Jarminder turned her back on him as a demonstration of her disgust. “Do you even know her family? Do you even know what kind of girl she is? What kind of family lets their daughter spend the night at a boy’s house? We should never have brought you here. We should have stayed in India. We never thought that if we gave you a good education and all these opportunities, you would do something like this … That you would lie to us. That you would bring home a girl like this, a girl who is not one of us. A girl who does not even know our culture, who cannot speak our language, who we know nothing about.”

She felt deafened by the death knell of the life that she had planned for her son resounding. As far as she was concerned, only hardship awaited her son if he were to take the path that he was headed down.

“Mama, you don’t know her,” Omkar pleaded. “If you did know her, you would know that she is smart and she is beautiful and she is good and I love her.”

Neeraj tried to find a middle ground between his wife and son. “Omkar, I know you believe you love this girl, but your mother is right. You are too young to know what love is. The game of love is slippery. And by lying to us, you have proven that you are too immature.

“This has got to end now, Omkar. The kind of love that lasts is the kind that is slow to bloom. If love comes fast, it will disappear just as fast. Is that what you want? Do you want to throw your life away for something that will end soon anyway?”

Omkar fumed at his parents’ blatant refusal to consider the reality of his love for Aria. As usual, the control they confused for love gave him no room to breathe.

Aria was petrified. She was not the sort of person to stay where she wasn’t wanted, and being so obviously unwanted made her want to run as fast and far as she could. But Omkar held her tight and she let him hold her there, out of some dim hope that his parents’ sound rejection would wither. Aria had imagined that the only reason Omkar had made her sleep in the storeroom was because of his parents’ strict stance on sex; the reality now revealed made everything depressingly more clear. She said nothing, but continued to listen to them talk about her as if she weren’t there.

“I can do nothing about it if you refuse to accept that I love this girl,” Omkar said. “But I’m disappointed in you. You have raised me to have an open mind, but now, when I ask you to have an open mind, you keep yours closed.”