I pulled out fifteen rupees from my purse and gave it to him. “I will give this to you now and my mother will give you another fifteen,” I told him and he looked at me quizzically. I got into the rickshaw and asked him to drive to my parents’ house. “And don’t tell my mother that the price is thirty, just fifteen. Accha?”

The auto rickshaw driver winked at me. “Take it easy, Amma, apun can keep secret,” he said as he hitched his pants up to his knees and started the scooter of the auto. “Vroom-vroom… to your castle, hain?”

I gave the man directions and he drove, chuckling to himself. When we reached the gate of my parents’ house, I asked him to wait while I went to get my mother. The rickshawwallah didn’t listen to me and even before I had set foot on the road, he honked three times, loudly enough to wake up the dead.

Ma came out of the house hurriedly, responding to the honks, wearing a red and yellow cotton sari, and my eyes took time to adjust to the bright colors. I didn’t like knowing that I had to adjust to India -it was absurd. I was Indian, yet everything seemed only vaguely familiar. I couldn’t remember how I used to feel when my mother wore a sari that made her look like a large Tequila Sunrise.

With the help of the auto rickshaw driver we put the twenty kilos of raw mangoes in the auto rickshaw. Ma and I squeezed on the slightly torn brown vinyl seat with difficulty, our legs hanging limply on the side of the large straw basket. I put a cotton bag with a change of clothes between us, along with a bag of gifts I brought for the family, and got ready for a bumpy and uncomfortable ride.

“Now, if Ammamma wants to give you something, just take it, okay? ” Ma told me. “But if she gives you something very expensive, like jewelry, then,”-she paused and shrugged-“ask me if you can take it.”

“And what’ll you say?”

“I will ask you to take it,” Ma told me irritably. “But that doesn’t mean you have to take it right away. Nothing wrong in showing some reluctance.”