I had heard nothing but this complaint since I got back. My grandmother had given mangoes from the ancestral orchard only to my aunt Lata. This year the harvest had not been good and there weren’t enough mangoes for everyone. My mother was still seething and would probably continue to seethe for the next fifteen years. After all, she was still angry that her wedding sari had cost less than the sari her parents had given their daughter-in-law, Lata, for her wedding.

The battle between Lata and Ma was fought with jibes and remarks. My mother held her head high because my father was the managing director of an electronics company and we lived rather luxuriously compared to Lata. My uncle Jayant was an engineer at BHEL, Bharath Heavy Electronics Limited, a public company where everyone got paid like government officials. Lata and Jayant had a small one-bedroom apartment where they lived with their two young daughters. Ma never ceased to mention how crowded it must be.

My parents had built a large house. They hoped that once my brother and I got married and had children, there would be plenty of room when we came to visit them. But now that I was going to marry an American, I could imagine Ma and Nanna would not want us to visit because then they would be able to avoid the pointed question from neighbors and other family members, “How could you allow this to happen?”

Nate of course could not be counted on to spend much time in my parents’ house once he left for good. Even when I was living in my parents’ house, he was rarely found there. He was now in engineering school in Madras and lived in the university dorm. He came home for the summer but usually found something to do with friends that prevented him from staying at my parents’ house for more than three days in a row.

“The fourth day, there is always hell to pay,” he told me. “First three days she pampers, fourth day she wants to take me to Ammamma’s house and there is Lata there and Anand and his illicit wife… And from then on things start going from bad to worse to really rotten real fast.”