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Kiran Deshpande: Where Are You From? I have lanced many boils, but none pained like my own. INDIAN ADAGE

I’m never sure what people want to know when they ask me: “Where are you from?”

The question doesn’t offend me, as I’m curious about people myself. I’m fascinated by the origins of family trees, the land and seas over which seeds migrate, cross-pollinate, and germinate anew.

In my thirty-two years, I’ve traveled to all fifty United States, lived in ten of them, in every American time zone, most since I left home for college at seventeen and never moved back. A modern gypsy, I’ve developed an ear for accents. I’m charmed by different cadences. It’s a game for me to place them, to listen for the fish out of water.

“Is that Texas I hear?” I ask with a smile—always a smile, the universal ambassador of goodwill—of a lady in Juno, Alaska.

I never ask that slippery little devil, you know the one: “Where are you from?”

Sometimes, I envy people who can answer this deceptively simple question in two words or less. “Jersey” or “Chicago,” “New Orleans” or “Southern Cal.” People who’ve lived most of their lives in a single state, sometimes even a single town. People whose physical appearance or last name is unremarkable.

I don’t fall into any of these categories.

When I get this question—not an everyday occurrence, but I get it more than most—I’m never certain what information the person seeks. Is it the origin of my own mid-Atlantic accent? My heritage? My married name (read off a credit card, a check, or a name tag)?

To cover the bases, I supply all three. Probably overkill, but I figure the desired answer’s somewhere in here: “My parents emigrated from India in the 1960s when my father went to medical school at Harvard. I was born in Cambridge but grew up outside of Washington, D.C. My husband’s last name is Italian.”

If I answer with a genuine smile, I almost always receive one in response, which strengthens my belief in karma.

 

A guy once told me I looked like Disney’s Princess Jasmine, except my boobs weren’t big enough. For the first four years of our marriage, I assumed he exaggerated on both counts.

Princess Jasmine is prettier than I am, but she isn’t bigger than a B-cup, thankyouverymuch.

In retrospect, as I reflect on his statement (something I do less as time goes on), I wonder if he meant my boobs weren’t big enough for him. This would be a logical con- clusion after coming home early to find his face sand- wiched between a pair of D-cups. Silicon D-cups, which is my professional opinion as a practicing physician, not just another ex-wife whose husband screwed around on her.

I am wondering about this today as I appreciate the latest and greatest “water bra” in the Victoria’s Secret dressing room. It’s the first week of December, and I’m almost finished with my holiday shopping, so I’m splurging on a few things for myself. The water bra has a lovely effect, I must admit as I turn from side to side. I take it off and decide I look great, with or without the bra. I’m young. I’m healthy. My body is well toned. Nothing sags.

So why am I crying?

A tissue box sits on a ledge, as if my meltdown is not an isolated phenomenon in these dressing rooms. I thank whomever for the forethought and mop my face.

Why are you crying? I ask the woman in the mirror. You have everything going for you.

Yes, but where will it go from here? the woman replies. And with whom?

I turn my back because I can’t bear to look at her anymore, but I can’t leave either. Not like this. Once I was stuck in a stairwell after I lost a patient. I couldn’t come out until I regained control, couldn’t risk the family seeing me that way. They count on me to be strong when they’re weak. But who’s strong for me when I’m weak?

The woman in the mirror mocks me because she still looks so young, yet for the first time, I feel the acceleration of time. It doesn’t seem so long ago I turned twenty-two, med school and marriage my dreams. Now here I am a decade later, a doctor, married and divorced. I’ve crossed thirty, and I’m afraid if I blink, I’ll be staring at forty, looking back on today.

“It seems like just yesterday I fell apart in the Victoria’s Secret dressing room,” I’ll say as I recollect the days when I had perky breasts.

Stark reality presses against me, a cold stethoscope on my bare skin. I cringe and shiver, hug my arms, rub my goose bumps. The truth is I am terrified. Of squandering my precious time on this earth. Of wasting what’s left of my youth. Of turning the big Four-O and looking back with regrets.

