Monsoon Diary by Shoba Narayan

Author:Shoba Narayan [Narayan, Shoba]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Cooking, Memoirs, Recipes, Asian Culture, India, Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780307431486
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Published: 2007-04-01T07:00:00+00:00

ONE MONTH INTO the program, I met my host family. Incoming foreign students were assigned to American families who had volunteered to help us adjust to America and serve as surrogate parents. Mine were Mary and Doug Guyette, who lived in neighboring West Springfield, and their two daughters, Margie and Kathy. They were my window into family life as I attempted to piece together the jigsaw puzzle that was America.

On a chilly October evening Mary picked me up at my dorm and took me out to dinner at a fancy Northampton restaurant along with her teenage daughter Kathy. When she noticed that I was throwing my garbage into a cardboard box, she quietly equipped my room with a wastebasket, table lamp, and a few other essentials that I didn’t realize were essential. Two weeks later she drove me to a giant, sprawling shopping mall, the likes of which I had never seen before, and bought me my first Elizabeth Arden makeup box, a glittering pink-and-gold confection with eye shadows, mascara, lipsticks, and foundation.

When I told my mother about it during our monthly phone calls, she was delighted. “A girl needs makeup and you won’t wear any,” she said. “I’m glad someone is taking you in hand.”

A middle-aged woman with kindly eyes, Mary held a part-time job and was very involved in her church. Her husband, Doug, worked at a bank and drove an impressively large Cadillac. Occasionally he would pick me up on Friday evening and drive me to their house for the weekend. Their elder daughter, Margie, was away in the Peace Corps, while Kathy, lanky and reserved, was in high school.

We would have supper together: salad, bread, rice and beans for me, chicken for them, a fruit tart of some sort, and coffee afterward. At first the conversation was stilted and awkward. They were too polite to probe, and I was intimidated by their accents. I had hundreds of questions—which came first, fork or spoon? how many dates did it take to “go steady”? which trees changed color in the fall? what subjects did Kathy study in high school?—but I concentrated merely on making sense when I did speak.

It was at Mary and Doug’s house that I got my first glimpse of American family life, the soap and suds of it, the gentle grace of setting a table with fork and knife rather than baldly eating with our hands as we did back home; the carpet and ruffled curtains; and “my” bedroom upstairs, which smelled of linen and rose potpourri.

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