Mehul-kaka sighed, resting his arm around her shoulders as he escorted her to the kitchen. “In the meantime, make sure Kaki gives you hot-hot samosa.”

Annika rolled her eyes at the literal translation of garam-garam. The words actually meant hot-hot, but the connotation was fresh and hot. Her family loved the wordplay. Her kaka laughed and made eye contact with his wife. Veena-kaki’s eyes lit up at the sight of Annika. “Maybe she can bribe information from you with good food.” He chuckled and left her in the kitchen.

The kitchen was, as always, a hotbed of activity. Aunties sat or stood in small clusters around the room, depending on what part of the samosa they were working on. At one end, far from the stove, a couple of aunties rolled out the dough for flatbread that would be the outer covering. Next was the filling station, as Annika’s head interpreted it, which comprised another few aunties. The last station was the closing station, where the filled samosas were squeezed shut before frying. This task was usually given to ten-year-old girls who wanted to help. And sure enough, two young girls were sealing samosas and looking very pleased with themselves. A third girl did the work, a slight scowl on her face. She eyed the boys running around with a ball with more than a little longing. It was as if Annika was watching herself at that age.

Amid all this, small children ran around playing, marginally supervised by the socializing adults. Bollywood music played in the background, and somewhere, young teen girls giggled as they practiced Bollywood moves.

In all the time she’d dated Steven, she had not once brought him to one of these parties. It was difficult to explain the chaos and the camaraderie that was mixed in with the gossip and judgment. Though arrival and departure times were loose, children roamed freely, and people ate constantly, standing or sitting anywhere there was a spot, there were definite rules of etiquette that needed to be followed. He never would have understood, he never would have fit in, and he hadn’t really wanted to. And she had known it.

To be honest, sometimes these parties seemed more work and annoyance than they were worth, and when Annika was in her early twenties, the rebel in her took charge and she stopped going. The gossip and the judgment of her career choice was irritating, so she saw no point in it. She started coming back after the breakup with Steven and found she didn’t quite hate them anymore. There was a sense of comfort in being surrounded by people who have known you your whole life that Annika found healing.