Unaccustomed Earth

by Jhumpa Lahiri

“Would you like to do anything special on your last day here?” she asked. “We could drive into Seattle for lunch.”

  He seemed to brighten at the suggestion. “How about the boat ride? Is that still possible?”

  She went inside, telling him she was going to get Akash ready and look up the schedule. He was suddenly desperate to leave, the remaining twenty-four hours feeling unbearable. He reminded himself that tomorrow he would be on a plane, heading back to Pennsylvania. And that two weeks after that he would be going to Prague with Mrs. Bagchi, sleeping next to her at night. He knew that it was not for his sake that his daughter was asking him to live here. It was for hers. She needed him, as he’d never felt she’d needed him before, apart from the obvious things he provided her in the course of his life. And because of this the offer upset him more. A part of him, the part of him that would never cease to be a father, felt obligated to accept. But it was not what he wanted. Being here for a week, however pleasant, had only confirmed the fact. He did not want to be part of another family, part of the mess, the feuds, the demands, the energy of it. He did not want to live in the margins of his daughter’s life, in the shadow of her marriage. He didn’t want to live again in an enormous house that would only fill up with things over the years, as the children grew, all the things he’d recently gotten rid of, all the books and papers and clothes and objects one felt compelled to possess, to save. Life grew and grew until a certain point. The point he had reached now.

  The only temptation was the boy, but he knew that the boy would forget him. It was Ruma to whom he would give a new reminder that now that his wife was gone, even though he was still alive, there was no longer anyone to care for her. When he saw Ruma now, chasing Akash, picking up after him, wiping his urine from the floor, responsible for his every need, he realized how much younger his wife had been when she’d done all that, practically a girl. By the time his wife was Ruma’s age, their children were already approaching adolescence. The more the children grew, the less they had seemed to resemble either parent—they spoke differently, dressed differently, seemed foreign in every way, from the texture of their hair to the shapes of their feet and hands. Oddly, it was his grandson, who was only half-Bengali to begin with, who did not even have a Bengali surname, with whom he felt a direct biological connection, a sense of himself reconstituted in another.

  He remembered his children coming home from college, impatient with him and his wife, enamored of their newfound independence, always wanting to leave. It had tormented his wife and, though he never admitted it, had pained him as well. He couldn’t help thinking, on those occasions, how young they’d once been, how helpless in his nervous arms, needing him for their very survival, knowing no one else. He and his wife were their whole world. But eventually that need dissipated, dwindled to something amorphous, tenuous, something that threatened at times to snap. That loss was in store for Ruma, too; her children would become strangers, avoiding her. And because she was his child he wanted to protect her from that, as he had tried throughout his life to protect her from so many things. He wanted to shield her from the deterioration that inevitably took place in the course of a marriage, and from the conclusion he sometimes feared was true: that the entire enterprise of having a family, of putting children on this earth, as gratifying as it sometimes felt, was flawed from the start. But these were an old man’s speculations, an old man who was himself now behaving like a child.

  Her father left early the next morning, while Akash was still asleep. Again she’d offered to go to the airport, but this time he was even more adamant, telling her he didn’t want to upset Akash’s schedule. They were all tired from their day in Seattle. After the ferry ride they’d gone up the Space Needle and then had dinner in Pike Place Market before driving home. Joining her father in the kitchen, she saw that he’d already finished his cereal, the bowl and spoon in the drainer. The tea bag normally saved for a second cup later in the day had been tossed out.

  “You’ve got everything?” she asked, seeing his suitcase by the door. He’d come bearing gifts but had bought nothing to take back with him. Everything he’d purchased in the past week, all the things from the nursery and the hardware store, the coiled-up hose and tools and bags of leftover topsoil now neatly arranged under the porch, had been for her.

  “Call when you get home,” she said, something her mother would say to her children when they parted. She asked for his flight information, writing it on the bottom of the same sheet of paper that was on the refrigerator door with Adam’s itinerary.

