“Tell them I’m a Brahmin from Tennessee,” Nick had joked when I told him that my family would most probably perform death ceremony rituals for me if we were to get married.

Sometimes I imagined they would accept Nick. Why shouldn’t they? He was well educated, came from a good family, made good money-if my parents were to arrange my marriage it would be to someone like him, only he would be Indian and a Telugu Brahmin.

Marriage was on my parents’ minds as well. I had spent my first night in India crushed in a one-sided conversation with my mother regarding my inability to appreciate the ominous situation I was in by being single at my age; while my father and brother watched a late-night cricket broadcast from England. India versus England, and India was most probably on the way to being thoroughly clobbered as Sachin Tendulkar had just got out on a duck score.

“Has she gone from bad to worse, or what?” I asked Nate when I cornered him alone in the kitchen. He was pouring himself a glass of water during a tea break in the cricket match.

“She has gone from bad to worse,” Nate agreed as he patted my shoulder with little sympathy. “Now if you had a boyfriend…” He paused when he saw the look on my face and then shook his head. “American?”

“Yes,” I said glumly, not surprised that Nate should be the one with the golden insight.

“You’re so a dead woman, ” Nate said cheerfully. “When do you plan to tell them?”

“I was thinking at Ammamma’s this Friday when we go to make mango pickle,” I said. “You know, tell the old and the older people all at the same time and get it done with.”

“I’m not sorry I won’t be there for the massacre,” he said grimly. “You know, don’t you, that there will be bloodshed?”

“I know, ” I muttered.