I’m a family doctor. Every day, I see families. I want a family, too.

I’m healthy and vibrant now, but with each passing year, my eggs age. I’m tired of wandering. Tired of my gypsy existence as a traveling doc, temporarily filling in where there’s a need. Tired of running away from the fact my foolish heart betrayed me as much as Anthony’s cheating.

I yank two more tissues from the box and discover they’re the last ones. Isn’t that life? One day the tissues run out.

So what’s your strategy with the tissues you have, Kiran?

I don’t want to freeze my eggs. I don’t want to visit a sperm bank. I don’t want to be a single parent, if I have any choice in the matter. I want a nuclear family. I want to put down roots, to let my seeds germinate, to watch them bloom and flourish. Not one day, if and when I ever fall in love again, but now. While I still have my youth, damn it.

I glance over my shoulder at the puffy-eyed woman in the mirror. Slowly, I turn and face her. There is a solution, if she’s willing to keep an open mind, to think with her head this time, instead of her heart. I take a deep breath, hold it, and nod. And right there in the Victoria’s Secret dressing room, in my yuppie-chick equivalent of a midlife crisis, I allow myself to contemplate something I always deemed impossible, dismissed as cold, archaic, backward. The mate-seeking process that served my parents, most of their Indian-immigrant friends, and generations of ancestors for centuries.

An arranged marriage.

Leaving the shopping carnival of Georgetown Park, I stand at the intersection of M Street and Wisconsin Avenue and wait for the walk signal. You’d think I’d be done with malls, but no. When I got my driver’s license at sixteen, Georgetown was the place to hang out, and for me, it’s never lost its appeal. I love the shops and restaurants, the inter- national and academic atmosphere, the colonial architecture. Whenever I’m back in town, I make a pit stop here on my way home. It grounds me.

I walk up the brick sidewalk to 33rd and Q. It’s been five years since my last visit, but my ritual’s unchanged. If I can get a space, I parallel park near my dream house, a Tudor that resembles a gingerbread house, its fence and gate laced with a jungle of ivy, trimmed to reveal the pointed tips of cast-iron rungs as straight as spears. When I graduated from high school, in addition to throwing a penny in the mall fountain and making a wish, I put a note in the mailbox on Q Street asking the owners to please call me when they wanted to sell the house. I hoped by the time they were ready, I would be, too. I’m still waiting.

With my purchases—a red poinsettia in green foil and white roses with sprigs of fern—ensconced in the passenger seat of my Saab, I take Key Bridge across the muddy Potomac and cruise down the G.W. Parkway toward the ’burbs. I’m tempted to stop—and stall some more—at one of the scenic overlooks (make-out hot spots). Instead, I crack the windows, crank the heat, blare the Goo Goo Dolls to calm my nerves, and force myself to keep going.

I’m so not looking forward to this. As if it isn’t hard enough coming home with my tail between my legs, the thought of approaching my parents with my brainstorm makes it that much worse. I already know what’s in store. The Mother of All Lectures. The Granddaddy of I-told-you-sos. A lifetime of smugness. Vindication they were right and I was wrong in my decision to marry Anthony . . . If only I’d listened to them . . . Blah blah blah . . .

No matter how old I get or how much respect I garner from the rest of the world, to my parents, I’m still an exasperating, recalcitrant child whose ear requires constant twisting. And in their world, I feel reduced to one. Which is why I avoid them as much as possible, and why I feel like a runaway coming home.

In my hometown of Potomac, Maryland, I almost run a stop sign that wasn’t there five years ago. I slam on the brakes. The seatbelt pins me. I lunge my right arm out to catch the poinsettia before it takes a header. Too late. The plant sails off the seat, smashes into the glove compartment, and skitters under the dash, dumping black soil all over the cream floor mat and filling the air with the scent of damp earth.

Excerpt 2

Do you believe in omens?