  “Adam will be here tonight?”

  She nodded.

  “Good. Things will return to normal then.”

  She wanted to tell him how normal it had felt, to have her father there. But she couldn’t bring herself to say the words. Her father glanced at his watch, then poured a bit of his tea into his saucer in order to cool it more quickly. He raised the saucer to his lips, sipping from the rim.

  “It has been a marvelous week, Ruma. I have enjoyed each day.”

  “Me too.”

  “These days with Akash have been the greatest gift,” he added, his voice softening. “If you like, I can come for a while after you have the baby. I won’t be as useful as your mother would have been.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “But please understand, I prefer to stay on my own. I am too old now to make such a shift.”

  His gentle words fell on her thickly, too quickly. She understood that he had not had to think it over, that he had never intended to stay.

  “Make time to look into law firms here,” he continued. “Don’t let all that hard work go to waste.”

  He stood up, and before she could stop him, rinsed out his cup and saucer and put those into the drainer as well. It was time to go.

  “Let me go downstairs and give Akash a kiss,” he said. He turned to leave the room, then stopped. “Do you have a spare stamp? I need to put a bill into the mail.”

  “In the drawer of the little table in the hall,” she said. “There’s a roll there.”

  She heard the drawer opening, then closing, then the sound of his flip-flops hitting the stairs. When he returned, he went to the entryway to put on his shoes, tied his laces, fit the flip-flops into the front pocket of his suitcase. He kissed Ruma on the cheek. “Take care of yourself. Let me know how the garden comes along.” He glanced at her stomach and added, “I am waiting for the good news.” He turned and walked outside to his car, putting the suitcase into the trunk. She stood watching as he turned on the engine and backed out, wondering when she would see him again. At the mailbox he paused, and for a moment she thought he was about to open the window and put his bill inside. But he only waved through the closed window, leaning toward her, looking lost, and a few seconds later he was gone.

  “Where’s Dadu?” Akash asked as she was finishing her tea.

  “He went home today.”

  “Why?”

  “Because that’s where he lives.”

  “Why?” In her son’s small face she saw the disappointment she also felt.

  “Daddy’s coming back tonight,” she said, trying to change the subject. “Should we make a cake?”

  Akash went to the kitchen door and tried the knob, looking through the glass at the yard. “I want Dadu.”

  She opened the door for him and followed him out, both of them padding barefoot, Ruma treading gingerly, Akash not fearful of stones or twigs. It was chillier than she expected, still too early for the warmth of the day to have gathered. She considered going back in for sweaters. “Sweetpea? You cold?” she asked, folding her arms across her chest, but Akash did not reply. He picked up the empty watering can her father had left underneath the porch and pretended to water things in his little plot. She looked at the items poking out of the ground: pens and pencils, a straw, a Popsicle stick. There were papers, too: old envelopes from junk mail, the cards that fell out of magazines, seeking subscribers, folded up like little tents on the soil. Her eye fell t
o another piece of paper, stiffer than the rest. She bent down to look at it, recognizing her father’s handwriting. She assumed it was a postcard her father had sent to her, one Akash had removed from the front of the refrigerator door, or the basket on the hall table. But this postcard bore no post-mark, had not been sent. It was composed in Bengali and addressed in English to someone on Long Island. A Mrs. Meenakshi Bagchi.

  She picked it up. “Akash, what’s this?”

  He reached out, attempting to snatch it back from her. “It’s mine.”

  “What is it?” she asked, more harshly this time.

  “It’s for my garden.”

  “Did Dadu give this to you?”

  He shook his head angrily, and then he started to cry.

  She stared at the card and instantly she knew, just as she’d known from the expression on the surgeon’s face what had happened to her mother on the operating table. The woman in the video, the reason for her father’s trips, the reason for his good spirits, the reason he did not want to live in Seattle. The reason he’d wanted a stamp that morning. Here, in a handful of sentences she could not even read, was the explanation, the evidence that it was not just with Akash that her father had fallen in love.

