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thin lock of hair tumbled out of place, over one eye. He was not a tall man, and his mustache was neatly trimmed in a thin bar, like my brothers’. An impression was all I had: dignity, kindness, intelligence. Maybe even humor.
    Why did I get the needy, ingratiating charmers and oafs instead?
    Hari-prar checked his Seiko—a present from a customer whose smuggled Toyota he’d fixed—and asked for the check.
    “You want to insult me? You think I’d charge you money when you have brought me however brief a presence of this lovely lady?”
    We gathered our umbrellas and flashlights. The rest of the night seemed unstoppable and unbearable. Threehours or more in soggy clothes in an over-air-conditioned hall, men copping feels in the chilly dark, mice scurrying under seats for warmth.
    “Arvind!”
    I clutched my flashlight.
    “So, you do think she’s a temptress? You took so long we thought she’d failed the test!”
    The stumbler floated toward me.
    “What is your name?” He asked the question in English. He asked it in a very soft voice.
    “Arré,” Arvind-prar objected. “You know her name already.”
    But the voice kept welling over me. “Does she talk? What is your name?”
    “Answer him!” Arvind-prar ordered. “She is all the time talking, we can hardly shut her up.”
    “Shut up,” he said, not unkindly, in Punjabi. “She is blushing. She is a woman of fine sympathies, not like you blockheads. You are blushing. Are you afraid of me? There is time to talk. I saw you worry, back there, when I stumbled. It was instinctive, wasn’t it? Don’t talk. Don’t say a word. I want to be surprised when I hear your voice.”

12
    T WO weeks later we were married. I wore Matajis red and gold wedding sari, which was only slightly damaged by mold, and in my hair the sweetest-smelling jasmines. Ours was a no-dowry, no-guests Registry Office wedding in a town a 250-rupee taxi ride south of Hasnapur. Vimla, who was engaged to the son of the Tractor King of our district (he imported Zetta tractors from Czechoslovakia and was supposed to have illegal bank accounts all over Europe), accused us of living in sin. I showed her our marriage certificate, but she shook her head. She said, “It isn’t for me to say anything like this, I know, and of course the papers nowadays are full of caste-no-bar-divorcees-welcome matrimonial ads, but it seems to me that once you let one tradition go, all the other traditions crumble.”

    She and her fiancé were holding off their marriage till he was twenty, because of their horoscopes. “What is the sacrifice of a little bliss now for a guaranteed lifetime?” Just because you’re clever in school doesn’t mean you can ignore your fate in the stars, she reminded me. I’d already had my warning, which I succeeded in blocking (“Believe an old fool?” “What does he know? Ha!”) every time the memory of the banyan tree and the old man came over me in the night.
    My husband, Prakash Vijh, was a modern man, a city man. He did trash some traditions, right from the beginning. For instance, in Jullundhar, instead of moving in with his uncle’s family, as the uncle had expected us to—Prakash had lost his parents in a cholera epidemic when he was ten—he rented a two-room apartment in a three-story building across the street from the technical college. His uncle fussed: “In the old days we had big houses and big families. Now nobody cares for old people,” and his aunt wept: “Your wife is so fancy that our place isn’t good enough for her?” The Prime Minister was destroying ancient values with her vasectomy program and giving out free uterine loops.
    But Prakash remained impatient. “There’s no room in modern India for feudalism,” he declared.
    For the uncle, love was control. Respect was obedience. For Prakash, love was letting go. Independence, self-reliance: I learned the litany by heart. But I felt suspended between worlds.
    * * *

    He wanted me to call him by his