How ironic! There was a time when I couldn’t wait to see Masi, when I hung on her every word. But that changed the winter after Vinnie left for college.
I flipped open my battered MacBook and adjusted the screen. I had spent the whole morning obsessively cleaning the house, as if someone were actually coming over. I’d even washed and waxed my car—washed the dog too, since I had the garden hose out. But it was only a virtual visit—she was going to see my face and shoulders, and approximately ten square feet of wall behind me, total. I put my bottle of Poland Spring down by the laptop, clicked my Zoom window open, and waited for the tone to ring.
I couldn’t even exchange ten words with the woman, and now, for Vinnie, I had to beg her for handouts.
The singsong tone rang loudly, nearly making me choke on my gulp of springwater.
The video chat window popped open. “Answer with video?” it asked politely, and I clicked OK.
I expanded the video window to full-screen and waited for the screen to refresh.
“Mini? Are you there?” a familiar voice said. It killed me how much she sounded like Mom, when no two women were ever less alike. “I can’t see, beta.”
“Just give it a minute, Mallu Masi!” I said. “It’ll come up soon.”
And there she was. Mallika Motwani, in the flesh. Dark shoulder-length hair with classy caramel highlights, her fine-featured face a younger, feminine version of Nanaji’s. She had a huge pair of very stylish glasses perched on her nose. Hello? Who wears sunglasses indoors? Apparently she wears anti-glare glasses so she can bear to look at a computer screen.
She pulled them off to reveal wide brown eyes, just like Mom’s—and mine. I noticed Masi’s had a few more lines around them than I remembered.
“There you are! Mini!” She smiled. The office behind her was tastefully decorated. Was that a real M. F. Husain hanging on the wall? For all I knew, the master artist had been a personal friend of hers or something. She certainly didn’t have to spend an hour vacuuming and mopping and picking up, like I did. No, Mallu Masi had a live-in housekeeper, a driver, a cook, a gardener for her penthouse terrace garden, a massage lady (I kid you not), and sundry other specialized servants. Some of this isn’t out of the ordinary for even middle-class India, but Mallu Masi was definitely not middle-class.
I nudged the wet mop gently away with my toe so it wasn’t visible leaning against the ten square feet of wall behind me.
“You look great, Mini,” she pronounced. If I didn’t know better I’d have said that her cheerfulness sounded a bit forced, just like mine. I wiped the sulky look off my face and tried for a genuine smile. It wouldn’t do to look rebellious if I was trying to get something out of her.
“Thanks, Masi,” I said. “So, Vinnie’s wedding is most probably going to be on August twenty-eighth.” No point beating about the bush. “And she really needs a wedding lehenga. I know it takes months to custom-embroider one—but is it possible to get one off the shelf?”
She ignored me completely and asked a question instead. “Who is this boy Vinnie is marrying? Why didn’t anyone tell me about him?”
“We didn’t know about him either, Masi.” I forced myself not to sound impatient. Vinnie had been over this with her, surely. “Vinnie kind of sprang it on us, you know?” I tried to steer the conversation back to the lehenga. “Um, Vinnie is going to be home next week. Could we pick a few options for her to look at? And did you get my email with her measurements?”
“Yes, yes.” She waved one bejeweled hand. “I got the email. Don’t worry, we’ll fix Vinnie up. And we can look at everything I have in stock next week—whatever she wants. But what about the boy? Is he… nice?”
“Yes, he’s nice.” I didn’t know Manish well enough to give him a ringing endorsement, so I went over his basic résumé instead. “He’s a doctor. He’s twenty-seven years old. He was one year ahead of Vinnie in med school. He’s a second-year resident, at the same hospital where Vinnie is doing her residency.”
“But where is the family from?” she prodded. “Has anyone checked them out?”
She called Vinnie exactly once a year, and now she wanted to “check out” the family of the guy she was marrying. What next? Was she going to arrange a marriage for me?
“They’re from Newton, Masi,” I said. “Newton, Massachusetts.”
“No, no, where are they from in India?” Masi said.
Oh, that.
“They’re, uh… Tamil?” I said, trying to remember what Shoma Moorty had said. “His name is Manish Iyer.”
“Iyer!” she said, her face clearing. “Yes, they’re Tamil. TamBrahms.”
I probably looked confused because she added, “It’s short for Tamil Brahmins.”
“Okay,” I said. Not that I cared about caste or anything, but it felt oddly nice that someone had a clue about where Manish’s folks were from, geographically speaking. Apart from Newton, Massachusetts, that is.
“They’ll probably want her to wear a Kanjivaram sari for the wedding,” she said.
“What’s a Kanjivaram sari?” I asked. I’m always interested in fabrics, and though I knew a lot about saris I hadn’t heard that term before.
“They’re very rich handwoven silk saris,” she said. “Like a South Indian version of Benarasis. You know what those are, right?”
I did. Mom had some. One of them even had real gold thread woven into the border.
“Aren’t they kind of heavy?” I asked.
“They are,” she said. “I’m not sure Vinnie can handle that. She should wear a Punjabi lehenga—one of mine, of course—I can make it as light as she wants. The wedding customs should be from the bride’s side of the family, no? After all, we’re hosting.”
“About that,” I said, remembering how the moms at Ace talked about the movie where