  He was in a bookshop in the airport, buying a newspaper to read at the gate, when he saw, propped by the register on a metal stand, a copy of the same guidebook to Seattle that had been at his bedside in Ruma’s house. He’d searched everywhere for the book, overturning all the sheets, nearly waking up Akash in the process. He opened drawers he’d never used, peering on the shelf of the closet, wedging his hand as far as it would go under all sides of the mattress, cursing himself for not making the time to mail the card earlier. At last he spotted the book on the floor beneath the bed, on the side where Akash slept. He searched frantically through each page, shaking the book by its spine, but the postcard was missing. For an instant he’d been tempted to wake the boy, to ask if he’d seen it, put it somewhere. He looked in the bathroom, in the laundry hamper, in the tub where just that morning he’d bathed. Finally, unable to justify his search any longer, knowing that he would miss his plane, he left, the unused stamp from Ruma still floating in his shirt pocket, its value more than a postcard needed, a weightless thing that filled him with dread.

  She took Akash inside, wiped his tears and held him, and then, when he was calm, prepared his breakfast. She said yes when he asked if he could watch television, setting him with his cereal bowl behind the coffee table, and returned to the kitchen to look at the postcard again. Her first impulse was to shred it, but she stopped herself, staring at the Bengali letters her mother had once tried and failed to teach Ruma when she was a girl. They were sentences her mother would have absorbed in an instant, sentences that proved, with more force than the funeral, more force than all the days since then, that her mother no longer existed. Where had her mother gone, when life persisted, when Ruma still needed her to explain so many things?

  She walked back outside, across the grass and looked at the hydrangea her father had planted, that was to bloom pink or blue depending on the soil. It did not prove to Ruma that her father had loved her mother, or even that he missed her. And yet he had put it there, honored her before turning to another woman. Ruma smoothed out the postcard in her hand, scraping away, with her fingernail, the dirt that obscured a bit of the Zip code. She turned the postcard around and looked at the front, at the generic view her father had chosen to commemorate his visit. Then she went back into the house, to the table in the hall. From the drawer she took out the roll of stamps and affixed one to the card, for the mailman, later in the day, to take away.

  Hell–Heaven

  Pranab Chakraborty wasn’t technically my father’s younger brother. He was a fellow Bengali from Calcutta who had washed up on the barren shores of my parents’ social life in the early seventies, when they lived in a rented apartment in Central Square and could number their acquaintances on one hand. But I had no real uncles in America, and so I was taught to call him Pranab Kaku. Accordingly, he called my father Shyamal Da, always addressing him in the polite form, and he called my mother Boudi, which is how Bengalis are supposed to address an older brother’s wife, instead of using her first name, Aparna. After Pranab Kaku was befriended by my parents, he confessed that on the day we met him he had followed my mother and me for the better part of an afternoon around the streets of Cambridge, where she and I tended to roam after I got out of school. He had trailed behind us along Massachusetts Avenue and in and out of the Harvard Coop, where my mother liked to look at discounted housewares. He wandered with us into Harvard Yard, where my mother often sat on the grass on pleasant days and watched the stream of students and professors filing busily along the paths, until, finally, as we were climbing the steps to the Widener Library so that I could use the bathroom, he tapped my mother on the shoulder and inquired, in English, if she might be a Bengali. The answer to his question was clear, given that my mother was wearing the red and white bangles unique to Bengali married women, and a common Tangail sari, and had a thick stem of vermilion powder in the center parting of her hair, and the full round face and large dark eyes that are so typical of Bengali women. He noticed the two or three safety pins she wore fastened to the thin gold bangles that were behind the red and white ones, which she would use to replace a missing hook on a blouse or to draw a string through a petticoat at a moment’s notice, a practice he associated strictly with his mother and sisters and aunts in Calcutta. Moreover, Pranab Kaku had overheard my mother speaking to me in Bengali, telling me that I couldn’t buy an issue of Archie at the Coop. But back then, he also confessed, he was so new to America that he took nothing for granted and doubted even the obvious.

