Page 51 of Hot for the Hockey Player (The Single Moms of San Camanez: The Vino Vixens #2)

“I have with me here today, Dr. Manpreet Patel, or Man, as he prefers to be called. I only just met Man earlier this week, but he’s already one of my favorite people.

He taught me how to whittle a badass spoon—without gouging a giant hole in my hand—and he cooked me the most delicious dal turka I’ve ever had in my life.

While I ate nearly my body weight in homemade naan and dal, Man filled me in on his life’s story, how he won the heart of his lady fair, and the difficult decision they made to move from India to the United States and raise their four daughters. ”

Damon continued to nod. Then, like he knew I was waiting for his approval, he gave me a thumbs up.

I exhaled in relief. “Man, thank you so much for agreeing to be my first ever guest. I’m kind of courting a lady myself right now—” That got Damon’s attention, and he lifted his eyes to me for a moment, but I stayed the course and kept talking.

“Which is how we got on the topic of you and your wife. I asked you how you wooed Padma. It’s honestly a story I could listen to a hundred times and never grow tired of. Do you think you could share it today?”

Man nodded, sipped his tea, then set the mug down onto a coaster on the end table beside him. He sat back in his chair, squared his shoulders, and clasped his hands in his lap before meeting my eyes. “I have five older sisters. There are eight years between me and the one before me.”

“Oh wow.” Even though I’d already heard this story, I knew how to actively listen and break up a monologue with reactionary sounds.

Man nodded. “My father insisted my mother give him a son. Even though her last three pregnancies were difficult and resulted in C-sections. She was advised by her doctors not to have anymore children. My father raped her, and I was conceived.”

Bile rose up in my throat. I cast a look at Damon out of the corner of my eye and there was fresh color in his cheeks as he stared at the laptop screen.

“My mother died giving birth to me. She was over forty, and the pregnancy was the hardest one yet. She bled to death.”

“Man … I am so, so sorry.”

His Adam’s apple bobbed heavily in this throat as he nodded.

“Luckily, and I say this with total honesty in my heart, my father was hit by a car before my first birthday and died as well. He was not a nice man. He was cruel, and he hit my mother and sisters. I was raised by my maternal grandmother and my sisters. They taught me how not to be like my father. How to appreciate, respect, and honor women. When my oldest sister married, her husband was very kind to me. I called him my brother, and he was the male role-model I needed. My grandmother never would have allowed any of my sisters to marry a man like my father. She knew the mistake she made, letting her husband choose who their daughter—my mother—should marry. My grandfather approved of my father because he came from a good family, from a high-ranking caste. Even though my grandfather was dead by the time my sister got married, my grandmother refused to let history repeat itself and chose kindness and a good heart over all other factors when she helped my sister find a husband.” He took another sip of his tea.

“My ‘brother’ was a doctor, and I wanted to be just like him. He paid for my medical school.”

I smiled at the positive turn this harrowing story took.

“Padma and I were indeed an arranged marriage by my grandmother and Padma’s parents.

She was in medical school, and I was in my first year at the hospital.

I loved her the moment I met her.” He glanced up at the corner of the room and a wistful smile curled his mouth, which seemed to have invisible strings attached to the skin around his eyes and made it crinkle.

“She took a bit more convincing. I was quiet. Nerdy. And kept saying all the wrong things. I told her she was lucky that she had a nicely shaped head.”

I snorted. “As opposed to what compliment were you intending?”

His shrug accompanied a laugh, his eyes crinkling even more. “I have no idea. The woman caused a million butterflies flying like they were all drunk in my belly. She was the most beautiful person I’d ever seen. Inside and out.”

I glanced over at Damon, who wore a big grin.

“But her parents and my grandmother told her this was a good match, and she just needed to show me a little patience and understanding. That I was a good man, just painfully shy.”

“Obviously, she did.”

“She suggested we write letters to each other.”

“I love that.”

Man unclasped, then reclasped his fingers. “So we got to know each other through letters. Sometimes several a day. Until I felt like I could sit with her and not comment on her nicely shaped head, but rather, say something a bit more … appropriate.”

“And did you?” I asked.

“I told her she had lovely penmanship.”

Damon snorted, and I just smiled widely.

“I mean, to be fair, it was very nice. But that goddess took me by the hands and told me to breathe. She said she was nervous too. That I needed to relax and just be myself.”

“Then what?” Damon blurted out, making me jump in my seat.

“I pulled out the spoon I whittled for her,” Man said.

Both Damon and I went slack jawed, and I’d already heard this part before.

“She loved it,” Man said. “Said nobody had ever made her anything like that before.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a worn, hand carved spoon.

“This one. She kept it all these years. Brought it with her when we moved from India. Ate her morning porridge with it every day for forty years.”

Fresh emotion lodged in my throat.

“She told me, not too long after that, when I got over most of my fear and could talk a bit better, that she fell in love with me after seeing me interact with her niece. Her niece, Ashti, was six, and so precocious. She was a joy to be around. She wanted to be an astronaut and all the men around her told her that girls couldn’t be astronauts.

But I went home and built her an entire solar system out of paper-mache and Styrofoam, then told her if she wanted to go to school to become an astronaut, I would pay for it. ”

“And did she?”

He nodded.

“Padma said I was a man she wanted to have daughters with. That was when she knew she loved me. And honestly,” tears welled up in his eyes, “I’ve never received a greater compliment in my life.”

Damon handed him a tissue and Man blotted at his eyes.

“I don’t think there is a greater compliment you can give a man,” I replied. “That he’s someone you want to have daughters with. And you guys did. You had four of them.”

Man’s chuckle was raspy as he reached for his tea and took a sip to clear his throat.

“Four kind, smart, beautiful daughters, yes. We were so very blessed. We are so very blessed. They are healthy and happy, and that is all that matters. They have chosen partners who value them, who respect them, and treat them as their equals. It was why we left India. We wanted to give them more opportunity to be whatever they wanted to be and not feel the weight of centuries of oppression and cultural expectation pressing down on them.”

“I couldn’t help but notice that the first word you used to describe your daughters was ‘kind’ and I want to circle back to that for a moment.

I don’t have children, but if I did, or ever do, I think my main objective would be to raise kind people.

Maybe it’s because of the pandemic, or something bigger afoot, but I feel like we’re entering this depressing lack of kindness vortex.

People are less and less considerate nowadays.

Everyone is out for themselves. Inherent kindness, inherent consideration seems more difficult to find than ever before.

And I’m only twenty-six, but I definitely see it. ”

Man nodded. “Padma and I were the same way. Raise kind people. Teach them empathy and the rest will follow. Often, the kindest person in the room is also the smartest, because they have empathy and lift others up, rather than step on them to get ahead. We taught our girls to think with their hearts, but also never let someone walk all over them. It’s a fine line raising kind people with backbones.

” He smiled in a way that told me he and his wife had probably had many of these similar conversations over the years while in the thick of raising kids.

“What advice would you give young men, in India, or all over the world really, who might not see things the way you and I do? Who think women should serve them, submit to them, and are the weaker and lesser sex?” I asked.