Mahalingam

Manufactured Destiny

By Vaidhy Mahalingam

When I returned home from the lab for lunch, Rukmini was bent over the small kitchen counter, her sari wound tight around her and the end tucked into her waist. She was flipping through her thick and worn-out spiral-bound college-ruled notebook, sticking Post-it notes on random pages.

That could mean only one thing—intense kitchen duties on the weekend. Surely, she would call her people from her Berkeley Hare Krishna community for Saturday lunch to be followed by a kirtan, a raucous and ecstatic session of devotional chanting and singing. To fuel the singing and raptures, there would be Tupperware-loads of ghee-infused vegetarian food, and lots of it. All singers would be twenty-something Caucasian folks like herself, all sincere Hindus with archaic scriptural Hindu names. Not one would be a half-assed modern Hindu like me, all of them aspiring to be idealized Krishna devotees of medieval Bengal. It had taken me a while, but I had warmed up to their orthodox practices by then. However, I was content staying at a safe distance from their ‘Vedic way of life,’ being a PhD in engineering and all.

I had met Rukmini two years earlier as a clueless grad student with an empty bank account and a week to go before the next stipend. A top-knotted devotee in Sproul Plaza had handed out a flier advertising ‘free vegetarian Sunday feasts,’ and that had brought me to her Hare Krishna temple. Possibly her proselytizing instincts identified me in the crowd, and she invited me to a kirtan event at her house, like the one she was planning that evening. At that kirtan, I had impressed her with my domestic sensibilities, I suppose, which led to courtship and, eventually, our wedded bliss. So, my gradual progression into a trusted kitchen assistant and into Saturday’s predicament was destined.

No complaints. Along with the fragrant chai in front of me, I consumed my opinions and options with a smile. My world hadn't judged me, and I returned the favor.

Rukmini spoke to the notebook, “Haven’t seen your friend Chuck in a while. What’s up with him?”

“Busy, I guess. You know he wrapped up his MSc, right? He started at a new job in the City, oh, about a month ago. Everyone and their mothers seem to be joining these new dot-com startups nowadays. It is a feeding frenzy over there.”

Chakradhar Shastri used to be a perennially hungry graduate student, like I was. Our labs were on the same floor. I invited him home once out of kindness, and he developed an expertise in finding reasons to knock on our door during dinner time. But lately, those knocks had dwindled.

“Ask him to be here for lunch on Saturday?”

“Uh, sure. But why?”

“Just make sure.”

“Is it his birthday or something?”

Rukmini smiled and peeled off another Post-it note.

Her demeanor told me I shouldn’t take it lightly, so I picked up the phone.

“I would love to come over,” he said. “Tell her if she promises to make those fabulous rava dosas of hers, I will call in sick and head over right now.”

We were setting up some folding chairs in our small backyard. These were the same ones we used inside, too; we had little else besides my old futon from grad student days, now a full-time couch, in the way of furniture in our house. Even when put together, her bank teller’s pay and my postdoc stipend didn’t stretch too far. I covered my old work desk with a cheap paper tablecloth and set up the paper plates and plastic utensils.

Amid the usual gang in full Hare Krishna regalia, there was a new face. A dark-skinned girl, probably twenty, staring blankly at something beyond the redwood fence at the back. Rukmini gently placed her hand on the girl’s shoulder and brought her over to me.

The girl’s shalwar kameez was poorly cut from an extravagantly patterned fabric apparently designed by a color-blind Cubist on LSD, but her piety was clearly exhibited through the rosary-like kanthi mala on her neck and the delicate smear of sandalwood paste on her nose.

“Honey, this is Shweta. Make a plate for her and seat her please; I will be back,” Rukmini said.

The demure girl was content inspecting her own feet with great attention. I nudged a chair towards her; she smoothed the tail of her kameez and accepted the offer. I grabbed a paper plate, arranged a pair of vadas and a pair of idlis, topped them with a dollop of chutney and handed it to her.

“New to Berkeley?” I asked her.

“Yes, yes. New to America. Came last month only. My uncle … has business … in … in … Oakland. I stay in his house.”

