Monsoon Diary (19 page)

My dad looked stunned by my tirade. “Why not?” he asked. “They are tasty.”

“Taste is not the point!” I cried. “I am not a commodity to be traded for
sojji
and
bajji.
I am a human being.”

My aunt stroked my hair gently. “All of this will only last till the wedding,” she said. “Once you two are married, who cares about
sojji
and
bajji
?”

Nalla-ma didn’t even understand my ranting. I could see that in her face. “In my days, when your grandfather came to see me, I had to touch the feet of all the elders,” she said helpfully. “At least we won’t make you do that.”

“I refuse to touch anybody’s feet,” I said coldly. “Why should I? I am just as educated as he is.”

“You don’t have to prostrate before him,” Nalla-ma replied. “But his parents are your elders. What is wrong with prostrating before elders and getting their blessing?”

“Enough about prostration,” my father said finally. “Why don’t you just let her be? She can freshen up in a little while.”

All the ladies looked at him with the affectionate scorn they reserved for men who read too much into an emotional situation.

“Why don’t you go freshen up?” my mother said sweetly. “We will manage.”

My aunts were patting me, stroking my hair, plumping the pillows so I would be more comfortable.

“So, what are you going to wear?” my mother asked in a stern voice that said, “Enough of this crying. Let’s get to business.”

“A skirt,” I said flatly, knowing full well that nobody would go for that idea.

“Not a skirt,” my eldest aunt said. “It’s too casual. Why don’t you wear a nice sari.”

“A silk sari,” my grandmother said. “That’s the tradition.”

“Well, I am sorry, but I refuse to wear a silk sari. I am not a mannequin,” I began again.

“Why don’t you wear that light blue cotton sari?” my cousin Sheela said diplomatically. At twenty-nine, she was just five years older than I, and we had a wonderful rapport. “It looks gorgeous on you, and you’ll be comfortable too. How’s that for a compromise? Yes?”

I shook my head and then nodded, sighing. What was the use? This was presumably the most important meeting in my life, and we were arguing about saris. It was almost farcical.

As if reading my thoughts, my mother said, “You don’t have to like him, you know. The last thing we want is for you to be miserable after marriage. So just tell me if you don’t like him or whatever. You don’t even have to say anything. Just shake your head, or wink, or scratch your ears.”

“What is this? They haven’t even met and you’re already telling her to make faces,” Nalla-ma chided. “Of course they’ll like each other.”

“They’re here!” someone shouted.

There was a mass exodus, and I was, for a moment, all alone in the room. Then Sheela hurried back.

“He looks good,” she said with a mischievous smile. “Now, let’s get you ready.”

She helped me drape my sari around my waist and over my shoulder, then began to open the makeup kit.

“No makeup,” I said. “If he doesn’t like me as I am—”

“Come on, Shoba,” Sheela said. “You wear makeup all the time. This is bending over backward. You’ll see. It seems like a huge tragedy now, but it’s really very simple. You see him, you sit down, you talk, and you get a feel for each other. If you like each other, fine. If you don’t, fine. And you’ll laugh about this later, I promise. When Arun came to see me, I was just recovering from chicken pox and had huge zits all over my face.”

Her soft voice washed over me as she applied light foundation to my face, patted it dry with powder, and stuck a vermilion dot on my forehead. She squeezed the jingling glass bangles over my hand and onto my wrist and slipped some gold chains around my neck.

Suddenly, I heard someone call my name. “Shoba! Why don’t you join us?”

“It’s time,” Sheela whispered. “Okay, now smile. Come on. You can do it.”

She gently nudged me out into our spacious living room. It felt like emerging from a cave into blinding sunlight. The smell of sandalwood incense filled the room, and there were baskets of flowers everywhere. Extra chairs had been brought from the dining room and the study, and everyone was sitting in a large circle and staring at me. In the middle was a large coffee table with trays of nuts, chips, and chocolates. It was a long way from the art studio at Mount Holyoke.

More out of habit than anything else, I kept my eyes on the floor, as Indian girls are taught to do in front of elders, and walked gingerly into the crowd.

“Why don’t you sit down?” Ram’s mother said. Her voice was solicitous, her eyes eager to put me at ease. She introduced me to Ram and we exchanged a quick hello.

As I sat down and adjusted my sari, Ram and my father made polite conversation about how humid Madras was, and how the monsoon was predicted to be late that year. Everyone drilled Ram with questions—about his job, about America, about how long he was planning to stay in town and where he was going next. While I squirmed in my seat at my family’s interrogation, he answered everything patiently.

