There’s change shifting in the air, and I don’t know how I feel about it.

That night, my fingers itch as I sit next to Dadu in the dining room. She’s peeling and cutting vegetables for tomorrow’s meal, and I’m doing my homework while music plays in the background.

“Dadu?” I tap my pencil anxiously against my textbook. I’ve felt off all day, and even counting backward in my head hasn’t helped. “When you met Dada, what was it like?”

My grandma fumbles with the potato she’s peeling and stares up at me from beneath her glasses. “When I met Dada?”

A part of me feels bad for bringing it up. Talking about Dada is a sore topic. I see how deeply she misses him every day, because all of her sarees are white in mourning. One day, when I was visiting her in New Jersey, I came across an entire closet full of colored sarees with a thin layer of dust coating them. I never asked Dadu about them, but it made me horribly sad to know she’d locked away the color in her life.

“Yeah,” I say, spinning my pencil between my fingers. “What was it like when you first met him?”

“Myra.” Dadu’s eyebrows pull together. “Your Dada and I had an arranged marriage.”

It’s probably stupid to compare an arranged marriage to an arranged tutoring situation. No, it’s definitely stupid. But it’s the closest way I can think of to relate to my grandma right now, so I press forward.

“I know. That’s why I’m asking. You were just thrown into the situation together, right? What was your first impression of him?”

Dadu hums, setting her potato back down on the cutting board. “He was handsome,” she says, smiling faintly. “I remember I was glad about that. He was very spaṣṭabhāṣī, though. I didn’t expect that.”

I repeat that word, spaṣṭabhāṣī. It’s not a word I’m familiar with. “What does that mean?”

My grandma pauses for a long moment, clearly searching for the right way to explain it. “He spoke his mind,” she says finally. “He said what he wanted and didn’t care what other people thought of him. He was a city boy, born and raised, and I was a country girl. It was strange for me to see how bold he was. I admired that in him sometimes, and thought he was a rascal the rest of the time.”

I laugh in surprise. Near the end of his life, Dada was always serious. It’s strange to hear he wasn’t always like that. “A rascal?”