“Nice! One sec … Rukmini is calling me,” I said. I rushed back to the table where Rukmini was setting up the lemonade pitcher.

“Hold the seat next to Shweta till Chuck comes, OK?” Rukmini said.

Only then did I notice a tiny mischievous flush in her cheek. How awkward! Chuck was my friend. Wasn’t she taking a tad too much liberty here, even though she had adopted him as her favorite little brother? Was he even ready for this? Anyway, not knowing what else to do, I sat next to her, as instructed, and made some discreet inquiries. I knew no Telugu, so we had to make do with broken English, spoken slowly. She had met Rukmini at the Hare Krishna temple. Rukmini Auntie was so, so, nice to her. She was missing her village in Srikakulam district, Andhra Pradesh, terribly. And there seemed to be something shady in her visa status.

“... She is new here; she doesn’t know anyone. You are also Telugu, right? Why don’t you talk to her?” I overhead Rukmini’s voice and looked up; she was bringing Chuck over.

“Shweta,” I said, taking the cue. “This is my friend from school, Chakradhar Shastri. We call him Chuck, though.”

“School? Where? In Andhra?” Her eyes lit up.

“Uh, no. University, here in Berkeley. We call it ‘school’ here.”

“Oh.”

“Hi Shweta,” Chuck said. Did I notice a deliberate American mispronunciation of her name?

“But Shastri garu here is from Andhra too,” I said, getting up from my chair. “Chuck, let me go get you some of those vadas. Be right back.”

As I started towards the table, I sneaked in a quick peek behind me. His gaping mouth confirmed that he had figured out what was going on and was not happy about it. More out of curiosity than compassion, I hurried back with a snack-laden plate. I pulled up another chair and sat facing them. The conversation flowed like molasses from a tipped jar. Even though Chuck was a ‘born and brought up in Andhra’ boy, he was resisting conversing in their common native tongue, deliberately trying to keep Shweta within the uncomfortable confines of English.

“Where did you go to school … er, college?” Chuck asked.

“No, no … I pass high school only.”

There was no self-consciousness or diffidence in her tone when she said this.

“Oh,” said Chuck. There was a finality in the tone, like a bureaucrat’s rubber stamp’s thwack, marking a permit application as ‘REJECTED’.

And with that interjection, all opportunities for further conversation between the parties were sealed permanently.

Despite her deep immersion into Indian culture, or rather a fringe version of it, a white woman like Rukmini could not have known better. Perhaps one should have been raised in India to understand; it is hard to get these nuances by growing up Hindu in an American commune. This attempted setup between a wannabe millionaire upper-caste, Berkeley PhD, fair-skinned boy and this dark, under-educated village girl had no chance of success. Fortunately, Shweta was too naïve to understand what had been arranged for her. If she had understood, I do not know how she would have reacted to this absurd attempt to upgrade her life, or at least her visa status.

For several long minutes, all we heard was the sounds of chomping of vadas and idlis and the rasps of chutney being swiped from paper plates. Shweta seemed to have found once again whatever she had found very interesting in her toes a half hour ago. Chuck, probably more socially adept than the two of us, excused himself and went in pursuit of the fabled rava dosas, specially made for him.

I didn’t hear about Shweta again until about a year later. The newspaper had measured but lurid details about her restaurateur uncle in Berkeley, who had been nabbed for immigration fraud, and worse. The black-and-white photograph showed a balding man being escorted by police officers.

“Hope they lock him up for a long time.” Rukmini’s voice was gentle, yet steely.

I looked up from the paper.

“Whoa! I haven’t heard this side of you before!”

“Do you know what he did to Shweta? His own niece?”

“No, I don’t. What did he do?”

Rukmini’s succinct complement to the newspaper story clarified that the uncle’s relationship with his niece was exploitative in the extreme.

“Poor girl. So simple, so devout. She and Chuck would have made such a nice pair. I really wanted them to click. Both were from Andhra, spoke the same language …”

I also didn’t mention that, in a phone call after the day of the party, he had confided in me that he abhorred the idea of arranged marriage—a manufactured destiny. He wanted to marry for love, to pursue love. And the intro had discomfited him, as Shweta was not his type. By ‘type’, did he mean ‘caste’ and/or income and education stratum? I was not an expert at these things.

