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I’ve made good friends with this seventeen-year-old Indian girl named Tulsi. She works
with me scrubbing the temple floors every day. Every evening we take a walk through the gar-
dens of the Ashram together and talk about God and hip-hop music, two subjects for which
Tulsi feels equivalent devotion. Tulsi is just about the cutest little bookworm of an Indian girl
you ever saw, even cuter since one lens of her “specs” (as she calls her eye-glasses) broke
last week in a cartoonish spiderweb design, which hasn’t stopped her from wearing them.
Tulsi is so many interesting and foreign things to me at once—a teenager, a tomboy, an Indi-
an girl, a rebel in her family, a soul who is so crazy about God that it’s almost like she’s got a
schoolgirl crush on Him. She also speaks a delightful, lilting English—the kind of English you
can find only in India—which includes such colonial words as “splendid!” and “nonsense!” and
sometimes produces eloquent sentences like: “It is beneficial to walk on the grass in the
morning when the dew has already been accumulated, for it lowers naturally and pleasantly
the body’s temperature.” When I told her once that I was going to Mumbai for the day, Tulsi
said, “Please stand carefully, as you will find there are many speeding buses everywhere.”
She’s exactly half my age, and practically half my size.
Tulsi and I have been talking a lot about marriage lately during our walks. Soon she will
turn eighteen, and this is the age when she will be regarded as a legitimate marriage pro-
spect. It will happen like this—after her eighteenth birthday, she will be required to attend fam-
ily weddings dressed in a sari, signaling her womanhood. Some nice Amma (“Aunty”) will
come and sit beside her, start asking questions and getting to know her: “How old are you?
What’s your family background? What does your father do? What universities are you apply-
ing to? What are your interests? When is your birthday?” Next thing you know, Tulsi’s dad will
get a big envelope in the mail with a photo of this woman’s grandson who is studying com-
puter sciences in Delhi, along with the boy’s astrology charts and his university grades and
the inevitable question, “Would your daughter care to marry him?”
Tulsi says, “It sucks.”
But it means so much to the family, to see their children wedded off successfully. Tulsi has
an aunt who just shaved her head as a gesture of thanks to God because her oldest daugh-