Nate had spent three days with me and had escaped on a hiking trip in the Aruku caves with his friends the day before our pickle-making ritual.

“But I planned this six months ago,” he lied easily when Ma threw a tantrum. “I can’t back out now.”

Nate and I had a good relationship. We communicated regularly via email and he and I spoke on the phone if my mother was out of earshot on his end. There was no sibling rivalry between us. Nate was ten years younger than I, and we believed that he was too young and I was too old to feel any rivalry. Because of the age difference, there was no race for the attention of my parents. We were family and we fought over HAPPINESS and other assorted food items and philosophies, but we acknowledged the fact that we both had spent time in the same womb, and accepted each other, flaws and all.

My father had sneaked off to work this morning in the car despite Ma’s nagging and she lamented about that as well. “Couldn’t he have taken the day off?” she said when the auto rickshaw stopped in front of my parents’ house. “Now we will have to take an auto rickshaw to Ammamma’s house, too.”

“He’s taking tomorrow off,” I said as I helped her haul the large basket of mangoes inside the veranda, after she paid the auto rickshaw driver with the grace of a kanjoos, makhi-choos, scrooge, scrooge, who would suck the fly that fell in her tea.

“Now go change; wear something nice,” she ordered as she collapsed on a sofa.

The electricity was out. For six hours every day in the summer, the electricity was cut off to conserve it. The cut-off times changed randomly but were usually around the times when it was most hot. Today seemed to be an exception, because instead of cutting off the electricity from eleven to one in the afternoon, they had taken it out at eight-thirty in the morning.