I got an email from Nate with all the family gossip. Thatha was not speaking with Nanna anymore as the last time they talked, which was just a week ago, they ended up talking about me and almost came to blows. Ma was back to normal, bitching and moaning that I didn’t call enough and when I did, she bitched and moaned that I talked too long with Nanna and wasted my money.

“Write long letters, tell everything there, don’t waste money on phone calls,” she said. “Send email, send us a picture of Nick. We still haven’t seen him.”

Lata had ballooned up with her advancing pregnancy and couldn’t wait for the baby to get out. Despite Jayant’s insistence she refused to have an ultrasound done. When I called her, she told me that she thought it was another girl and that she was just fine with that. She even had a name picked out, Nithila, which meant “pearl” in Telugu. If it was a boy, she said, she would go with Abhay, “the one without fear.”

Sowmya was getting married on September 21 and was very sorry that Nick and I couldn’t make it to the wedding. She understood our predicament as our wedding date was set for October 3.

Nanna and Ma were coming and even Nate had decided to make an appearance.

“Your wedding and I won’t be there?” Nate had written in his email. “Are you trying to be funny or something? So, are you going to introduce me to some hot chicks?”

Apparently, Tara, the girl from Delhi Ma would have hated, proved to be unsuitable as she had kissed another boy at a cousin’s wedding in Madras.

“It was just a kiss, she said,” Nate wrote in yet another email where he told me the entire sob story and how much her betrayal had hurt him. “I go for lots of weddings, don’t catch me kissing anyone, just.” But at Nate’s age, relationships come and go with little pain and Tara had already faded into a forgotten yesterday.

Frances was planning our wedding with great pleasure. Nick and I’d caved in and had agreed to a Memphis wedding (a Hindu ceremony followed by a Baptist one) and a San Francisco reception.

It was going to be a small wedding, Frances told me, just three hundred of her closest family and friends and then we could add to that with our close friends and my family.

The invitations were to go out in a few days and I wanted to make sure I sent my parents a personal letter along with the invitation.

The envelope with the wedding invitation, a note from me, and a picture of Nick had been ready for days but I kept forgetting about it. It wasn’t deliberate. Finally, with just a month left to our wedding I dropped the letter off at my company mailroom. The mailroom guy assured me that the letter would reach its destination in five to seven days…

THE MANGO SEASON

Amulya Malladi and Priya Raghupathi, a business analyst from New Jersey,

have known each other for many, many years. They went to engineering school

together in India and have remained friends, through job changes, moves to

different countries, marriage, and children. Amulya borrowed Priya’s

name for the protagonist of The Mango Season, as well as some

of her emotions, though that is still murky.

Amulya Malladi: Well, this is vaguely uncomfortable, talking about something that must make sense after the conversation is over.

Priya Raghupathi: Oh, I don’t know, I’ll turn the floor over to you, as the phrase goes.

AM: Ah, but you have to talk about the book and ask me questions about it, because I already did my job. I wrote the book.

PR: Okay, let’s start with the names in The Mango Season. They were all very familiar.

AM: Names as in, the names of the people?

PR: Yes.

AM: Hmm, I did notice that… but later on. I know different writers write differently, but I need to have the title of the book in place. I can think about the book, even write a few pages but if I don’t have a title, I can’t move on. And the title just comes; I don’t work very hard at it. Same with names of characters, my fingers just type the names and I settle down with them. I don’t second-guess myself too much.

PR: We’ve heard all these names in our close circles.

AM: I think I borrowed a lot of names from people I knew. I didn’t realize that I was borrowing your name for Priya until later when I started to read the blurb of the book and saw that she went to Texas A &M and so did you. I did get some hints when Priya’s brother’s name started out to be your brother’s name but I changed it without thinking much. And maybe there were connections that came from our time together in Hyderabad, as Neelima was also the name of your roommate (and I didn’t realize that until right now). I did quote another classmate of ours, Sudhir, in the book and used his name. Ashwin, Priya’s father’s name, came from an ex-boyfriend’s brother’s name. Ah… the list is endless.

Even, Priya’s boyfriend’s name came from an unusual place. One of my husband’s friends had a baby boy and they didn’t give the kid a name until he was almost six months old. And I think I was working on the book when my husband told me they finally named their son Nicholas. And I used it.

I don’t “steal” names consciously. Later on I can draw lines and make sense of it, but right then and there… it’s just something that works out.

PR: You also have a lot of references to the Bay Area and Hyderabad, places you’ve been. Do you write only about places you’ve been to? Even in your first book, you wrote about Bhopal, a place you were familiar with.

AM: I think it’s easier to write about a place you’ve lived in. The research element definitely shrinks and you can write more confidently. I also feel I have an obligation to write about a place I’ve lived in. I have moved a lot in my life, as a child and even as an adult, and I just feel that it would be such a waste if I wouldn’t write about the places I have lived in.

My third book, Serving Crazy with Curry is set completely in the Bay Area, while the book after that is going to be set entirely in India in this small town by the Bay of Bengal that I was familiar with when I was a child. And now that I live in Denmark, I feel I must write a book set in Denmark with Danes. After all, I am so intimate with this society, not just because I live here, but also because I’m married to a Dane.

PR: And I also think because you’ve lived in these places you relate with them and don’t make up stuff.

AM: I don’t mind making up stuff, especially about a place. After all, I’m writing fiction, not a travel book. But I’d rather not make up stuff.

PR: I guess writers do write about places they know. Hemingway did go to Spain a lot when he wrote his books with that backdrop.

AM: Even Naipaul does that. He writes about Africa and Indian immigrants who live there. Amy Tan writes about American Chinese characters who live in China and the San Francisco Bay Area. Maybe writers like to revisit the places they have lived in, the experiences they have had there.

For me writing The Mango Season was like taking a trip to India. I’d forgotten how good chaat tastes, or how good ganna juice tastes and when I was writing about it I could all but smell that sugarcane juice. I miss sugarcane juice! I remember how you and I would get off the bus from college and eat roadside chaat and indulge in a tall glass of sugarcane juice. Our mothers were never too pleased about us eating and drinking that junk. Never stopped us, though, even when we fell sick because of it.