The floor was stone, polished and weathered by time. It glistened beautifully when Parvati mopped it and it was cool to touch, which was a blessing during the hot summer days.

At home Nick and I had hardwood floors and carpet and I could never walk barefoot on either since neither was as cold as stone. It was just one of those things I had brought along with me to the United States, like my inability to eat beef, no matter how many times I told myself that the cow in America was probably not sacred.

I sat down on the floor next to mounds of mangoes. Sowmya sat next to me, while Ammamma was settled comfortably on a new sofa, which was a step up from the old one that had springs coming out from the fabric and needed to be covered with thick towels to prevent bottoms from being pierced. Lata sat on a chair and immediately Ma demanded a chair for herself and Sowmya got one for her from the dining room.

I had no idea how to break the ice with people I had known for a good part of my life. The saving grace was my grandmother. Ammamma could talk anyone under the table and she almost always did. She usually launched into vitriolic tirades about something or the other. This time the spotlight was on my younger uncle and his “elopement.” Anand, to everyone’s surprise, had a love marriage. He fell in love with a colleague, Neelima, at the company he worked for. Neelima was a Maharashtrian and they got married in secret without telling anyone about it until after the three knots of the mangala sutra had been tied.

Their marriage had been the subject of numerous phone conversations between my parents, grandparents, and me for the past year. The conversations always ended with someone warning me against a love marriage. It was because of how Anand’s secret marriage had broken everyone’s heart that I decided to tell my family before doing the deed, though it was very tempting to take the easy way out and tell them after the fact.

My grandparents and most of my family members did not have high hopes for Anand’s marriage and they all were convinced that Neelima was not the right woman for him. They also believed that Neelima was actually a witch who had brewed a nasty potion to ensnare their poor little innocent son into her web.

“She is fair-skinned… but…”-Ammamma shrugged and tied the edge of her sari around her potbelly-“not like our Lata.” She smiled at her daughter-in-law, who returned the smile.

Something was going on, I noted suspiciously. Lata and Ammamma had never really gotten along. Ammamma and Thatha had expected Jayant to follow the archaic joint family system and live with them after his marriage.

It didn’t work out that way.

Six months after the wedding, Lata didn’t say anything to anyone, just packed her bags and Jayant’s, found a flat, and left. The family went into total cerebral shock. Thatha argued, begged, and pleaded for her to come back, but Lata stood her ground. She told him she was tired of living with people to whom she was merely a cook and a maid. (Who could really blame her for that?) She also said that she wanted her own home, where she was the mistress. Jayant quietly followed his wife and broke my grandparents’ hearts. But now Ammamma was being nice to the traitorous daughter-in-law. It was more than enough to bring out the Sherlock Holmes in me.

“Don’t listen to them, Priya, Neelima is a nice girl,” Sowmya interjected. “And she is a Brahmin, ” she added for good measure.

“But not our type,” Ammamma argued. “She is a Maharashtrian Brahmin, not Telugu.”

And being Telugu was very, very essential. Telugu was the official language of my state, Andhra Pradesh, and we were called Telugu or Telugu people. Being of the same caste was not enough to sanctify a marriage. To marry someone, that someone had to also be from the same state. It was very simple: “they” were somehow lower because “they” were not Telugu.

At least “they” were Indian, I thought unhappily; my “they” was American and an un-devout Christian to boot.

“Neelima is a very good person,” Sowmya pointed out. “And her family has lived in Hyderabad for generations. She speaks Telugu fluently and cooks our food.”