“How have you been spending your time at home?” Ram’s mother asked me with a kind smile. In her beige cotton sari and red
bindi,
she looked like a traditional Indian homemaker rather than a high-powered government official who had pretty much run a state for a couple of years. I liked her immediately.

“Oh, I’ve been taking music lessons and Sanskrit classes,” I replied.

“What type of music?” She appeared genuinely interested.

“Shoba sings beautifully,” my grandmother said with sickening pride.

My mother and aunts brought in plates of snacks and coffee. Ram refused the snacks but accepted a cup of coffee. All the fussing with the food gave me a chance to observe him covertly. He had a square face, an animated smile, and curly hair. At least he wasn’t bad-looking.

“Look at all this food!” Ram’s father exclaimed. “We came for tea, not dinner.”

He didn’t mean for it to be a joke, but everyone guffawed loudly.

“Did Shoba make all this?” Ram’s mother asked with gay facetiousness.

I could hear my grandmother’s comment before she said it. “Shoba is an excellent cook. She cooks both Western and Indian meals. She can make
idlis, dosas, vadas,
coconut chutney, mango chutney, almond cake, sweet and sour—”

I held up a hand. Nalla-ma was beginning to sound like a waitress.

In between the clinking of the coffee cups and tumblers and the snatches of self-conscious conversation, Ram suddenly asked, “I wonder if Shoba and I can take a walk together?”

There was total silence.

My father stood up. “Of course, you might want to talk to each other in private. Perhaps if we move into the other room.”

“Of course, of course,” everyone murmured and got up. My parents gently led his parents away.

We were alone. I kept my head down demurely. Men liked demure women, didn’t they? Suddenly, it became very important that he like me, more for my pride than anything else. If anyone was doing the rejecting, I wanted it to be me.

To my surprise, the conversation flowed easily. We had a great deal in common. We compared universities, summer jobs, spring break, and cheap airline tickets. But his profession was very different from mine. He told me about his days as a student in Ann Arbor, his job as a financial analyst on Wall Street right after he graduated from business school, and his current job with a consulting firm.

An hour later we heard the scraping of chairs from the adjoining room and knew that the elders were getting impatient.

“I’d like to get to know you better,” Ram said. “Unfortunately, I have to be back at my job, but I could call you every other day? No strings attached, and both of us can decide where this goes, if anywhere. Does that sound okay?”

I was a little nonplussed by his directness. I had expected that our conversation would end with vague, trailing remarks about keeping in touch. I had half hoped that he would be so swayed by my charms that he would propose to me on the spot—even though I had no intention of accepting. I certainly hadn’t expected him to take charge with a rationality that I was not used to.

“That sounds fine,” I mumbled. “I could call you too.” I didn’t want him to think that just because he was the man, he had to foot the expensive, overseas calls.

The author’s maternal grandparents and family. The author’s mother
is sitting on the bottom right.

“Oh, it’s a lot cheaper to call from the States,” he said. “If our locations were reversed, believe me, I would have made you call.” His smile was disarming.

I pursed my lips at my own discomfiture.

EVERYONE THOUGHT that he was “perfect.” We had all gathered in the kitchen, where my mother was heating dinner. Plates and cups were stacked in the sink. A tray of sticky sweets rested on the table, and my father was picking off the crumbs absently and popping them into his mouth. Nalla-ma sat at the dining table and began to help him polish off the remainder of the sweets.

“Ma, you have diabetes,” my mother said from near the stove. “Don’t touch that.”

“I like him,” Nalla-ma announced. “His laugh is like my father’s. No venom or malice in that laugh.” The fact that she was comparing Ram to her father meant that she liked him enormously.

“He didn’t fuss about accepting coffee,” someone said. “Even drank it the second time. Not like these America-returned types who won’t touch food or drink in the subcontinent. As if the food here is tainted.”

“You like him, don’t you, Shoba?” my mother asked, turning to me. I looked at her smiling, glowing face. What was I going to say? That I hated him? But I didn’t. That was the trouble.

“I don’t dislike him,” I replied in a measured tone.

“Look at her blushing!” Sheela crowed.

“I am not blushing,” I replied.

Everyone laughed. I could sense their happiness, their feeling that the whole thing had gone off well. What if he doesn’t like me? I thought suddenly. What if he never calls? That would be such an anticlimax.