To my wife, I said, “Yes, there were some compatibility problems, I think.”

“We should find someone for him.”

“We shouldn’t! He is dating. He reconnected with this waspy Scandinavian Literature grad student he knew when he was in the international student dorms.”

She looked at me with wide-as-saucer eyes.

“What?” she yelled. She rolled up the newspaper I was reading and started whacking my head with it. “What? Chuck has a girlfriend, and you never told me? You beast! You horrid, horrid beast! When do I get to meet her?”

I called Chuck to tell him I would be in hot water till he brought over his girlfriend for dinner.

Now, Hannah and Rukmini really clicked. Hannah was an expert in French cuisine and had had stints as a sous chef in various high end Bay Area restaurants. So it was not surprising at all they connected fabulously over food. Many fragrant hours passed as Rukmini trained Hannah on vegetarian cooking, while Chuck and I spent silent hours watching ball games on a muted TV. The four of us hung out a lot. This continued for four years. By that time, Chuck had bought a penthouse condo in the city, and I was still using a futon for a couch.

It was a little misunderstanding that allowed Rukmini to get the answer to a question she had never dared to ask Hannah in all those years.

As soon as I opened the front door, Rukmini hollered at Hannah to come over to the kitchen and join her. She had two pots on two burners, one with the makings of labda and the other with chorchori. The lesson was apparently to tease out the differences in the two related stars of Bengali vegetarian cuisine. Hannah came in and stood with her hands in her jeans pockets, leaning over the range, taking in the redolence of organic California-grown vegetables getting cooked in the exotic panch phoran.

A few minutes later, Chuck walked in and spoke, half inflated, half deflated. “Hey! You guys didn’t say anything.”

Rukmini asked, “About what?”

Chuck looked at Hannah and said, “You didn’t tell them about the big news?”

Hannah spoke sans effervescence. “No, not yet.”

That is when Rukmini saw the ring on Hannah’s finger.

“Oh! Oh! Oh!” Rukmini screamed, “You have a ring! A ring! And here you are … standing around … watching me boil potatoes. You guys! When were you going to tell me the big news, Hannah?” She ran to get something sacred from her shrine in the puja room, bubbling with joy.

Hannah and Chuck exchanged bewildered looks. When Rukmini came back, beaming like a lighthouse, Hannah said, “Thanks, Rukmini. But, uh, that was not the big news.”

Rukmini's eyes shone. “Oh! You have a date? When? Where?”

Hannah had to break it to her gently. “No, that is not it either. Chuck wanted to tell you about the new car.”

“New car?”

“Didn’t you notice the new car when you waved us in?”

Rukmini probably couldn’t tell the difference between a Honda Civic and a Bentley if they were the same color.

“Uh, no,” she said, perplexed.

I peered out of the window. “Now that you mention it, I see you have a new Beemer,” I said.

Chuck seemed crestfallen. “What the heck, dude? How could you not have noticed it?”

Rukmini dropped onto the futon like a sack of potatoes. “So that was the good news, then? Congratulations, I guess. Enjoy your new car.”

Something tickled her senses, she wrinkled her nose, and she called out to me, “Honey, can you turn off the stove?”

“Hey, looks like the veggies got slightly charred a bit at the bottom,” I called out from the kitchen.

“Perfectly acceptable for a chorchori,” she said. “A little charring brings about the perfect marriage of the local vegetables and Indian seasonings wonderfully.” Turning to Hannah, who was sitting quietly next to her, tucking her hands to bury the ring between her thighs, she said, “Tell me about the ring now.”

You could read between the lines of Hannah’s ‘gotta follow stupid traditions’-flavored nonchalant discourse. She had become impatient and had applied pressure on Chuck. He gave in, if only to delay the next step. A ring was purchased. No one kneeled, no skywriters were involved, and Hannah wasn’t exulting in her victory.

Rukmini gently prodded, “Picked any dates for the wedding yet?”

“To be determined,” she said, and looked wistfully at Chuck for directions. His counter-expression seemed well rehearsed.

