Unaccustomed Earth

by Jhumpa Lahiri

  Sudha told Rahul to enjoy himself, that Neel spent the days with a nanny, but that in the evening his nephew would be all his.

  “So, when’s the next one?” Rahul asked, draping Neel over his legs, jiggling them up and down.

  “Next what?” Roger asked.

  “The next kid.”

  “Have you been talking to Ma?” Sudha said, beginning to laugh before abruptly stopping herself.

  “What do you want, buddy?” Rahul asked, looking down at Neel’s upturned face. “A little brother like me, or a sister?”

  Now that the subject of their parents had come up she decided to give Rahul their news, that their father was retiring at the end of the year and that their parents were shopping for a flat in Calcutta. “That’s where they are now,” she said.

  “They’re not in Wayland?”

  “No.” It was a fact that had made it easier for Sudha to honor Rahul’s request and not tell her parents about his visit.

  “Are they moving back for good?”

  “Maybe.” She told him about their father’s knee trouble, that he was going to have surgery to have fluid drained. One day, she knew, it would be something more serious, and when it came, as long as Rahul stayed away, she would have to be an only child all over again.

  After dinner Roger put away the leftovers while Sudha went upstairs to run Neel’s bath. Rahul came with her, sitting on the toilet and blowing some bubbles he’d brought for Neel as she crouched on the floor and soaped and rinsed him. Neel was ecstatic about the bubbles, waiting wide-eyed for each to emerge from the little plastic wand, reaching out and popping them and calling out for more.

  “Okay, little guy, time for bed,” she said after a few minutes, lifting the rubber plug and letting the water drain out out of the claw-foot tub. She reached for Neel’s towel, throwing it over her shoulder and lifting him out. She wrapped him up, scrubbing his head. “Say goodnight to Mamu,” she said.

  “What does he call them?” Rahul asked.

  “Who?”

  “Our parents.”

  She hesitated, though the answer was not something she had to search for. “Dadu and Dadi.”

  “Just like we did,” he said, his voice softening. “I bet they treat you like a king,” he said to Neel.

  “You could say that. We still haven’t unwrapped some of his Christmas presents.”

  “What about next Christmas? Do you guys have plans?”

  “They’re supposed to come to London,” Sudha began, watching for a reaction. “Of course, you’re welcome,” she continued, knowing the idea was ludicrous. “All of you, Elena and Crystal. You guys could stay in a hotel.”

  She stopped then, realizing that she was holding her breath, waiting for him to walk out of her life all over again. Instead he said, “I’ll think about it,” leaving her even more breathless, for she realized that without a formal truce the battle had ended, that he wanted to come back.

  Rahul was already awake when she came downstairs the next morning, sitting at the table with Roger, a T-shirt sticking to his thickened body, sweaty hair plastered to his face. He was wearing shorts, the hair on his dark legs curlier than she remembered. Roger was drinking his tea, showing Rahul a Tube map, telling him which trains went where, pointing out parks in which he could run.

  “Where did you go?” she asked Rahul. She prepared a pot of coffee, then warmed the milk for Neel’s Weetabix, knowing he would be up soon.

  “No idea,” he said. “I just go for an hour. Running’s my new addiction.” It was the first time since he arrived that he’d alluded in any way to his drinking. “That and coffee.”

  When it was ready she poured him a cup, watched him add three spoons of sugar, remembered the time he’d visited her in college and she’d handed him his first beer. “What will you do today?”

  Rahul shrugged. “Maybe a museum. I just want to walk around.”

  “Be ready in twenty minutes and I’ll drop you at the tube,” Roger offered.

  While Sudha was at work she wondered what her brother was doing, wondered if one of the hundreds of pubs on the streets of London would tempt him. Part of her worried that something would set him off and that he would disappear again. But when she got back to the house that evening she found Rahul crawling up the staircase after Neel, pretending to be a hungry lion. That night they went out for curry and again he did not drink, covering the paper spread on the table with elaborate drawings. Again he sat with Sudha in the bathroom as she bathed Neel, and the following morning he went for his run. For the rest of the week he worked through his list of activities, always returning with a little gift for Neel. It felt strange to be at work for so much of the time that Rahul was visiting, but Sudha thought it was better, safer, that their time together was limited to mornings and evenings, times when Roger and Neel were around.

