“That nice boy in Cheee-cah-go,” she continued, “he was perfect. But you didn’t want him. You don’t want anyone, all nakhras you have.”

Here we go!

“Ma, the nice boy in Chicago had a girlfriend, an American girlfriend. He didn’t want to get married and was only agreeing to talk to girls to get his parents off his back.” I repeated what I had told her three years ago when the same matter had come up.

Ma shook her head. “All boys wander a little and I am not saying that being with one of those Christian girls is good, but he would have said yes.”

“I wouldn’t want him to, ” I exploded. “He was living with this woman. They had a relationship going on for three years. I wasn’t going to marry a man who was in love with another woman.”

“Love, it seems, is very important,” Ma said sarcastically. “He was making eighty thousand dollars a year. Do you know how much that is in rupees?”

“I make eighty-five; do you know how much that is in rupees?” I countered.

“You didn’t three years ago,” she shot back. “He must be making so much more now. All that money…” She clicked her tongue and started giving directions to the driver instead.

I leaned back and closed my eyes. Another week and a half, just another eleven days, and I’ll be out of here. I repeated it to myself like a mantra.

My grandmother’s house had always been a home away from home, a place where my mother couldn’t always dominate and coerce. A home where I was spoiled often and where not all of Ma’s rules applied. I had played in this house since I was born, and as we got close to it, I immediately recognized the smells emanating from the streets and the surroundings. It was a blow to my olfactory senses that even after seven years I still knew how this place smelled and how the air tasted.

The house stood on a large premium plot of land in the center of the city. Coconut trees grew around it and there was a well that had been used for years in the old-fashioned way to draw water. The well now had a motor pump that extracted water from the ground and filled the overhead tanks, but evidence of the old ways hung on the well in the form of a piece of old frayed coconut rope dragged over a rusty metal pulley.