I try not to as I drive through town, inventorying the new superimposed over the familiar. Widened roads. Bulldozed trees. New traffic lights at the intersections of new
neighborhoods. A parade of 5,000-square-feet-plus homes squashed together on tiny, impeccably manicured plots. Luxury townhouses offer a smart alternative for those who can’t afford sticker prices over one million dollars but want the amenities. Lots of dinky old homes, squatters on primo acreage, have been demolished, replaced with monoliths. I
imagine the former owners cashed out and headed south. Gone, too, is the mom-and-pop service station where I dropped off my car for repairs, billed to my father’s account,
and a mechanic gave me a lift home in a tow truck. A twelvepump Mobil with touchless carwash now gleams in its place. Still, while much has changed, much remains the same.
The salmon brick building of my high school. The golden arches of Mickey D’s where we snacked after school and sports events, our home away from home. The 7-Eleven
where we tried (no dice) to buy California wine coolers. The white picket fence of Shady Creek Stables where I learned to ride on a gentle mare named Shokie who had a penchant for carrots I tucked into my pockets for her. These and other landmarks greet me like old friends.

As I anticipate each twist and turn of the winding twolane road that takes me home, I feel a strange mix of connection and detachment. Home isn’t home anymore. I don’t live
here. I’m a visitor. A near stranger to my folks. Even mor than when we cohabitated. They converted my old bedroom into a guestroom a while back, I heard. I wonder which of my photos they keep on display, if any, and where they stashed the ones they removed—like my wedding pictures. How appropriate is it that the great philosophers the Goo Goo Dolls should choose this moment to sing my theme song, “Iris”? I join them and belt out the lyrics.

A mile away, I kill the music and raise the windows. As I pull into the driveway, my fingers tighten around the steering wheel, my muscles stiffen like the onset of rigor mortis, and I ask myself for the millionth time if it’s really worth the grief.

I’m sorely tempted to sneak around back and climb the trellis to the second-story roof outside my bedroom window where my friends and I used to steal away in high school and puff Marlboro Lights. (I quit cold turkey my sophomore year in college—during finals, which I don’t recommend—but if there was a cigarette in my car right now, I sure as hell wouldn’t waste it.) I wipe my clammy hands on my jeans and pop a stick of gum into my mouth.

Okay, Kiran. You’re a big girl. You almost went into emergency medicine. You handle drug overdoses, spinal taps, emergency C-sections, and broken bones with nerves of steel. Surely, you can face—Tap-tap-tap! Raps on my driver’s-side window startle me
mid-affirmation.

“Kiran! Is that you?”

My memory banks struggle to match the familiar, boisterous voice with the woman beaming at me. I press a button and lower the glass. It’s the chunky gold pendant that dangles from long strings of tiny black-and-gold beads on her sutra—Hindu wedding necklace—that cinches what should have been obvious.

“Saroj Auntie! I didn’t recognize you at first!” What’s different? “Your hair! What a cool new do,” I blurt, as if I’ve been M.I.A. for five weeks instead of five years, then sheepishly add, “Or, uh, is it just new to me?”

One of my mother’s oldest and dearest friends, Saroj Chawla, has known me since birth. “Why, thank you.” With a hand, she props up the mop of curls, cropped into a chinlength bob that suits her buoyant personality. “It is a new do. To go with my new body.” She grins and steps back, unbuttons her full-length, camel-colored coat, and whips it open
like a flasher. I realize she has shrunk several dress sizes, shape-shifting from plump to voluptuous. “I lost fifty pounds on the South Beach diet.”

My jaw drops. “No way.”

She laughs. “Yes, way.”

Somehow, “South Beach” and “Indian” have never gone together in my mind. What’s Indian food with no rice, bread, potato—? I nearly gasp. “No samosas?”

“Not in the beginning. Now, everything in moderation.”

“Whew. Thank goodness.”

