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it.
    I removed my sandals and peeped inside. The living room was empty, but I could hear sounds coming from the womb of the house, resonating with my memories as if a tuning fork had been put into motion.
    One could see to the other end of the house from the front door. All the rooms lay on opposite sides of my line of vision and I saw a smiling Sowmya step outside the dining area next to the kitchen.
    She ran to me and we hugged.

The Politics of Giving and Receiving Gifts
    My grandmother hugged me so hard that I almost cracked a rib. Ammamma had this strange notion that the harder the hug, the more the love. Despite the discomfort, the subtle smell of betel leaves and cloves that clung to her body pervaded my senses and I soaked the smells in. This was familiar territory and at that instant it didn’t seem so bad to be back.
    I knew that today or tomorrow, literally, I would have to tell them all about my plans for the future, and about the man in my life of whom they would wholeheartedly disapprove. But for now Ammamma was hugging me the way she always did and it was enough.
    My aunt gave me a perfunctory hug. Lata and I never got along, to a great extent because of the cold war between Ma and her. I didn’t have any feelings toward her, good or bad—I just thought of her as my very beautiful aunt about whom I didn’t feel one way or the other. I remember, when I was around fourteen years old, my uncle Jayant got married and I had showed off to all my friends that I was getting a very beautiful aunt.
    I was not wrong; Lata was beautiful. She was tall and walked like a “graceful deer”—so everyone said—and she was fair. Unlike me, she was very fair. Fair somehow always meant beautiful and having darker skin was a flaw. I got my father’s dark color, my mother always said, clicking her tongue disapprovingly, and Nate got her fairer skin. According to Ma, that was my bad karma. A boy could get a good wife irrespective of how he looked if he was financially viable; for a woman, however, physical appearance was important. My dark skin color, Ma felt, could pose a problem when the time came to find me a suitable husband.
    Nick was heartily amused when I told him how my own mother had discriminated against me because I was dark. He couldn’t see the subtle differences between the various shades of Indian dark, which made the situation even more preposterous to him.
    “All Indians are dark,” Nick pointed out. “Compared to say a Scandinavian . . . what chance does your mother have of being called fair?”
    But my mother was fair, fairer than most, and everyone including her talked about how beautiful she had been when she was young. Just like a marble doll, they would tell Nate and me. Then they would look at me, make sad sounds, and sympathize with Ma: “Too bad your daughter didn’t get your looks.” I was raised under the limelight of a mother whose beauty was long gone, but hardly forgotten. Today my mother could not be called beautiful. Her face, along with the rest of her body, had puffed up and any remnants of beauty were submerged by obesity.
    Ma blamed her weight problem on birth control pills. They did the damage, she would accuse, as if eating mountains of white rice with lots of fat smeared on it was not responsible for the abundance of fat tissue in her body. She also blamed the doctor who had prescribed the criminal birth control pills to her almost twenty-seven years ago.
    “That quack, gave me these awful pills and look . . . When you get married, Priya, no birth control pills, just have those babies and then . . . ask your husband to have a vasectomy, ” she advised.
    Unlike most Indian men, Nanna didn’t care that Ma wanted him to get a vasectomy; he had never been that much of a chauvinist but what rankled and even amused him was Ma’s reason.
    “In case I die and he marries again, I want to make sure his new wife doesn’t have any kids, so that you both are taken care of and not