A Good Indian Wife by Anne Cherian

Author:Anne Cherian
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2008-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

BY THE TIME OONA LEFT, it was past three-thirty and Leila set off immediately to meet Rekha. Every walk still contained the thrill that she was on concrete instead of sending up small squalls of mud. The cold air that pricked tears out of her eyes was so different from the sticky warmth back home. She shook her head. She had to stop thinking of India as home. This was her home now and she was beginning to own it. Just last week the painters had finished with the apartment building across the road. The old cream was gone, replaced by pale blue, but she would always know that original color.

Tall apartment buildings, stuck together, gave way to houses, and she saw people weeding gardens, gathering leaves into piles, snipping flowers whose blooms had faded. A dog walker picked up the pile just deposited by a golden retriever, though the odor still lingered. She increased her pace. She had looked up the address on the map and been fooled by the distance. Places always looked closer on paper.

The café was almost empty and she chose a corner seat. The herb tea smelled deliciously familiar, the cardamom evoking Amma’s Sunday-only biryani. Indy used to call it the culinary obstacle course because of the cardamom, cloves, and round, fat peppercorns in the biryani. The rest of the family would have finished eating, and there was Indy, slowly, painstakingly picking through the rice because she didn’t want to bite into one of the spices.

“Sorry I’m late.” Rekha was out of breath. She considered punctuality a crucial difference between Indians like her parents, who were habitually late, and Americans.

“Hi. I was a little late myself. I was actually afraid you might have left.”

“Oh I’d never do that. Just give me a sec and I’ll get something to drink. I’m dying for some brew.”

Leila watched Rekha. She was so confident, chatting with the man behind the counter, dropping coins into a tip jar labeled “Counter Intelligence.” It was obvious that things came easily to her. Including Tim. She had told Leila on the phone that their relationship was “back on track.”

“Leila, I’ve been thinking a lot about you ever since we met and I’ve had a brilliant idea!” Rekha vigorously dissolved the powdered cocoa in her cappuccino. “Well, actually, I have to give Tim some of the credit. I was telling him about you and it suddenly occurred to us that I should do my MA thesis on arranged marriages. Concentrating on the woman’s perspective, naturally. What do you think?”

“I never did a thesis, just exams, so I don’t know what that means.”

“Oh, a thesis is just a long paper. At our school it’s anywhere from thirty to sixty pages. Most students do it toward the end of their second year. But I thought I’d get a head start. And use your know-how, if you don’t mind?”

“But I don’t know much.” An arranged marriage was something one lived, not something one studied, like bugs or Shakespeare.

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