My favorite Indian appetizer, the triangular potato-and-pea- stuffed pastry is one of Saroj Auntie ’s specialties. Not only is she a culinary genius but, luckily for the rest of us, she owns one of the premier catering services in the D.C. Metro Area, possibly the eastern seaboard. She started it back in the Boston Days. That’s how they refer to them, those early years in the States when my father and her husband were poor grad students on academic scholarships, my father at Harvard and Sandeep Uncle at M.I.T. My dad says, “We were poor, but we didn’t know we were poor, so we were happy.” From their stipends, they supported their new brides and sent what savings they could to family in India, where every dollar made a significant contribution toward groceries, health care, clothing, education, rent, or utilities. As the story goes, every day Saroj Auntie packed
Sandeep Uncle ’s lunch in tiffins—round, stackable stainless steel containers holding different dishes. Indian Gourmet to Go. Before long, Saroj Auntie garnered a reputation as an excellent cook, and as word spread, others began asking for lunch tiffins and offering to pay.

Sandeep Uncle was dead set against his wife doing anything that could be construed as work for hire, a huge bruise to his ingrained masculine caveman-hunter-gatherer-protectorshould-provide-for-woman pride, but Saroj Auntie appealed to his sense of manners and hospitality. She convinced him it was far worse to refuse requests for her cooking. Such refusal reflected poorly on them, and indeed on Indian culture, in the cases of Americans who expressed interest. As immigrants, they were India’s cultural ambassadors, after all. And since it was unrealistic to foot the bill for the ever-growing number of requests, what choice did they have but to accept payment? With much grumbling, Sandeep Uncle caved in. As her business grew, he continued to grumble, especially since his professional success grew as well, but Saroj Auntie persisted,
and won.

I congratulate her on her latest victory and climb out of the car. She gives me her customary big squishy hug, mashing me against her ample chest, but despite all the I’m-Okay-You’re-Okay motions, I can’t shake the niggling embarrassment of a patient in a hospital gown, her bare bottom showing out the back slit. Even if Saroj Auntie doesn’t know the sordid details of my falling out with my parents (mum’s the word with dirty family secrets), being one of Mom’s best friends, she knows enough. And she knows that I know she knows, even if neither of us openly acknowledges it. The December air is sweet and invigorating, cold enough for our breath to steam but not for our teeth to chatter. I pull on my leather jacket, leaving it unzipped, and we linger to catch up a bit before going inside. She updates me on the Chawla clan, and I give her the highlights of my upcoming assignment in Georgia. Belatedly, I register the B.M.W., Mercedes, Lexus, and Volvo S.U.V. parked around the culde- sac and wonder if my mother’s having all her Indian friends over. Uh-oh . . .

“Is the—” I catch myself before I say “Hindi-Bindi Club,” the age-old nickname we offspring gave our mothers’ gatherings when we were little. “Are all of my aunties getting together tonight?”

“Yes, yes, everyone’s coming, but we didn’t know you were home. Or, no one told me.” She plants one hand on her hip, the same endearing gesture I remember since childhood. “Do I have to scold your mom?”

The thought makes me smile. A wry smile. I doubt anyone’s ever scolded my mother. They would have no reason. Unlike me, she ’s never misbehaved in her life, to my knowledge, and I’d be shocked if anyone told me otherwise. “No, Auntie. Mom doesn’t know. It’s a surprise visit.”

“Oh.” A slight pinch around her eyes. A wince? Before I can be sure, it’s gone. “Oh! What a wonderful surprise!” She claps.

Okay, I’m nervous again, my performance anxiety compounded by the awaiting audience. I’m not sure if it’s better or worse to have the aunties witness my homecoming, not sure how I’ll be received by my mother, let alone the Hindi-Bindi Club en masse. I expect I’ll be the proverbial pink elephant in the room.

Saroj Auntie sighs. “Too bad Preity isn’t flying in sooner, and staying longer. But she ’ll be here the day after Christmas, with hubby and the little ones.”

“Mom mentioned that.” Woo-hoo. Indian Barbie and Corporate Ken, home for the holidays. Could this possibly get any better? I force up the corners of my mouth. “Can’t wait.” Taking my hand between hers, Saroj Auntie gives me a there-there pat-pat. “You kids scattered all over the map, didn’t you? Preity in Minneapolis. Rani in San Francisco.” She names others who have left the area. “So hard to keep in touch with your busy lives, isn’t it? I’ll give you Preity’s email. Drop her a note later tonight. Let her know you’re home. She’ll be so excited.”

