Read Arranged Marriage: Stories for Free Online

myself as I make my way down the aisle, in love with the exotic syllables. No problem . I finger my long hair, imprisoned in the customary tight braid that reaches below my waist. Itfeels coarse and oily. As soon as I get to Chicago, I promise myself, I will have it cut and styled.
    The air inside the plane smells different from the air I’ve known all my life in Calcutta, moist and weighted with the smell of mango blossoms and bus fumes and human sweat. This air is dry and cool and leaves a slight metallic aftertaste on my lips. I lick at them, wanting to capture that taste, make it part of me forever.
    The little tray of food is so pretty, so sanitary. The knife and fork sealed in their own plastic packet, the monogrammed paper napkin. I want to save even the shiny tinfoil that covers the steaming dish. I feel sadness for my friends—Prema, Vaswati, Sabitri—who will never see any of this. I picture them standing outside Ramu’s pakora stall, munching on the spicy batter-dipped onion rings that our parents have expressly forbidden us to eat, looking up for a moment, eyes squinched against the sun, at the tiny silver plane. I pick up the candy in its crackly pink wrap from the dessert dish. Almond Roca , I read, and run my fingers over its nubby surface. I slip it into my purse, then take it out, laughing at my silliness. I am going to the land of Almond Rocas, I remind myself. The American chocolate melts in my mouth, just as sweet as I thought it would be.
    But then the worries come.
    I hardly know Aunt Pratima, my mothers younger sister with whom I am to stay while I attend college. And her husband, whom I am to call Bikram-uncle—I don’t know him at all. They left India a week after their wedding (I was eight then) and have not been back since. Aunt is not much of a letter writer; every year at Bijoya she sends us a card statinghow much she misses us, and that’s all. In response to my letter asking for permission to stay with her, she wrote back only, yes of course, but we live very simply .
    I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. All the women I know—my mother, her friends, my other aunts—are avid talkers, filling up lazy heat-hazed afternoons with long, gossipy tales while they drink tea and chew on betel leaves and laugh loud enough to scare away the ghu-ghu birds sleeping under the eaves. I couldn’t ask my mother—she’d been against my coming to America and would surely use that letter to strengthen her arsenal. So I told myself that was how Americans (Aunt Pratima had lived there long enough to qualify as one) expressed themselves. Economically. And that second part, about living simply—she was just being modest. We all knew that Bikram-uncle owned his own auto business.
    Now I look down on the dazzle-bright clouds packed tight as snow cones, deceptively solid. (But I know they are only mist and gauze, unable to save us should an engine fail and the plane plummet downward.) I pull my blue silk sari, which I bought specially for this trip, close around me. The air feels suddenly stale, heavy with other people’s exhalations. I think, What if Uncle and Aunt don’t like me? What if I don’t like them? I remember the only picture I’ve seen of them, the faded sepia marriage photo where they gazed into the camera, stoic and unsmiling, their heavy garlands pulling at their necks. (Why had they never sent any other pictures?) What if they hadn’t really wanted me to come and were only being polite? (Americans, I’d heard, liked their privacy. They liked their lives to be smooth and uninterrupted by the claims ofrelatives.) What if they’re not even at the airport? What if they’re there but I don’t recognize them? I imagine myself stranded, my suitcases strewn around me, the only one left in a large, echoing building after all the happily reunited families have gone home. Maybe I should have listened to Mother after all, I say to myself. Should have let her arrange that marriage for me with