Calling my mother a nag was not a stretch-she was a super nag. She could nag the hell out of anyone and do it with appalling innocence.

“No autos,” Ma complained airily, and looked at me as if I was somehow to blame for the lack of auto rickshaws. “Why don’t you try and get one,” she ordered, as we stood on the roadside, unhappy in the skin-burning heat, a large basket of mangoes standing slightly lopsided between us on the uneven footpath.

I waved for a while without success. Finally, a yellow and black three-wheeler stopped in front of us, missing by inches my toes that were sticking out of my Kohlapuri slippers.

With her usual panache Ma haggled over the fare with the auto rickshaw driver. They finally decided on twenty-five rupees and we drove home holding the mango basket between us, making sure none of the precious green fruits rolled away.

The road was bumpy and the auto rickshaw moved in mysterious ways. I realized then that I couldn’t drive in India. I would be dead in about five minutes flat. There were no rules; there never had been. You could make a U-turn anywhere, anytime you felt like it. Crossing a red light was not a crime. If a policeman caught you without your driver’s license and registration papers, twenty to fifty rupees would solve your problem.

Everything that had seemed natural just seven years ago seemed unnatural and chaotic compared to what I had been living in and with in the United States.

The breeze was pleasant while the auto rickshaw moved, but the heat and the smell of the mangoes became intolerable when the auto rickshaw stopped at a red signal or for some other reason. There were many “other” reasons: stray cattle on the roads, frequent traffic jams, a couple of Maruti cars parked against each other in the middle of the road as the drivers passionately argued over whose mistake the accident was.

“If Ammamma had only given us mangoes like she did Lata, we wouldn’t have this problem, now would we?” my mother said as the auto rickshaw leaped and jerked over a piece of missing road.