  My parents and I had lived in Central Square for three years prior to that day; before that, we lived in Berlin, where I was born and where my father had finished his training in microbiology before accepting a position as a researcher at Mass General, and before Berlin my mother and father had lived in India, where they were strangers to each other, and where their marriage had been arranged. Central Square is the first place I can recall living, and in my memories of our apartment, in a dark brown shingled house on Ashburton Place, Pranab Kaku is always there. According to the story he liked to recall often, my mother invited him to accompany us back to our apartment that very afternoon and prepared tea for the two of them; then, after learning that he had not had a proper Bengali meal in more than three months, she served him the leftover curried mackerel and rice that we had eaten for dinner the night before. He remained into the evening for a second dinner after my father got home, and after that he showed up for dinner almost every night, occupying the fourth chair at our square Formica kitchen table and becoming a part of our family in practice as well as in name.

  He was from a wealthy family in Calcutta and had never had to do so much as pour himself a glass of water before moving to America, to study engineering at MIT. Life as a graduate student in Boston was a cruel shock, and in his first month he lost nearly twenty pounds. He had arrived in January, in the middle of a snowstorm, and at the end of a week he had packed his bags and gone to Logan, prepared to abandon the opportunity he’d worked toward all his life, only to change his mind at the last minute. He was living on Trowbridge Street in the home of a divorced woman with two young children who were always screaming and crying. He rented a room in the attic and was permitted to use the kitchen only at specified times of the day and instructed always to wipe down the stove with Windex and a sponge. My parents agreed that it was a terrible situation, and if they’d had a bedroom to spare they would have offered it to him. Instead, they welcomed him to our meals and opened up our apartment to him at any time, and soon it was there he went between classes and on his days off, always leaving behind some vestige of himself: a nearly finished pack of cigarettes, a newspaper, a piece of mail he had not bothered to open, a sweater he had taken off and forgotten in the course of his stay.

  I remember vividl
y the sound of his exuberant laughter and the sight of his lanky body slouched or sprawled on the dull, mismatched furniture that had come with our apartment. He had a striking face, with a high forehead and a thick mustache, and overgrown, untamed hair that my mother said made him look like the American hippies who were everywhere in those days. His long legs jiggled rapidly up and down wherever he sat, and his elegant hands trembled when he held a cigarette between his fingers, tapping the ashes into a teacup that my mother began to set aside for this exclusive purpose. Though he was a scientist by training, there was nothing rigid or predictable or orderly about him. He always seemed to be starving, walking through the door and announcing that he hadn’t had lunch, and then he would eat ravenously, reaching behind my mother to steal cutlets as she was frying them, before she had a chance to set them properly on a plate with red onion salad. In private, my parents remarked that he was a brilliant student, a star at Jadavpur who had come to MIT with an impressive assistantship, but Pranab Kaku was cavalier about his classes, skipping them with frequency. “These Americans are learning equations I knew at Usha’s age,” he would complain. He was stunned that my second-grade teacher didn’t assign any homework and that at the age of seven I hadn’t yet been taught square roots or the concept of pi.

  He appeared without warning, never phoning beforehand but simply knocking on the door the way people did in Calcutta and calling out “Boudi!” as he waited for my mother to let him in. Before we met him, I would return from school and find my mother with her purse in her lap and her trench coat on, desperate to escape the apartment where she had spent the day alone. But now I would find her in the kitchen, rolling out dough for luchis, which she normally made only on Sundays for my father and me, or putting up new curtains she’d bought at Woolworth’s. I did not know, back then, that Pranab Kaku’s visits were what my mother looked forward to all day, that she changed into a new sari and combed her hair in anticipation of his arrival, and that she planned, days in advance, the snacks she would serve him with such nonchalance. That she lived for the moment she heard him call out “Boudi!” from the porch and that she was in a foul humor on the days he didn’t materialize.