Unaccustomed Earth (3 page)

She opened the pantry. “I’ll make tea, Baba.”

“Let me water your delphiniums. They won’t survive another day.” He took the kettle from her hands and filled it at the sink. Then he carried it, slowly and carefully, through the kitchen door outside, taking oddly small steps, and for the first time since his arrival she saw that in spite of his clear eyes and skin, her father had become an old man. She stood by the window and watched her father water the flowers, his head bent, his eyebrows raised. She listened to the sound of the water hitting the earth in a forceful, steady stream. It was a sound that vaguely embarrassed her, as if he were urinating in her presence. Even after the sound stopped, her father stood there for a moment, tipping the spout and pouring out the final drops that the kettle contained. Akash had followed her father outside, and now he stood a few feet away, looking up at his grandfather with curiosity.

Akash had no memory of her mother. She had died when he was two, and now, when she pointed her mother out in a photograph, Akash would always say, “she died,” as if it were something extraordinary and impressive her mother had done. He would know nothing of the weeks her mother had come to stay with Ruma after his birth, holding him in the mornings in her kaftan as Ruma slept off her postpartum fatigue. Her mother had refused to put him into the bassinet, always cradling him, for hours at a time, in her arms. The new baby would know nothing of her mother at all, apart from the sweaters she had knit for Akash, which he’d already outgrown and which the new baby would eventually wear. There was a half-knit cardigan patterned with white stars still on its needles, one of the few items of her mother’s Ruma had kept. Of the two hundred and eighteen saris, she kept only three, placing them in a quilted zippered bag at the back of her closet, telling her mother’s friends to divide up the rest. And she had remembered the many times her mother had predicted this very moment, lamenting the fact that her daughter preferred pants and skirts to the clothing she wore, that there would be no one to whom to pass on her things.

He went downstairs to unpack, arranging his two pairs of pants in one of the drawers of the bureau, hanging his four checkered summer shirts on hangers in the closet, putting on a pair of flip-flops for indoors. He shut his empty suitcase and put it in the closet as well and placed his kit bag in the bathroom, at the side of the sink. The accommodations would have pleased his wife; it had always upset her, the fact that Ruma and Adam used to live in an apartment, with no separate room for them to sleep in when they stayed. He looked out at the yard. There were houses on either side, but the back felt secluded. One could not see the water or the mountains from here, only the ground, thick with the evergreen trees he’d seen on the sides of the highway, that were everywhere in Seattle.

Upstairs, Ruma was serving tea on the porch. She had brought everything out on a tray: a pot of Darjeeling, the strainer, milk and sugar, and a plate of Nice biscuits. He associated the biscuits deeply with his wife—the visible crystals of sugar, the faint coconut taste—their kitchen cupboard always contained a box of them. Never had he managed to dip one into a cup of tea without having it dissolve, leaving a lump of beige mush in the bottom of his cup.

He sat down and distributed gifts. For Akash there was a small wooden plane with red propellers and a marionette of Pinocchio. The boy began playing with his toys immediately, tangling up Pinocchio’s strings and demanding that Ruma fix them. There was a handpainted cruet that had the word “olio” on its side for Ruma, and a marbled box for Adam, the sort of thing one might use for storing paper clips. Mrs. Bagchi had chosen everything, spending nearly an hour in a toyshop, though she had no grandchildren. He had mentioned nothing to Ruma or Romi about Mrs. Bagchi, planned to say nothing. He saw no point in upsetting them, especially Ruma now that she was expecting again. He wondered if this was how his children had felt in the past, covertly conducting relationships back when it was something he and his wife had forbidden, something that would have devastated them.

It was Ruma and his wife who were supposed to have gone on the first of his trips to Europe. In the year before she died, his wife had begun to remark that although she had flown over Europe dozens of times in the process of traveling from Pennsylvania to Calcutta, she had never once seen the canals of Venice or the Eiffel Tower or the windmills and tulips of Holland. He had found his wife’s interest surprising; throughout most of their marriage it had been an unquestioned fact that visiting family in Calcutta was the only thing worth boarding a plane for. “They show so many nice places on the Travel Channel,” she would remark sometimes in the evenings. “We can afford it now, you have vacation days that are wasting away.” But back then he had had no interest in taking such a trip; he was impervious to his wife’s sudden wanderlust, and besides, in all their years, they had never taken a vacation together, alone.

Ruma had organized as a sixty-fourth birthday present a package tour to Paris for her mother and herself. She scheduled it during the summer, a time Adam could take Akash to her in-laws’ place on Martha’s Vineyard. Ruma put down a deposit at the travel agency and sent her mother tapes to learn conversational French and a guidebook filled with colorful pictures. For a while he would come home from work and hear his wife up in her sewing room, listening to the tapes on a Walkman, counting in French, reciting the days of the week. The gallstone surgery was scheduled accordingly, the doctor saying that six weeks would be more than enough time for her to recover before traveling. Ruma took the day off from work and came down with Akash for the procedure, insisting on being there even though he’d said there was no need. He remembered how irritated he’d felt in the waiting room over how long it was taking, that feeling vivid in a way the surgeon’s news still was not. That information, and the chronology of events that followed, remained hazy to him: listening to the surgeon say his wife was dead, that she had reacted adversely to the Rocuronium used to relax her muscles for the procedure, he and Ruma taking turns with Akash as they went in to see the body. It was the same hospital where Ruma had been a candy striper, where he had once rushed to the emergency room after Romi broke his arm on a soccer field. A few weeks after the funeral one of his colleagues at work suggested that he take a vacation, and it was then that he’d remembered the trip Ruma and his wife had planned. He’d asked Ruma if she still intended to go, and when she said no, he asked if it would be all right for him to reserve the tour in his own name.

