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forgot Mummy, his anger, the fear that somehow he would be coerced into marrying while at home. All he could think of was Tattappa reciting long passages from the Ramayana . Telling him how a British bullet had blasted off his little finger during the fight for Independence. Cheering Neel on at every basketball game. When asthma racked Neel’s knobbly young body, only Tattappa’s presence had brought comfort.
    “Let’s get another opinion. I’ll fly you to the States. We’ll get the best oncologist to check you.”
    “Calm down, Suneel, you will only to make yourself sick,” Tattappa said. “Your father is virry much like you. He took me to another doctor and that one also did the same exam, poking this way, taking this tissue. Paah! A waste of time. He gave the virry same diagnosis.”
    “Can’t they operate?” Neel asked, though he knew the answer.
    “No. Six months, and if all the days are like today, then I shall to be happy. My grandson is home.”
    “Tattappa, I’d like to talk to your doctors, make sure you are getting the best treatment. And following orders.” He remembered Mummy telling him that Tattappa was being difficult.
    “You can talk to the doctor, why not? But right now he has gone home to his village to see his father. You see, everyone is going to their families.”
    They turned back, Neel dragging his feet as if that would somehow slow Tattappa’s cancer.
    “Suneel, we have left your mummy virry upset. Maybe you can see some of the girls they have arranged for you. Only to make peace in the house while you are with us.”
    “Please, not you, too, Tattappa. You know I don’t want an arranged marriage.”
    “You have never come out and said it, but yes, that I know. But also it is not good to live alone for too long and I am only a little worried that you are not yet married.”
    That makes two of us, Neel wanted to say, but he could not suddenly confide his personal life and desires to Tattappa. They had never discussed marriage, not even during the last disastrous visit when Mummy went around the house with a teary, defeated face. Now, surprisingly, Tattappa was implying that he would accept any bride Neel brought home.
    “So you wouldn’t mind if I married an American?” Neel tested Tattappa’s prejudice.
    “It is not a question of minding or not minding. It is simply better to marry one’s own kind.”
    For some years now Neel had analyzed the reasons why he had not met his “own kind” in America. Not a girl Tattappa would consider suitable, but the sort of women his colleagues married. One by one his former classmates at Stanford—Sanjay, Brendan, Victor—had walked down the aisle with a wife who was pretty, well educated, and whose family, seated in the front pew, exuded wealth and power. In their designer wedding gowns and professionally sculpted hair, they had just the sort of pedigree Neel longed for in a partner. Tattappa would neither have understood nor accepted a daughter-in-law named Savannah. “Ahmerican?” he could hear Tattappa shout. “We are Indians. Did I fight away the British only to have my own family spoiled with the blood of a white fahrinner?”
    Now Neel said, “By ‘one’s own kind’ you of course mean a nice Iyengar girl.”
    Tattappa ignored the statement. “Suneel, if you had someone in Ahmerica, you would definitely have made that mention to me. So why not just see one of our girls? I am not asking for you to marry her.”
    “Tattappa, you know how it is here. If I see a girl, Mummy will expect me to marry her.”
    “No, Suneel, even your mummy cannot force you to marry against your wish. Just it will make her happy that at least she is trying her best for you. There will be no fights, no sadness in the house.”
    He was using his illness to blackmail Neel into submission. A sick man needing peace. Neel decided to change tactics. “I don’t think that’s right. Not just for me but also for the girl .” He stressed the last word,