Ah, the forced kinship of the second generation. I smile and nod, like we all learned to do. Make the appropriate noises. Shift my weight from one foot to the other. Pray Saroj
Auntie doesn’t come up with the brilliant idea to call Preity tonight and put me on the phone—put us on the spot—like the old days.

There’s an assumption—or is it an expectation?—among some Indian-immigrant parents that because they are so tight with each other, their children are likewise best buds.

Or should be. In my experience, not speaking for anyone else, that isn’t the case. Foisted on each other because of our parents and shared heritage, we’re friendly acquaintances
more than friends, per se. Cousins, not siblings.

“Come. Come,” Saroj Auntie says. “I’ve monopolized you long enough. Your parents will be so happy to have you back.”

Maybe, maybe not, I think as I airlift the sole surviving roses and sling my purse over my shoulder. I’ve never been an angel like her Perfect Preity. Just ask my parents, who live to compare me with such exemplary role models. “Why can’t you be more like so-and-so?” So-and-so was most often Preity Chawla. The only reason I wouldn’t call her a Mama’s Girl is the fact she ’s a Daddy’s Girl, too.

Rani, on the other hand, was just as close to her parents without the nauseating perfection. She was my saving grace, a foil to Miss Goody Two-Shoes, especially during her goth stage. WiBBy, I called her. Weirdo in Black. I could always counter Preity’s shining example with Rani’s, though this seldom appeased my mother, who attributed all of Rani’s transgressions, as she saw them, to having an American father.

“This is what happens when we compromise our values,” she would say, though never directly to Uma Auntie, the one who committed the alleged compromising in marrying Patrick Uncle. Theirs was a “love match.” Gasp!

Uma and Patrick McGuiness date back to the Boston Days, too. Uma Auntie did her Ph.D. at Boston College, where she was best friends and housemates with Patrick Uncle ’s sister, Colleen. Colleen’s family lived in nearby Charlestown, and they adopted Uma Auntie. She and Patrick Uncle got to know each other over time, very slowly, very innocently, because traditional Indian thought dictated: Good Indian girls don’t date, nor do they choose their own husbands.

And a well-bred, upper-caste Hindu girl choosing to marry out of caste, out of religion, out of country? Baap ré. Loose translation:Oh, Lordy.

It was the double move, India to Boston, then Boston to D.C., that cemented the friendships of our parents. And for the mothers especially, having daughters within a year of each other. First came Preity (naturally), then me, then Rani.

Growing up, we had a weekly playgroup. After we started grade school, our moms ditched us and lunched on their own. Always, our families gathered every month or two for a weekend shindig, and, often, we celebrated major holidays together.

The “Indian friends circle” included others too, but our three families—Deshpandes, Chawlas, and McGuinesses—formed the core, a hub with spokes.

“Are Rani and her husband going to be here?” I ask.

“Mom didn’t know, last we spoke. Something about a gallery exhibit?”

“Right, right,” Saroj Auntie says. “There was some mixup with dates and whatnot, but they worked it out. Uma Auntie and Patrick Uncle are flying out there, then everyone’s
flying back here together in time for the holidays.”

“Good,” I say. A buffer between Preity and me.

I was thrilled to learn from my mom that Rani’s recently gained commercial success with her modern adaptations of Warli art, a primitive Indian village style that resembles ancient hieroglyphics. Her husband’s kind of an odd duck, but then Rani’s always been on the eccentric side herself. He’s great for her, I hear. A good catch,my mother says, a marked change of tune, making me wonder if she means it as passive-aggressive dig: Even Rani, of all people, married better than you.

Excerpt 3

I remember when Rani first brought her then-boyfriend home from college for the holidays, something none of us ever dared: introducing a boyfriend/girlfriend to the Indian friends circle. The aunties and uncles still hadn’t recovered from her turning down Stanford for Berkeley (blamed on the American-heathen influence of Patrick Uncle, naturally) when she announced to a kitchen full of bug-eyed aunties, “He’s a computer geek, but he ’s my geek, and I’m crazy about him.” Judging from their reactions, you would have thought she said, “That’s right! He ’s great in the sack!”