  Saturday morning Rahul made omelettes, expertly chopping mushrooms and onions the way the chefs did on television, and then at Rahul’s suggestion they went to the London Zoo. Rahul had offered to take Neel himself, and though throughout the week both Sudha and Roger had taken advantage of Rahul’s presence, leaving him in charge for five or ten minutes if they needed to go to the corner for eggs or bread, there was no question of that. And yet, once they were at the zoo, both Roger and Sudha felt obsolete. Rahul carried Neel on his shoulders the whole time, the stroller Sudha pushed containing nothing but her purse. Neel was equally smitten, bursting into tears when Rahul had to use the restroom. Rahul had insisted on paying for everything—buying them their tickets, their sandwiches and sodas, the ice cream for Neel, the lime-green balloon that drifted all afternoon above their heads.

  “I was thinking of going to a movie later,” Rahul said when they returned to the house, still carrying Neel. “But I think I’d rather stay home with this guy.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Sudha said. “You’ve dealt with him all day. You deserve a break.”

  Rahul shook his head. “I’m leaving tomorrow, and we’ve got a lot of catching up to do.” And then he said, “You two are the ones who need a break. When was the last time you saw a movie together?”

  The idea presented itself, a perfect plan that felt all wrong. She looked over at Roger, and Rahul saw her looking. “What, you guys don’t trust me?”

  “Of course,” Roger said. He turned to Sudha. “Shall we, Su?”

  She reminded herself that they had a cell phone; the movie theater was a ten-minute drive from the house. If they went to an early show, they’d be back in time for Neel’s bath. “I’ll call to see what’s playing,” she said.

  “We’ll be right here,” Rahul promised her, looking up from the sitting room floor where he and Neel were stacking blocks, and she forced herself to believe him. They had not left him a key, there was nowhere he could go. She had left food for Neel, milk in a sippy cup, overcooked macaroni that was impossible to choke on. She had reminded Rahul to be careful with Neel on the stairs. During the movie she kept the volume of her cell phone turned on, not trusting it to vibrate in the pocket of her jeans. After the first hour she got up and called from the lobby.

  “Everything okay?”

  “Everything’s great,” Rahul told her. “He seemed hungry so I’m giving him something to eat.” In the background she could hear Neel banging something, a cup or a spoon, against the tray of his high chair.

  “Great. Thanks. We’ll be back soon,” she said.

  “No need to rush,” Rahul said. And so on their way back, at Roger’s suggestion, they stopped at a market, for cheese and jams and a few other things they needed. They bought three nice steaks for dinner, Roger saying he would make a tart.

  Rahul and Neel were not in the sitting room where she expected to find them, not playing among the toys scattered across the carpet. A children’s show was on television but no one was watching it. Downstairs in the kitchen the high chair had not been wiped, and gummy bits of pasta were submerged in a puddle of water on the surface of the tray. The balloon from the
zoo had been tied to the side, reaching almost to the ceiling. All the upper cupboards were open, but nothing seemed to have been removed from them. Quickly Sudha shut them, a cold sweat forming on her lips.

  “They haven’t left, the push chair’s still here,” Roger said.

  As she raced up the steps she heard the sound of water splashing and chided herself for panicking. “It’s okay,” she called out. “He’s giving Neel a bath.”

  She found Neel in the tub, filling his sippy cup with water and pouring it out. He was sitting without the plastic ring they normally put him in so that he wouldn’t tip over. He was trembling but otherwise happy, intent on his task, the water up to the middle of his chest, the mere sight of him sitting there, unattended, causing Sudha to emit a series of spontaneous cries and a volt of fear to seize her haunches. The water was no longer warm. One slip and he would have been facedown, his fine dark hair spread like a sunburst, the strands waving as the rest of him was still.

  “Where’s your uncle?” Roger demanded, even though Neel did not yet have the words to reply. He yanked Neel out of the tub, making him burst into tears.