“Did you like Italy?” Ruma asked him now. She sat with the Pinocchio on her lap, clumsily untwisting the strings. He wanted to tell her that she was going about it wrong, there was a knot in the center that needed to be undone first. Instead, he replied to her questions, saying that he had liked Italy very much, commenting on the pleasant climate, the many piazzas, and the fact that the people, unlike most Americans, were slim. He held up his index finger, waving it back and forth. “And everyone still smokes. I was nearly tempted to have a cigarette myself,” he said. He had smoked when she was little, a habit he’d acquired in India but abandoned in his forties. He remembered Ruma, never Romi or his wife, pestering him about quitting, hiding his packs of Winstons, or removing the cigarettes when he wasn’t aware of it and replacing them with balled-up tissue paper. There was the time she’d cried all night, convinced, after her teacher at school had talked about the dangers of smoking, that he would die within a handful of years. He had done nothing, back then, to comfort her; he’d maintained his addiction in spite of his daughter’s fear. He’d been attached to a small brass ashtray in the house, shaped like a nagrai slipper with a curling, pointed toe. After he quit he threw out all the other ashtrays in the house, but Ruma, to his puzzlement, appropriated his favorite, rinsing it out and keeping it among her toys. He recalled that she and her friends would pretend it was the glass slipper in Cinderella, trying to get it to fit over the unyielding plastic feet of her various dolls.

“Did you?” she asked him now.

“What?”

“Have a cigarette in Italy.”

“Oh no. I am too old for such things,” he said, his eyes drifting over to the lake.

“What did you eat there?” she asked.

He remembered one of the first meals the group had had, lunch at a restaurant close to the Medici Palace. He’d been shocked by the amount of food, the numerous courses. The marinated vegetables were enough for him, but then the waiters brought out plates of ravioli, followed by roasted meat. That afternoon a number of people in the group, including him, went back to the hotel to recover, forgoing the rest of the sightseeing. The next day their guide told them that the restaurant lunches were optional, as long as everyone met back at the next designated place and time. And so he and Mrs. Bagchi began to wander off together, picking up something small, commenting with amazement that there had once been a time when they, too, were capable of eating elaborate lunches, as was the custom in India.

“I tried one or two pasta dishes,” he said, sipping his tea. “But mainly I ate pizza.”

“You spent three weeks in Italy and all you ate was pizza?”

“It was quite tasty pizza.”

She shook her head. “But the food there is so amazing.”

“I have videos,” he said, changing the subject. “I can show them later if you like.”

They ate dinner early, Ruma saying her father must be hungry from the journey and her father admitting that he was eager to turn in, that it was after all three hours later on the East Coast. She’d spent the past two days cooking, the items accumulating one by one on the shelves of the refrigerator, and the labor had left her exhausted. When she cooked Indian food for Adam she could afford to be lazy. She could do away with making dal or served salad instead of a chorchori. “Is that all?” her mother sometimes exclaimed in disbelief on the phone, asking Ruma what she was making for dinner, and it was in such moments that Ruma recognized how different her experience of being a wife was. Her mother had never cut corners; even in Pennsylvania she had run her household as if to satisfy a mother-in-law’s fastidious eye. Though her mother had been an excellent cook, her father never praised her for it. It was only when they went to the homes of others, and he would complain about the food on the way home, that it became clear how much he appreciated his wife’s talent. Ruma’s cooking didn’t come close, the vegetables sliced too thickly, the rice overdone, but as her father worked his way through the things she’d made, he repeatedly told her how delicious it was.

She ate with her fingers, as her father did, for the first time in months, for the first time in this new house in Seattle. Akash sat between them in his booster seat, wanting to eat with his fingers, too, but this was something Ruma had not taught him to do. They did not talk about her mother, or about Romi, the brother with whom she had always felt so little in common, in spite of their absurdly matching names. They did not discuss her pregnancy, how she was feeling compared to last time, as she and her mother surely would have. They did not talk very much at all, her father never one to be conversant during meals. His reticence was one of the things her mother would complain about, one of the ways Ruma had tried to fill in for her father.

“It is still so light outside,” he said eventually, though he had not lifted his eyes from his plate since he’d started eating, had seemed, as he so often did to Ruma, oblivious to his surroundings.

“The sun doesn’t set until after nine in the summer,” she said. “Sorry the begunis broke apart,” she added. “I didn’t let the oil get hot enough.”

“It doesn’t matter. Try it,” he told Akash, who for the past four months refused to eat anything other than macaroni and cheese for dinner. To Ruma he added, pointing to Akash’s plate, “Why do you buy those things? They are filled with chemicals.” When Akash was younger she had followed her mother’s advice to get him used to the taste of Indian food and made the effort to poach chicken and vegetables with cinnamon and cardamom and clove. Now he ate from boxes.

“I hate that food,” Akash retorted, frowning at her father’s plate.

“Akash, don’t talk that way.” In spite of her efforts he was turning into the sort of American child she was always careful not to be, the sort that horrified and intimidated her mother: imperious, afraid of eating things. When he was younger, he’d eaten whatever her mother made for him. “You used to eat Dida’s cooking,” she said. “She used to make all these things.”

“I don’t remember Dida,” Akash said. He shook his head from side to side, as if denying the very fact that she was ever alive. “I don’t remember it. She died.”