I figured out what was ‘to be determined’ would not be easily determined. Chuck confided in me once again. It was about his conservative Brahmin family in the village. They had fixed someone up for him. Same village, caste, clan, etc. Mentioning Hannah would not go too well over there; his mother would likely threaten to jump into the well in the backyard. Much care was needed to break open this topic.

Fortunately, for that night, all we had to break open were the soft fluffy luchis the ladies had made. We used them to scoop up delicious chunks of subtly charred vegetables. With some selective reckoning and a decision to end the night with a tub of organic artisanal mango-pistachio frozen yogurt, we settled ourselves into a place of joy; we laughed all the way to Whole Foods and back, ensconced in fine-grained leather seats.

Two months later, a knock came on the door at a late hour, accompanied by the deep despondent sobs of a woman on the other side. Rukmini had received the distress call an hour earlier. The joy had melted into this.

Now Hannah was weeping in her arms, mascara streaming down her cheeks and unbrushed long blond hair.

Just last Sunday, as he said his goodbye at SFO, Chuck had twiddled with her ring in the airport, pecked her on the cheek and told her he was going to sort it all out with his folks. He would be back in a couple of weeks with a date. He was aiming for a Hindu wedding in his village, with the blessings of his clan.

She got a call, and a wedding date was mentioned. In the past tense. He would return as a married man. He was talking from a pay phone in hushed tones.

He had told her he was sorry, but he had no choice. They weren’t meant to be. He asked her to take all her stuff away from his place before he returned, and that was it.

In these kinds of sticky situations, we all have to choose sides. Most of our common friends sided with Hannah and cut off Chuck. After all, he was the ‘bad guy’ in the story. For us personally, it was hard because we had been close to Chuck for a long time, even before Hannah came into the picture. Hannah stayed with us in our house for a while, recovered, and caught up with her career, which she had previously neglected. She went on to work as a vegetarian haute cuisine consultant for three- and four-star restaurants in Napa Valley.

I got to talk to Chuck the day after he returned from the fateful trip. Through another friend, he had booked a honeymoon suite in a fancy hotel where the newlyweds would stay for a couple of days. He told his bride that they should wait for an auspicious day before they stepped into his house together. Exploiting those two days, he snuck back into his apartment to make sure it was clear of all evidence: no pictures on the dresser, no panties under the bed and all that. He had his condo professionally cleaned; generously sprayed Lysol everywhere to hide possible traces of suspicious fragrances. Used all his engineering brains. He called me to let me know he was going to mail some of Hannah’s stuff he had found. Probably books, pictures, and sundry, don’t know—a substantial box arrived in the mail a few days later.

I told him she was staying with us and was in an awful state.

He sounded a bit perturbed. He said, “Yeah, it’s a major mess. But stuff happens. She will get over it. She is American. They are emotionally tough, not softies like us Indians. They are used to dating and breaking up, getting through boxes of Kleenex at a therapist’s office, rinse and repeat. She will be fine. Our world is more fucked up.”

I tried to be hard on the softie. “Hey, but what about you? You guys have been together for how long now? Five years? Come on, man, she even took those Bollywood dance lessons in Fremont. I totally believed, like, you guys were time-stepping towards a choreographed filmi ending. Like, you were meant to be together for seven lifetimes. How could you, man? How could you?”

“Yeah, you could see me as a total asshole for doing this to her, but I think it is for the better in the long run. For her and for me. She will move on,” he said.

In my San Francisco high-rise office, I was surprised by a call from him. How had he found my number after eight years of disconnect? We quickly got done with the clumsy greetings.

He followed up with a strange request. “Do you still have any old pictures with me and Hannah?”

“Really? Don’t tell me you are trying to rekindle some old flames.”

“No, no, quite the opposite. I want to close some unfinished old chapters. You know I married Indu, right? Of course you do. Our marriage started off rather shaky. She is a simple village girl with limited English skills, and America was a strange new place where she had no friends at all.”

So he had married a Shweta, who was an object of his condescension once. But this one perhaps redeemed herself with her caste and skin tone.

“It is hard for her to meet people. You see, most of my friends are American,” he said.

I could imagine. Chakradhar didn’t become ‘Chuck’ without reason.