Never have I seen a group of women more in need of an economy-sized bottle of Valium. (Note: I wasn’t around to see my mom tell the aunties about Anthony and me.)
Together Saroj Auntie and I walk toward the arched entryway and walnut double doors. To the west, the cherry lollipop of the setting sun glows between the pine trees. My
father planted the row of trees along the property line the summer before I went to college, each a wimpy Charlie Brown Christmas tree look-alike. Now, treetops soar above our two-story house, limbs intertwine, needles blanket the grassless ground, and the brisk scent of a forest perfumes the winter air.

So many years in the blink of an eye.

“Will you stay until the New Year?” Saroj Auntie asks as I ring the doorbell. I have a key, but it doesn’t feel right to use it. “I’m not sure yet.” Depends on how long I can stand the whiplash between past and present, especially since my older brother Vivek won’t be here. He and his wife Anisha opted to spend this round of holidays with her family in Houston since they were here with his for Thanksgiving. Vivek is my parents’ favorite, by a long shot, which I would resent, except he’s my favorite family member, too.

“If I knew you were coming home, I would have brought your favorite samosas.”

“Oh, Auntie. Did you have to tell me? Now I’m craving them.”

She winks. “I’ll drop off a care package.”

My scowl turns upside-down, and my inner child emerges with a high-pitched “Thank you.” Just as I hug her, my mother opens the door.

My smile freezes. My entire face feels encased in a plaster cast.The prodigal daughter returns pops to mind but stops short of my mouth, for once.

The first thing I notice is that her hair is shorter, too. Short-short. And sassy. Very unlike her personality. Saroj Auntie squeezes my shoulder. “Special delivery for Yashwant and Meenal Deshpande,” she says in a singsong voice. “Will you accept your parcel, madam?”

Lamely, I thrust out the roses, hoping she ’ll see them for what they are, an olive branch. My hands keep steady—from my training—but inside I’m shaking, evidenced in my voice.

“I-I was just in the neighborhood . . .”

My mother’s wide eyes mist, and her chin dimples like an orange peel.

My gut clenches in apprehension. Don’t cry, Mom. Please don’t cry. I can’t handle her tears. Never could. Growing up, the rare times I witnessed a single teardrop, I didn’t even
have to know the cause to blubber right there on the spot. Blinking, she takes my peace offering only to hand it to Saroj Auntie, then locks her willowy arms around me in a
tight embrace. She feels different somehow, I can’t pinpoint why, but she smells the same. Of clove shampoo and Johnson’s baby powder. Of warm cooking spices and sandalwood incense. Of her. Of home. And just like that, I remember every childhood injury she nursed, every boo-boo she kissed, every time she was there for me when I needed her. Blocking out the times she wasn’t, I close my eyes and hug her back. She loves me, even if it doesn’t feel like it most of the time, even if I don’t live up to her unrelenting expectations.

My mother loves me, and I love her.

Whatever else happens, I must not forget this moment. Just because people don’t love you the way you want, doesn’t mean they don’t love you the best they can.

Nine aunties turn out, a great showing for a weeknight, everyone comments. Though they’re as sweet and solicitous as ever to me on the surface, I catch their furrowed
brows, their anxious glances between my mother and me. They seem to hover over her. More than just lending a helping hand. Protective. Worker bees guarding their queen.
Do they think she needs protection from me?

At the thought, I feel small, hurt, guilty. In their eyes, I’m the bad guy. The Bad Daughter. Outnumbered, I shrink from the crowd.

It’s my mother who rescues me, coming to stand beside me, the most popular girl in school befriending the outcast on the playground. Taking me under her wing, she rubs a hand over my back, eyes sparkling, nose wrinkling with her contagious smile.

“It’s so good to have you home,” she says, loud enough for everyone to hear.

“Thanks, Mom.” My voice comes out hoarse, strained.

