Unaccustomed Earth (37 page)

I slit the tape with my car key and lifted the flaps of a few of the boxes. One contained old engineering books of my father’s. Another had a dinner set wrapped in pages of
The Times of India,
plates I had eaten off for years but forgotten until now, with a pattern of small orange diamonds around the rim. I found my enlarger, tongs, a set of trays, and old bottles of fixer for the darkroom I’d set up during my last year of high school. There were times my mother came down and kept me company, sitting quietly in the blackness as I struggled to load film onto the developing reel. Together we would breathe in the chemical smells, their corrosiveness, from which my hands were protected by rubber gloves, nothing compared to what was taking place inside her body. She would keep time for me with her watch, familiarizing herself with the process enough to be able to tell me when to pour the series of fluids in and out of the processing tank, both of us knowing that I’d have to buy a timer, eventually. “It must be something like this,” she said once in that perfectly dark, silent, sealed-up space, and I understood without her saying so that she was imagining what it might be like to be dead. “This is how I want to think of it.”

The box I was looking for was labeled “
X-MAS
” in my mother’s hand, not on the side so that it was easily identifiable, but in a corner on top. I had no sentimental attachment to the items inside, and yet I didn’t want to see them. The thought of Chitra going through the box, watching her sift through everything, upset me just as it had upset me, throughout the day, to watch her handle the cutlery, the teakettle, at one point to hold the telephone and speak with my father to learn that he was on his way home. When my father had tried to remove the signs of my mother from the house I blamed him for being excessive, but now I blamed him for not having done enough.

“I can’t find it,” I said, after returning upstairs. My father did not press the issue, did not insist on going down and looking for it himself. He behaved differently around Chitra, was more accepting of the minor defeats of life. I offered to go to a drugstore and buy what we needed, glad to have another reason to leave the house. When I came back my father and I trimmed the tree together, Chitra and the girls watching us from the sectional. We placed the tree in the stand and tightened the screws and draped lights over the branches. There was nothing personal or idiosyncratic to put on it, just a box of sapphire-blue balls, so that it looked less like a tree in someone’s home and more like one in the corner of a bank or an office lobby. But Rupa and Piu were delighted, exclaiming that they’d never seen anything more beautiful. My father went upstairs and returned with a shopping bag full of gifts. They’d all been wrapped at whatever store he bought them in, the same green-and-gold paper professionally taped and tied. He distributed them under the tree, eight boxes altogether. “Two for each of you,” he said to no one in particular. Rupa and Piu got up and went to look at them then, excited to find their names written on the tags.

“Can we open them?” Piu asked Chitra, Chitra who did not know the answer.

“Not until Christmas morning,” I said. “Until then you can just look. And maybe shake them a little.”

“So lovely,” Chitra said, impressed now that the tree had been trimmed.

“Kaushik, what about a picture?” my father suggested.

I shook my head. I had left my camera, my father’s old Yashica, at school.

“But you always have it with you.” That look of irritated disappointment, the one that had appeared the day my mother died and was missing now that he’d married Chitra, passed briefly across my father’s face.

“I forgot it,” I said. It was true, I did always have the camera with me. Even on quiet weekends when I came home and my father and I saw no one I would bring it, taking it with me on walks. This time I had left it behind, knowing that I would not want to document anything.

“I don’t understand,” my father said.

“Neither do I,” I replied. “You haven’t wanted a picture of anything in years.”

“That’s not true.”

“It is.”

We were stating facts and at the same time arguing, an argument whose depths only he and I could fully comprehend. I went to the kitchen to pour myself a drink, bringing it with me to the dining table when Chitra announced, a few minutes later, that dinner was ready. No one said anything during the meal. When we were done eating, Chitra cleared all the plates and took them into the kitchen, just as she had the night before, allowing my father and me to relax after dinner in a way that we’d never been able to during the last years of my mother’s life. We no longer had to assume the responsibility of scraping the plates and loading the dishwasher so that my mother could rest. I sat finishing my drink, and Rupa and Piu slithered out of their seats and returned to the sectional to watch more television. My father got up and followed them, settling into his recliner with the newspaper. He opened it to a large ad for Lechmere that featured cameras for sale, circling things with a ballpoint pen.