“Don’t worry,” Nalla-ma said. “We won’t pressure you into deciding right away. Take your time. You have forty-eight hours to say yes or no.”

HOT BAJJIS

This is how you eat a
bajji
in India. You go with your sweetie to the beach at twilight, sit in the gathering darkness, whispering illicit secrets. A cool breeze stirs up the waves. Stars twinkle as the moon rises. Suddenly the clouds open up. The monsoon explodes without warning. Clutching each other, you run through the rain. Someone is frying
bajjis
at home. You shower and walk into the warm kitchen, tossing your wet hair. A crisp, hot, golden
bajji
beckons. You take a bite and recoil from the heat. It reminds you of forbidden lips, of your lover’s kiss.

Bajjis
are a great winter recipe, warm fritters to liven up a cold night or cloudy afternoon. They are finger foods and work beautifully as appetizers for a party or a light snack, and they are what we served when I met my husband for the first time.

SERVES 2

2 cups gram flour or
besan
(available in Indian grocery stores)
2 to 4 green chiles, Thai or serrano, seeded and finely chopped
1/2 cup chopped fresh cilantro
1 teaspoon salt
2 or 3 cups vegetable oil for deep-frying
12 round 1/8
-
inch slices vegetables (4 slices each potato, onion, plantain)

Stir together the flour and 1 cup water, adding enough additional
water to reach the consistency of thick pancake batter. Stir in the
chiles, cilantro, and salt until combined well.

Heat the oil in a deep wok or Indian
kadai
until it reaches 375˚ F on a deep-fat thermometer. Working in batches, dip the vegetables into the batter, letting the excess drip off, and fry until golden brown, about 1 minute. Transfer to paper towels to drain.

Serve hot with a piquant sauce, ketchup, or coconut chutney.

SIXTEEN

Monsoon Wedding

RAM CALLED ten days later. At first we spoke on the telephone every other day, and then it became every day. Gradually I relaxed and began enjoying our conversations, which usually lasted for over an hour. We talked about our goals, dreams, and anxieties; we argued over which was the best pizza place in New York; we teased and joked.

“What do you want out of life?” he asked me one day.

“I don’t know,” I replied. “I’m not really sure.”

“Why don’t you think about it? Come up with five words maybe, of what you want to do with your life.”

His question intrigued me. Two days later I told him what I had come up with.

“I really like the Alcoholics Anonymous slogan,” I said. “ ‘God grant me the courage to change the things I can change, the fortitude to tolerate the things I cannot, and the wisdom to know the difference.’ ”

“I actually came up with five words,” Ram said. “Curiosity, contribution, balance, family, and fun. That’s what I want out of my life.”

Another time, he was telling me about his sister. “She’s really idealistic, an Aries, like you. She’s the type who will do anything for friends. She’s feisty—”

“Excuse me?” I couldn’t hear him clearly.

“Feisty. You know, spirited. F-i-e-s-t-y,” he spelled.

“
Feisty
is spelled f-e-i-s-t-y,” I said.

“You sure? I’m almost positive it’s with an i-e,” he said.

“Wanna bet?” I asked.

“Okay,” he replied. “Whoever loses has to surprise the other.”

We left it at that and talked about other things.

As soon as we hung up, I flipped through the dictionary and jubilantly noted that
feisty
was spelled my way.

That evening the doorbell rang. When I opened the door, I saw a huge bouquet. Red roses, yellow daffodils, orange irises, all throwing out a riot of color. In it was a card: “Here’s a feisty bunch.”

I couldn’t help laughing out loud.

A MONTH LATER I decided to bail out temporarily. It wasn’t that I didn’t like him. I did like him. Very much. I wasn’t in love with him, but I didn’t expect to be in love with a man I met through an arranged match anyway. To me that would have been odd. In most arranged marriages, love came later, as it had for my parents, aunts, and uncles. The problem was that I didn’t know how to decide if he was the man for me. If love wasn’t the parameter, then what was? All these conversations weren’t bringing me closer to any sort of decision. I had half expected a blinding flash of realization to strike me at some point and say, “He’s the one.” That hadn’t happened, and I didn’t know what to do.

To clear my head, I went to visit Nalla-ma in Coimbatore. I wanted some direction, and I knew that she would provide it—whether I liked it or not.

Ram called me there as well. Nalla-ma was curious about what we discussed, and after every conversation I gave her an account. She would suggest questions, come up with strategies, and try to improve my answers.

“Next time he asks you what you like, tell him that you’ll like whatever he likes,” she said.

