Just like a marble doll, they would tell Nate and me. Then they would look at me, make sad sounds, and sympathize with Ma: “Too bad your daughter didn’t get your looks.” I was raised under the limelight of a mother whose beauty was long gone, but hardly forgotten. Today my mother could not be called beautiful. Her face, along with the rest of her body, had puffed up and any remnants of beauty were submerged by obesity.

Ma blamed her weight problem on birth control pills. They did the damage, she would accuse, as if eating mountains of white rice with lots of fat smeared on it was not responsible for the abundance of fat tissue in her body. She also blamed the doctor who had prescribed the criminal birth control pills to her almost twenty-seven years ago.

“That quack, gave me these awful pills and look… When you get married, Priya, no birth control pills, just have those babies and then… ask your husband to have a vasectomy, ” she advised.

Unlike most Indian men, Nanna didn’t care that Ma wanted him to get a vasectomy; he had never been that much of a chauvinist but what rankled and even amused him was Ma’s reason.

“In case I die and he marries again, I want to make sure his new wife doesn’t have any kids, so that you both are taken care of and not neglected for the new wife’s children,” she reasoned.

Ma had a twisted mind, Nate and I deduced, but we agreed that her motives were noble. Nanna I am sure felt insulted for being told that he didn’t love his kids and that if Ma wasn’t alive he would discard us as easily as he would marry another woman. “Radha, you just don’t have enough faith in the universe,” he would always say to Ma when she went on her pessimistic rants.

Seeing the family again after seven years was like being slammed in the solar plexus. My center of gravity had shifted and I worried about losing my balance, both physically and emotionally.

It was difficult coming home and facing my parents and now the rest of the family. Especially when I knew that they would not be happy, to understate their feelings, when they found out about Nick.