Two days later was Christmas Eve, and my father stayed home from work, suggesting that we all go, the five of us, into Boston to show Chitra and the girls the city. I had no excuse and so I joined them, sitting in the backseat of my father’s car, between Rupa and Piu. Though we were only going for a short ride, the trip felt strangely momentous. For the last two years of my mother’s life, when she was always in and out of the hospital, we had gone nowhere, taken no trips for pleasure apart from those occasional walks along the beach. The last thing in my life that was anything close to a vacation was the layover in Rome with my parents, on our way back from Bombay. All I had learned about New England was the immediate region that surrounded our house, and the way to Mass General, making the trip back and forth until it was no longer necessary.

My father drove us first into Cambridge to look at Harvard and MIT, Chitra asking me why I had chosen a college so far away when I could have attended those schools instead. I ignored her question, as I ignored so many of the things she said to me. “He wanted to get out of Massachusetts,” my father explained.

I had thought we would get out of the car at various points and walk around, but Chitra said it was too cold and my father agreed. After circling around Kendall Square he drove over the Mass Avenue Bridge and turned onto Commonwealth Avenue, which was decorated with lights and wreaths, and then drove around the Public Garden and the Common. He pointed out the golden dome of the State House, and the beautiful homes that lined the steep streets of Beacon Hill. Behind those homes was Mass General, where my father and I had gone together so many times. A phone call had woken us in the early hours one morning, and we had driven down to Boston just as the first light was intruding with harsh orange streaks in the sky. She looked the same as the night before, lying in the bed with her eyes closed, only all the machines were shut off, making the room in which we had spent so many quiet hours all the more silent. Her skin felt chilled when I touched it, as if she had just returned from a brisk walk in winter. I looked up now at the windows of the hospital, but my father turned toward Chitra. “This is where America’s Brahmins live,” he said, laughing at his own joke, and in the front seat Chitra smiled in a way that revealed to me that she was falling in love.

For Christmas my father bought me a sweater and a shirt, but later he gave me an envelope containing ten hundred-dollar bills. “You will need it for this and that,” he said when I told him it was too much. My father had also arranged to go to Disney World for five days; this, along with the toys under the tree, was his present to the girls. “You are welcome to join us,” my father said when he announced this news on Christmas morning, but I said no, making up something about there being a winter session at Swarthmore. My father did not convince me to join them. But Rupa and Piu were devastated. “Why don’t you want to come?” they kept asking, all the more bewildered when they discovered that I had never been to Disney World. I sensed that they needed me to guard them, as I needed them, from the growing, incontrovertible fact that Chitra and my father now formed a couple. My presence was proof that my mother had once existed, just as they represented the physical legacy of their dead father. “Won’t you be lonely staying all by yourself?” Chitra asked me more than once. At the same time I gathered that she, like my father, was relieved to hear my plans. I had no plans, of course, other than to be in the house alone.

Once I knew that they were leaving I felt more charitable toward the girls, and in an effort to make up for not going to Disney World I took them to the Science Museum one day, and another day to the Aquarium. They behaved impeccably on these outings, never complaining or demanding, overjoyed when I bought each of them a cheap rubber lobster. They were with me, having ice cream at Herrell’s in Harvard Square, where I’d gone to buy a record, when Piu’s loose tooth fell out as she crunched on her cone, and I sopped up the blood in her mouth with napkins and put the sticky tooth in my pocket, telling them about the tooth fairy as we drove home. Though I was only twenty-one I remember wondering, just then, what it might be like to have a child. I did not hold it against them that they had begun calling my father Daddy. They never spoke of their own father, but one night I woke up to the sound of Piu screaming, locked inside a nightmare, asking for her Baba again and again.