“How sick!” I cried. “I’m not going to tell him that. He’ll think I don’t have a mind of my own.”

“Yes, yes, you have such a great mind,” Nalla-ma rumbled. “That’s why you can’t get a man to ask you to marry him.”

Nalla-ma was worried and annoyed that our conversation was taking so long to resolve itself into a conclusion. One day when Ram called she picked up the phone. After the usual inquiries about his health, the weather, and his job, she suddenly said—in the formal tone she reserved for sons-in-law—“Of course your good self is very intelligent and I don’t have to tell you anything. But isn’t it time that we heard some good news?”

I was horrified. I tried to grab the receiver from her hands, but she dodged me with surprising nimbleness. She listened some more and then handed me the phone with a smug smile. I glared at her.

“Sorry,” I muttered, thoroughly embarrassed. “You know how grand-mothers are.”

Ram and I had become extremely comfortable with each other. He told me that the elders in his family were equally eager to hear some “good news.” We joked about the forty-eight-hour rule. “My aunt thought she was being very generous,” Ram said. “She told me that I could make a decision within forty-eight hours.”

One day, after our usual chitchat about the heat in Madras, winter in the Northeast, Christmas shopping, and Bill Clinton’s election, Ram asked me to marry him.

I had thought about this moment in great detail and had even come up with what I considered a clever response. “Why don’t you come and ask me in person?” I replied.

“Answer me now and I’ll come,” he said.

I paused. He had pushed me to a corner.

“In that case, yes,” I replied, without qualifying what “in that case” was.

Although I had said “Yes,” in my mind, I felt like I hadn’t completely accepted his proposal. I had only said “Yes” so that he would come and ask me in person. I had an out.

A FEW MINUTES LATER the phone rang. It was my mother.

“Congratulations!” Mom sounded jubilant. “Ram told me that he proposed to you.”

“But I haven’t said yes,” I said quickly.

“He mentioned that too,” my mom said. “But don’t worry, I told him that you accepted.”

“What?” I shouted.

She continued blithely, “I told Ram that you had trouble making up your mind but that you liked him a lot.”

Nalla-ma, on the other hand, was firmly convinced that it was her nudging that had prompted Ram to propose. The two most important women in my life had bamboozled me into marriage, and try as I might, I couldn’t come up with a single reason to resist.

Everyone was overjoyed. Ram’s sister called me from Florida to congratulate me and welcome me into their family. My parents sent a telex message to Shyam, asking him to disembark from his ship. The wedding was set for April 15, and my parents hired a marriage contractor (similar to a marriage coordinator). They spent long hours closeted in the study, discussing invitations, menus, bands, banquet halls, and saris.

OUR ENGAGEMENT CEREMONY—where the priest announced the wedding date and my parents exchanged gifts with Ram’s—was held at Ram’s house, and he flew down for the occasion.

The ceremony itself was merely a preamble to the main event, which was a sumptuous tiffin buffet, served on the terrace for one hundred guests. As the bride-to-be I was the object of great curiosity and was stopped with friendly questions on my way to the buffet line. Thankfully, Ram’s cousin Nalini took my arm, cut in, and filled a plate with hot
bondas,
samosas, and sweet, square coconut
burfis.

As I sat down, plate in hand, Nalla-ma hissed, “A new bride does not stuff herself with
bondas.
Don’t eat a thing on your plate.”

I defiantly ignored her glares and proceeded to eat every delicious morsel, fending off solicitous offers for seconds with a practiced wave of the hand.

My parents took the engagement tiffin buffet as a challenge. Not to be outdone, they let it be known that they were planning a nine-course afternoon tiffin for our wedding with three kinds of sweet dishes, four kinds of savories, coffee, and ice cream, all of which would be served on a traditional banana leaf at 4:00 P.M. sharp on our wedding day.

“The Wedding Tiffin” took on a stature greater than the wedding itself. Cousins came from Nairobi and New York to sample it. Relatives I had never heard of called my parents before the wedding to provide their proper address, “just in case” my parents wanted to invite them. College buddies asked about the tiffin menu instead of my trousseau. My parents locked themselves into an air-conditioned bedroom and conferred with the caterers about the minutiae of tiffin preparation. The result was an afternoon tiffin that people talked about long after the wedding itself was forgotten.