  They found Rahul in Roger’s study, asleep, a glass tucked beneath the daybed. In their bedroom, the sweater chest was open, the necks of the bottles poking out, nestled in woolly arms. They went back to Roger’s study and were unable to rouse Rahul, Sudha shaking his shoulder as she held Neel. Roger leaned over Rahul’s duffel, stuffing it with clothes.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “What does it look like, Sudha?”

  “He’ll do that when he gets up.”

  Roger stood up, his face not at all kind. “I’m making it easier for him. I don’t want your brother to set foot in our home or come near our child ever again.”

  Because they could not scream at Rahul they began to scream at each other, the strange calm that had followed their discovery in the bathtub now shattered.

  “You’re the one who told him we trusted him,” she said. “You agreed to go out.”

  “Don’t blame this on me,” Roger said. “I barely know him. Don’t you dare blame a bit of this on me.”

  “I’m not,” she said, beginning to cry. “I’m sorry. I should have told you.”

  “Told me what?”

  She was sobbing now, too hard for any words to come out, Neel beginning to cry again in reaction. Roger went up to her, holding her by the shoulders, his arms outstretched. “Told me what?”

  And somehow, in spite of how hard she was crying, she told him, about the very first time Rahul had come to visit her at Penn, and how he hadn’t even liked beer, and then about all the cans they’d hidden over the years and how eventually it was no longer a game for him but a way of life, a way of life that had removed him from her family and ruined him.

  Roger looked around the study with its book-lined walls, its cabinets full of files, postcards of noble portraits pinned over the desk. A disgusted look appeared on his face. And then he looked at Sudha, his disgust for her just as plain. “You lied to me. I’ve never lied to you, Sudha. I would never have kept something like this from you.”

  She nodded. She was still crying, tightly holding Neel. Roger took their son from her arms and left her there with Rahul, who was flat on his back, one leg hanging over the edge of the daybed, his slackened face to the wall.

  All night she did not sleep, Roger stiff as a board on his side. They’d gone to bed hungry, the three steaks tossed into the freezer. Rahul had never woken up. She knew Roger was right, knew that if it had been his sibling she would have said and done the same. She thought of her parents, who had believed their children were destined to succeed, had fumbled when one failed. After everything Rahul had put them through they never renounced him, never banished him. They were incapable of shutting him out. But Roger was capable, and Sudha realized, as the wakeful night passed, that she was capable, too.

  She drifted off around daybreak, then woke up an hour later, hearing the shower running. It ran for a long time. She became nervous and considered knocking, but then she heard the door open, and a few minutes later, footsteps padding down the stairs.

  “I meant to clean up the high chair,” Rahul said when she joined him in the kitchen. He was dressed in one of Roger’s bathrobes, squinting, as if the subterreanean space were flooded with light. His voice was gruff, the effects of the liquor clear in the delicate yet awkward way he was moving about. He had filled the kettle with water, turned on the gas, measured coffee into the glass pot. “Sorry about that.”

  “I thought you were better.”

  He glanced at her, only for a second. He looked like an idiot to her, dull and slow.

  “What the hell happened, Rahul?”

  He didn’t reply.

  “Is it me?” she asked. For she had wondered this, during the long hours she had lain awake: wondered if seeing her had reminded him of the past, of those nights they had defied their parents together, pouring warm beer into cups of ice and forging a link all their own.

  The water began to boil, the kettle emitting a thin whistle. She switched off the gas, poured the water into the coffeepot. “You have to go to the airport,” she said.

  “My flight isn’t until evening.”

  “Now, Rahul. You have to get dressed and go now. You left Neel in the bathtub.” Her voice quavered and at the same time it was beginning to rise, the sickening image flooding her all over again.

  “I did?”

  “Yes, Rahul,” she said, fresh tears streaming down her face. “You passed out and you left our baby alone in a tub. You could have killed him, do you understand?”

  He turned away, his back to her. He pressed his head to a cupboard, twisting it slightly to either side, swearing to himself under his breath. Then, still without facing her, he said, “But he’s okay, right, Didi? I peeked into his room this morning and he was asleep in his crib just fine.”