I’m sorry it took so long, I want to say to her, but not with nine pairs of ears listening.

We stand like that a moment longer, an island in the Sea of Aunties, then she gives my arm a squeeze and asks, “Will you get the good silver, please?”

I nod, thankful for a task. From the china cabinet, I fetch eleven settings of heavy sterling plates, bowls, and cups, each engraved with meenal deshpande and my parents’ wedding date. I stack them on a side counter in the kitchen while Saroj
Auntie uses hot mitts to remove items from the double ovens, placing them on the granite island per my mother’s instructions. “Smells wonderful, Meenal,” she says, lead vocalist in an echoing, appreciative chorus. You know it’s the truth when it comes from Saroj Auntie. Never one to give false compliments just to be polite, she has no qualms voicing a negative opinion, however unpopular. She can be blunt to the point of rude and flamboyant to the point of tacky, but she ’s so charismatic you can’t help but love her. And she ’s right about the incredible aroma. . . .

Of course, we’ll have to air out the house, but if you’ve ever tasted Indian food, you know it’s worth it. Surveying the buffet, I forget all about samosas. Two appetizers. Three entrées. Four veggie dishes. A thick, hearty stew of daal—lentils. Picture-perfect, separated grains of buttery-nutty basmati rice—basmatimeans “queen of fragrance.” A tower of round, light-brownchappatis—soft, thin whole wheat griddle bread. I’m psyched to see my favorite chicken curry, garnished with fresh coriander leaves that smack of lemon-pepper and ginger. I remember the first time my mother sent me on an errand to the supermarket: It was for coriander. She was in the midst of cooking dinner when she realized she ’d forgotten it. “In the produce section,” she said. I looked but couldn’t find it. No cell phones then, I came home with parsley, which she said was “coriander’s brother” in appearance, but unfortunately, not in taste or smell. Next time we went together, she took me to the elusive herb. Red rubber bands secured crisp green stems into bouquets of flat, fan-shaped leaves. We looked up at the sign: cilantro.

“Still your favorite?” she asks, beside me again.

I nod and wait until Saroj Auntie ’s out of earshot, then confess under my breath, “No one’s as good as yours. No one’s.”

She, too, lowers her voice. “Good, then I’ll leave the world at least one specialty.” She tells me she ’s written this recipe plus a few others with measurements, so I, with my
meager time and more meager skill, can prepare them, should the impulse ever grab me one of these days. I brace for a comment about how Preity has a career, a husband, two children and still whips up a sumptuous home-cooked meal every night, but she either misses her cue or lets it go. “I haven’t made it in a while,” she says, “so you’ll have to tell
me if it’s the same as you remember.”

I sample a bite and fan my open mouth. “Hot. Hot. Hot.”

“Garam or thikhat?” She asks me to differentiate between temperature-hot and spicy-hot.

“Garam.” I fan some more. Swallow. Give the thumbs-up. She smiles and hands me a water pitcher. “Spring water, please.”

I take a gallon from the fridge. “Where ’s Dad tonight?”

“On call,” she says, which means he won’t be home. Yes! Finally, a break!

My father’s a cardiovascular surgeon. When he’s on call, he’s either at the hospital or the apartment he keeps nearby, since every second can mean the difference between life and
death. Unlike my mom, my dad didn’t have a privileged middle-class upbringing in their hometown of Mumbai— think: New York City and Hollywood combined—but what
he lacked in privilege he made up in highly disciplined academic pursuit and a lifelong rigorous work ethic.

He grew up in a two-room apartment—room, not bedroom—the eldest of six kids. Everyone but my dad slept in one room; he slept on the balcony. In a city where rich and
poor and everyone in between live side by side, he learned early on that education was the passport to a better life. With that goal, he rose every morning before dawn to study and prepare for school. His parents never had to nag him; he was self-motivated and competitive by nature. He made a practice of “standing first” in his class, scoring the highest marks, and earned merit scholarships.