Glistening banana leaves were laid out on long banquet tables. At four o’clock, as row upon row of guests sat waiting, the kitchen doors opened and uniformed waiters came out in choreographed precision. From large stainless steel buckets they served sweet carrot
halwa,
orange-gold
sojji
sprinkled with saffron, and almond
payasam
in silver bowls. Complementing the sweets were the savories. Hot
vadas
served with spicy coconut chutney and onion
sambar;
fluffy white
idlis;
golden plantain
bajjis;
and a dollop of
upma
served with an ice cream scoop. The menu wasn’t particularly novel or unusual, which was perhaps why our guests loved it. Sometimes, predictability and tradition please expectant guests rather than erratic invention and experiments that could fail.

ALL INDIAN WEDDINGS HAVE several things in common: noise, food, music, and color. This is why Indians who live in America or any other part of the world go back home to get married. It would be hard to duplicate the color and happy chaos that surrounds an Indian wedding anywhere else in the world. Aunts and uncles, grandparents, cousins, relatives, and friends descend by the dozen. They take India’s unpredictability and counter it with their exuberance. When there are power cuts, they light hurricane lanterns; when it rains, they dance in the rain; when the loudspeakers fail, they sing in chorus. Guests throw flowers at the bridal couple; hosts spray the guests with perfumed rose water.

The bride and groom walk around the fire seven times; they sit in the
mandapam
(bridal tent) cocooned by flowers, smoke, clamoring relatives, and chanting priests. They hold hands and touch the feet of elders to get their blessings; they sprinkle turmeric and wear vermilion
sindoor
on their foreheads. The parents hide behind pillars and wipe away tears as they worry about the in-laws, caterers, flowers, and foibles.

Women sashay around in silk saris of vivid hues—parrot green,
brinjal-
blossom purple, onion-skin pink, Lord Rama blue—even the names of the colors are evocative. They bring out diamond and gold jewelry from their safe-deposit boxes and don them in dazzling combinations. Someone loses a necklace, sending everyone into a frenzy before it is found under a pile of garlands or in some other innocuous place. An aged relative drinks eucalyptus oil by mistake and has to be taken to the emergency room. Children run around unchecked by elders; they make up games and hide under eaves. They stay up late and cling to the bride; they frustrate photographers by crossing their eyes at the last minute. At some middle-class weddings the street in front of the wedding hall is usurped and rows of chairs are arranged across the street to accommodate the swelling number of guests, forcing traffic to make a detour along other streets. Everyone sways to the pulsating music that never seems to cease; they indulge in a pageantry for the senses that would be deemed over-the-top and out of control anywhere else in the world. Above all, they eat and drink.

My wedding was no different. An Indian wedding is a two- or three-day affair, by the end of which everyone is exhausted. The first day involves the purification rites prior to the actual wedding and includes close family members. People are able to check out what the others are wearing, to gossip and gripe about imagined slights before being submerged in the festivities and tension of the ceremony on the last day.

On the second day, the day of my wedding, I woke up at 3:00 A.M. The astrologer had deemed 7:30 A.M. to be the most auspicious moment of the day, which meant that I had to be ready in bridal garb by five-thirty, for there were two hours of rituals before the actual wedding ceremony. In decades past, when men and women didn’t even see each other before their wedding day, these two hours of rituals were a way of helping them ease into each other. In these modern days, Ram and I used the two hours to hold hands, complain about the heat and smoke, and entreat everyone who passed by to bring us glasses of
panagam,
a juice with jaggery and ginger that is consumed by the gallon at South Indian weddings.

Right after Ram tied the
thali—
a thread symbolizing our union (similar to the ring in Christian weddings) and declaring us officially married—around my neck, there was a mass exodus to the dining room. We watched mournfully from the dais as entire congregations of people rose and exited en masse. By the time we finished yet another hour of rituals, we were almost faint with hunger. By then, most of the guests had eaten and left, to freshen up for the evening’s reception. Only close family members, which in our case included cousins, aunts, uncles, oh, about 150 people in all, waited for us.

It was only 10:00 A.M., but the kitchen was already serving lunch. We sat in a row at the long tables, which had been set with banana leaves. Eating from banana leaves requires the expertise of a civil engineer. The leaf has no rim and therefore no catchment area for fluids such as
rasam
or
payasam,
which therefore flow through the entire leaf and down the table unchecked. Adding to the challenge is the fact that waiters at weddings rush through the line, ladling and pouring hurriedly and insouciantly, without waiting to see if the eater is ready to receive it. After getting
rasam
dripping down the front of my dress when I was a child, I quickly learned the process.