Along with the firm advice that I shouldn’t commit suicide was the advice-or rather the order-that I shouldn’t have sex until I was married and that I should marry the man of her choice, not mine.

Even though I was raised in a society where arranged marriage was the norm, I always thought it was barbaric to expect a girl of maybe twenty-one years to marry a man she knew even less than the milkman who, for the past decade, had been mixing water with the milk he sold her family.

I had escaped arranged marriage by coming to the United States to do a master’s in Computer Sciences at Texas A &M, by conveniently finding a job in Silicon Valley, and then by inventing several excuses to not go to India.

Now, seven years later, I had run out of excuses.

“What are you looking forward to the most?” Nick asked, as we were parked on the 101-South carpool lane on our way to the San Francisco International Airport.

“HAPPINESS,” I said without hesitation.

Summer, while I was growing up, was all about mangoes. Ripe, sweet mangoes that dripped juices down your throat, down your neck. The smell of a ripe mango would still evoke my taste buds, my memories, and for a while I would be a child again and it would be a hot summer day in India.

There was more to a mango than taste. My brother Natarajan, whom we all called Nate because it was faster to pronounce, and I, would always fight over the sticky stone at the center of the mango. If Ma was planning to chop one mango for lunch, the battle for the stone would begin at breakfast. Sucking on the sticky stone while holding it with bare hands was the most pleasurable thing one could do with a mango. Nate and I called the mango stone HAPPINESS.

HAPPINESS was a concept. A feeling. Triumph over a sibling. I had forgotten all about HAPPINESS until Nick’s rather pertinent question.