Of Marriageable Age by Sharon Maas

you than you think. She knows more about me than I thought. Who d'you think told me not to worry about the Narain girl? To go to university, get on with my life, and let the whole thing fade out of thought?'
    'Ma? Ma told you that? You're kidding!'
    But Ganesh nodded and there was laughter in his eyes. 'I couldn't believe it myself.'
    'But I thought Ma was the driving power behind the whole thing!'
    'Naw, that was Baba. Ma played along with Baba as long as I made no objections. Then I talked to her and she swung around completely and said don't worry, it'll all work out for the best.'
    'Why didn't you tell me this before?'
    'Big brothers don't discuss everything with little sisters, you know. But you're a big girl now, thirteen, and you get to know grown-up secrets. There's more to Ma than meets the eye. She's on my side and she'll be on yours and help you if you trust her. Ma's pretty devious, you know. She knows how to get her own way.'
    Saroj had to digest this information. The Ghosh boy vanished from her thoughts, which all turned to Ma. She bit into another samosa, closed her eyes and opened her senses, to get the feeling of Ma hidden within the subtlety of taste, and considered in silence. Ganesh's information surprised her, but, after all, Ganesh was a boy, an only beloved son. Of course Ma would take his side, support him in all his plans; that exactly proved the point! Gan's imagination was running away with him — as usual.
    No. Ganesh was wrong. Ma could not, would not, help. Saroj was a girl, and that made all the difference. Childhood was over; it was growing-up time, becoming-a-lady time, and Ma was in league with Baba. And Baba had his own plans for her.
    All her life Baba had been shaping Saroj to fit into the Hindu world, to make of her the tame and biddable daughter their culture demanded, a carbon copy of Ma. He had done it with Indrani, successfully. Indrani was all lined up to marry a boy of Baba's choice, and Saroj was next in line. Up to now Saroj had nurtured hostility within, cultivated acquiescence without. It was a question of survival.
    But now she thought of the Ghosh boy with his protuberant teeth and from her deepest depths the cry rose up, the cry of defiance that marked the precise moment of her coming-of-age, No! I won't!
    No more nodding on the outside and gnashing of teeth on the inside. She knew with a certainty that filled her entire being and charged her with a joyous jubilant strength that she would not, not, NOT bow to a destiny chosen for her by Baba.
    Character is destiny. She said it out loud.
    'What?' asked Ganesh.
    'Character is destiny,' she repeated, and laughed a crazy, wild laugh that made Ganesh drop his grin and stare. Her family's destiny, till now, had been dictated more by culture than by character. Culture had moulded character to fit its own dictates so that culture, character and destiny were intermingled, intermeshed, interwoven into a preordained, predictable pattern.
    Saroj was a single loose thread sticking out. It was her turn to be tucked into the pattern, according to the plan.
    But she wouldn't be tucked in.
    And that meant shaking off everything she had been brought up to be. She would have to peel from her soul every last trace of India, abandon the culture bequeathed to her by Baba and Ma.

CHAPTER SIX
SAVITRI
    Madras, 1921
    T HE A DMIRAL and his wife were too absorbed by their own lives to notice David's absorption with the native girl Savitri. They were happy to have him off their hands and not demanding their attention. The Admiral was wheelchair-bound, having suffered grave spinal, arm and leg injuries when his ship had been torpedoed in the very last throes of the Great War, and had found a new lease of life in writing his war memoirs. All he really needed by way of human company was Joseph, the Christian Indian male nurse, to get him up, dressed and fed in the mornings and to administer the various pills he needed during the day, and Khan, to wheel him