A few days before New Year’s Eve, my father and Chitra were invited to a holiday party at the home of some of my parents’ friends. How strange it was, seeing Chitra carefully descending the floating staircase, dressed up in a dark green sari and a garnet necklace, and then my father behind her, then beside her, always beside her now, his hair neatly combed, wearing a tweed sports jacket I had not seen since my mother died. I was not expected to attend the party, but Rupa and Piu were going, had put on matching dresses with red-and-black-checkered skirts and black velvet headbands in their hair. At the last minute, just as my father was taking the coats out of a cupboard, Rupa turned to Chitra and asked, “Can we stay home?”

“Of course not,” Chitra said. “It would be rude.”

“But KD isn’t going.”

“Actually, it may be rather dull for them,” my father said. “I don’t believe there will be any children close to their ages.”

“I haven’t made dinner for them,” Chitra said. “They haven’t eaten.”

“I can get a pizza,” I offered, looking up from the sectional. I winked at Rupa and Piu. “We can have our own party.”

The girls clapped their hands, Piu smiling to reveal the new gap in her teeth. Chitra told me to have them in bed by nine, and then she and my father buttoned their coats and went off to the party. It was the first time they had gone out alone, and it occurred to me, once they were gone, that I had done a favor to them as well as to Rupa and Piu. The girls took off their shoes but kept their tights and party dresses on, and sat with me to watch television. We passed a bag of potato chips back and forth, and when it was empty I called in for pizzas. I put on my coat to go to the restaurant. Rupa and Piu stared at me.

“Where are you going?” Piu asked.

“To get our dinner.”

“You are leaving us alone?”

“It’s ten minutes away. I’ll be back before you know it.”

They said nothing, but they looked genuinely scared. It annoyed me that Chitra had instilled in them such fear. “Well, come if you want.”

We drove to the restaurant and ended up eating the pizza there. I drank a beer and smoked a few cigarettes during the meal, and Rupa and Piu sipped Cokes from tall paper cups. They asked me again if I would go with them to Disney World. I told them I would think about it, and the lie was enough to fill them with new hope. The phone was ringing when we returned to the house. It was Jessica, so I poured myself a drink and took the phone into the guestroom. When I told her about my father taking Chitra and the girls to Disney World, Jessica suggested coming up to visit me while they were away. I missed her, I thought about her and desired her at night in bed, and yet I did not want to see her in my parents’ house. I didn’t say this, but she sensed my reluctance and we began to quarrel for the first time. It was an awkward conversation, full of long pauses, draining, even though it never escalated into a real argument. I felt guilty about avoiding her, just as I felt guilty saying no to Disney World, but I knew that were I to agree to either proposition I would feel worse. I told Jessica the same lie that I told the girls, that I would think about it, and got off the phone.

When I opened the door to refresh my drink I saw that Rupa and Piu were no longer watching television, which was what I’d assumed they’d been doing all this time. I called for them, checking the kitchen, the bathroom, then went upstairs, to the door of my old room. I didn’t hear them talking and, seeing from my watch that it was already ten o’clock, thought maybe they were asleep. I opened the door, looking into the room for the first time since I’d come home. The lights were on, and I saw my old bed, and a folding cot placed beside it without any gap. The things I’d had on the walls, the poster of Jimi Hendrix and a copy of Paul Strand’s “Blind Woman” I’d ripped out of a magazine, had not been removed. The closet door was open, and there was a chair in front of it, as if positioned to pull something down from the shelf. I had thought the room would be transformed with Rupa and Piu’s things, but there was no sign of them apart from the extra bed and the small pile of toys they’d gotten for Christmas neatly stacked in one corner. Close to this pile sat Rupa and Piu in their party dresses. They had their backs to me, were hunched over something on the carpet that I couldn’t see. “She looks sad in this one,” I heard Piu whisper in Bengali, and then Rupa, saying, “She and KD smile the same way.”