My mother just shoots me a look before she continues. ‘Accepted. They wanted to get married. Except there were quite a few issues, but the greatest was that her family had no idea, and she insisted they must not come to find out. She was a Punjabi Sikh, he a Catholic. In neither of their religions would the two of them be permitted to have a faith-based wedding ceremony. And both their families … if they knew, they would certainly object.

‘So, against all odds, she got married to him in a tiny, tiny ceremony in Oklahoma City. His friends, and her friends. It wasn’t that they hated their families, they each loved them very much. But both of them knew they would not allow this. And each of them couldn’t live with the idea of, well, living, without the other.’

I squeeze my mom’s hand as a vice grips my chest. ‘And then?’

Mumma points to the photo on the mantel. Mumma, in a red and gold salwar-kameez, small gold umbrella-shaped kaleere dangling from her bangles, stands arm in arm with my papa, who wears a simple suit and a red tie to match her – along with, of course, his cowboy hat. They have the broadest grins of all time across both their faces, and if you look closely in the background, you can see just how small that ceremony was: maybe twenty chairs total. ‘That was that. He came clean to his family first, and they weren’t happy, but that was before they met her. Certainly, she was so charming and lovable and beautiful—’

‘Oh, certainly.’

Mumma grins. ‘So beautiful that she won them over immediately. The two of them moved onto the ranch, and they adjusted to life out there on the farm. She struggled, though. No neighbours. No one but themselves for miles. At first, she felt so isolated, so … displaced. But she learned to love the farm, the same way her parents—’

‘Nanaji and Naniji.’ My maternal grandparents.

‘Exactly. The same way they had learned to love it when they first married and moved onto Nanaji’s family farm in Gurdaspur. And maybe that was the reason that Nanaji and Naniji, when this young woman told them about her husband, were so gentle, and willing to accept this new development – not without some drama, of course, but eventually willing. Because they saw a part of themselves in their daughter and son-in-law.