He continued, “She had become extremely insecure; paranoid, actually. She was having panic attacks. I shouldn’t have mentioned Hannah. Was it guilt? An attempt at coming clean? Don’t know, perhaps it was stupidity. This was not a Hollywood movie. She is a simple Indian girl. She couldn’t understand.”

“No? I hope you have been understanding.”

“Perhaps more so now, but wasn’t so much in the beginning. But I had always been patient with her, even if not understanding. We have started going to a therapist. It is helping. I think. My idea, that. I found a good Telugu-speaking counselor. Now Indu is adamant that she should see a picture of Hannah and me together. The therapist says I should help her with this. So …”

“Let me go home and check. I think Rukmini ripped out all your pictures from our albums. She was so mad when you dumped Hannah.”

“I was a jerk, wasn’t I?”

I didn’t answer.

“It’s OK if you don’t find any,” he continued.

“I said I’ll try. But I am curious. What is your story now? What do you tell your wife?”

“I told her I was young and foolish. I was lonely. I got tempted.”

“Sounds reasonable, I suppose. But Indu must have questioned you about betraying Hannah, no?”

“I told her it was just a fling. We were not really in love. I think she is beginning to believe that.”

“Come on, seriously! For five years? Forget Indu for now; what’s the real story? The one you tell yourself.”

“Seriously! That is the truth. You see, this is what happened. I went home; the family arranged a trip to my uncle’s place in Emani. We were all there, and there was all this pressure. I was played. Indu was a distant relative, so it was all within the family. Planned since her birth. The horoscopes matched perfectly, etc. I was trying to figure out how to wiggle out of the god-awful mess. I had gotten into it way over my head. And then a random elderly ‘uncle’ comes along and becomes the voice of progressive thoughts in the village. He suggested they should ‘allow’ the youngsters to talk to each other in private for a bit and see if they liked each other. Maybe this ‘liking each other’ was the toehold I needed to climb out of the hole.

“I borrowed a cousin’s motorcycle, and we drove down a few kilometers away from the reach of the village ears and eyes; all the while I was thinking hard about whether to break the news to her or use Uncle’s free pass. We were sitting on the steps of a small devi temple on the banks of the Krishna River. We were surrounded by rice paddies and banana groves, and a cool afternoon breeze was whistling through the betel vines climbing up areca nut trees. She had little to say; she is not very educated. Supposedly, she was fond of cooking, but it was in her own limited way—you know, standard Andhra Brahmin dishes. There was no curiosity or excitement about America; it was so foreign to her she did not even know what to ask about life there. Yet … and yet, we were sitting there clumsily juggling our words and gazing into each other’s eyes and it was already evening.

“The eloquence of my own Telugu astonished me; I had hardly spoken a word in that language for years. A bright orange sun was descending through a pall of cow dung smoke into the lush fields of paddy and the Western sky was slowly darkening to the rhythm of the bells of a distant ox cart. I could smell my childhood, feel my roots under my feet. We had been ‘talking’ for hours. ‘They probably think we must have eloped’, I joked.

“It was then I knew this was the girl I could fall in love with. This was not about fun. This was love and sharing life. The real thing. I wanted to marry for real love, not for conquest. With Indu, I could have a bond, a bond that tied itself to innumerable other bonds that positioned me in the universe. It had to be her. The connections were too profound. I couldn’t possibly let go. I had to give this love a chance. I owed it to myself to ...”

His ‘eloquence’ and poetry were wearing me down. I told him I had to run for a meeting.

“Sure, sure … tell akka I always hope she will forgive me one day and feed me those divine rava dosas again. OK? Bye.”

And I left wondering why I, a South Indian Brahmin like him, had married Rukmini. A white woman for conquest or an orthodox Hindu for real love?

Vaidhy Mahalingam came to the USA from India for graduate school, completed his PhD in Naval Architecture, and had a 29-year career in the tech industry. In retirement, he spends his time cherishing moments with his family and putting into words the stories that have lived in his thoughts for years. His short stories have been featured or are scheduled to be featured in Arkana, Pembroke Magazine, Ginosko Literary Journal, MudRoom, and Umbrella Factory Magazine.