  “You have to go now.” Her words were coming out in almost a whisper. She was aware that she sounded like a broken record. Fury had raged through her all night; that storm cloud had unleashed its rain, and now she was simply tired.

  “I’ve stayed away from it for months,” he said. “I don’t know what happened. I just had the tiniest bit—”

  “Stop,” she said, and he did. “I don’t want to hear your explanation. Do you understand me? I don’t want to hear it.”

  He didn’t try to speak again. He went upstairs to dress and get his bag and then stood in the sitting room as she called a minicab for Heathrow. She held out fifty pounds to cover the fare and he took it from her. Then he left, going out to the street before the cab arrived. When it pulled up to the house she went to the window, held back the lace curtain, and watched him slip into the backseat. Then the cab pulled away, leaving her to stare out at the gray morning light. She wasn’t aware of when she’d stopped crying. She felt wide awake suddenly. She heard Neel upstairs, stirring in his crib. In another minute he would cry out, wanting her, expecting breakfast; he was young enough so that Sudha was still only goodness to him, nothing else. She returned to the kitchen, opened a cupboard, took out a packet of Weetabix, heated milk in a pan. Something brushed against her ankles, and she saw that the balloon tied to the back of Neel’s high chair was no longer suspended on its ribbon. It had sagged to the floor, a shrunken thing incapable of bursting. She clipped the ribbon with scissors and stuffed the whole thing into the garbage, surprised at how easily it fit, thinking of the husband who no longer trusted her, of the son whose cry now interrupted her, of the fledgling family that had cracked open that morning, as typical and as terrifying as any other.

  Nobody’s Business

  Every so often a man called for Sang, wanting to marry her. Sang usually didn’t know these men. Sometimes she had never even heard of them. But they’d heard that she was pretty and smart and thirty and Bengali and still single, and so these men, most of whom also happened to be Bengali, would procure her number from someone who knew someone who
knew her parents, who, according to Sang, desperately wanted her to be married. According to Sang, these men always confused details when they spoke to her, saying they’d heard that she studied physics, when really it was philosophy, or that she’d graduated from Columbia, when really it was NYU, calling her Sangeeta, when really she went by Sang. They were impressed that she was getting her doctorate at Harvard, when really she’d dropped out of Harvard after a semester and was working part time at a bookstore on the square.

  Sang’s housemates, Paul and Heather, could always tell when it was a prospective groom on the phone. “Oh. Hi,” Sang would say, sitting at the imitation-walnut kitchen table, rolling her eyes, coin-colored eyes that were sometimes green. She would slouch in her chair, looking bothered but resigned, as if a subway she were riding had halted between stations. To Paul’s mild disappointment, Sang was never rude to these men. She listened as they explained the complicated, far-fetched connection between them, connections Paul vaguely envied in spite of the fact that he shared a house with Sang, and a kitchen, and a subscription to the Globe. The suitors called from as far away as Los Angeles, as close by as Watertown. Once, she told Paul and Heather, she had actually agreed to meet one of these men, and he had driven her north up I-93, pointing from the highway to the corporation he worked for. Then he’d taken her to a Dunkin’ Donuts, where, over crullers and coffee, he’d proposed.

  Sometimes Sang would take notes during these conversations, on the message pad kept next to the phone. She’d write down the man’s name, or “Carnegie Mellon,” or “likes mystery novels” before her pen drifted into scribbles and stars and tick-tack-toe games. To be polite, she asked a few questions, too, about whether the man enjoyed his work as an economist, or a dentist, or a metallurgical engineer. Her excuse to these men, her rebuttal to their offers to wine and dine her, was always the same white lie: she was busy at the moment with classes, its being Harvard and all. Sometimes, if Paul happened to be sitting at the table, she would write him a note in the middle of the conversation: “He sounds like he’s twelve” or “Total dweeb” or “This guy threw up once in my parents’ swimming pool,” waving the pad for Paul’s benefit as she cradled the phone to her ear.