When he was twenty, he lost his father to an unexpected heart attack, the reason he went into cardiovascular surgery. Overnight, he became the head of the family and sole financial supporter. “I came to this country with two suitcases and seven mouths to feed,” he says. Over and over and over. (With his rags-to-riches life, he stands first in “uphill both ways” lectures.)

At the sink, my mother is snipping off the ends of the rose stems and arranging the flowers in a tall crystal vase with pale green sea glass at the bottom. She lowers her nose
to sniff the closed buds and smiles, making my heart feel full. Uma Auntie sashays into the kitchen double-fisted, the slender neck of a wine bottle in each hand. With her height—five foot seven—and moss green eyes, she ’s easy to spot in a crowd of petite, brown-eyed Indian women. A professor at George Washington University, she has this commanding presence, sharp intellect, and engaging rhetoric that make you sit up straight and pay rapt attention.

She dresses in a style I think of as “academic chic.”

Today she’s paired a cream ribbed turtleneck with a navy wool blazer and clipped her hair at the nape with a tortoiseshell barrette. While Mom and Saroj Auntie shortened their
hairstyles (I still can’t get over my mom’s pixie cut), Uma Auntie lengthened hers, so it falls an inch below her shoulders. In the middle parting of her hair, she sprinkled sindoor—red vermilion powder—which signifies she ’s married.

“Meenal? Wine for you?” Uma Auntie asks.

“No, thank you.”

“Saroj? Red or white?”

Saroj Auntie eyes the choices, a Riesling and a Zinfandel.

“Red, please.”

“Kiran?”

I look at my mother. Even after I turned twenty-one, she still instructed me—and only me, not Vivek—to abstain from alcohol in the company of Indian friends. She coached
me to refuse any offers with: “No, thank you. I don’t drink.” That was before I married an aspiring rock star—complete with a shoulder-length PONYTAIL, small gold loop EARRING, and TATTOO of a cross over his heart—whom  met at a club in SoHo that fateful summer after I graduated from Princeton, before I started medical school at Columbia. Yes, I know. Where ’s that copy of Smart Women, Foolish Choices when you need it? Not that it would have changed the outcome.

Until a drop-dead gorgeous man writes you beautiful poetry, plays Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata on a baby grand piano for you by candlelight, and serenades you with love songs in the shower, I don’t expect you can fully empathize with my (hard) fall from grace.

Since I’ve caused her enough grief, it doesn’t kill me to wait for some sign from my mother—parental permission—before replying to the booze question. It’s the little things,
Vivek advises me to concede. Small signs of deference go a long way.

My mom inclines her head. Go ahead if you want.

I want. I extend a wineglass by the stem. “White, please.” We form an assembly line and load our plates to take into the dining room. I serve myself as my mother taught, using
my left hand and spooning each dish into its proper place. Meat at ten o’clock. Lentils at eleven. Condiments like chutney, lemon, mango pickle, and a pinch of salt disperse across the outermost twelve region, cold veggies and yogurt due south. Warm veggies nestle between one and three. Rice or chappati at six.

Fried fish, which we don’t have, would take the nine o’clock spot but can shift inside (next door to meat and lentils) when dessert snags nine, a rarity at our house where “desserts are rewards, not side dishes,” my mother insists. That is, unless her mother visits from Mumbai. According to my traditional aji—maternal grandmother—a properly served, well-balanced meal includes all six rasas(tastes): sweet, sour, salty, spicy, bitter, and astringent.

Dinner conversation starts with compliments to the chef, then segues to family gossip, books and movies, and current events. No one uses a fork, knife, or spoon. We eat with the fingertips of our right hand, keeping the left hand clean for serving, passing, and holding drinks. I tear off a piece of chappati—the only food-touching act that permits lefthanded assistance—and envelop a piece of chicken, creating a bite-sized morsel. I’m competent at the fine art of Eating With One’s Hand but lack the elegance, the finesse of the aunties in the same way I can stitch up a patient, but I’m no plastic surgeon.

Excerpted from THE HINDI-BINDI CLUB © Copyright 2011 by Monica Pradhan. Reprinted with permission by Bantam. All rights reserved.

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