Unaccustomed Earth

by Jhumpa Lahiri

  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.”

  She was reading stories to Akash before his bedtime when her father knocked softly on the door, handing her the receiver of the cordless phone. He was holding up his right hand awkwardly in front of his chest, and she saw that it was soapy from dishwater. “Adam is on the phone.”

  “Baba, I would have done those. Go to sleep.”

  “It is only a few things.” Her father had always done the dishes after the family had eaten; he claimed that standing upright for fifteen minutes after a meal helped him to digest. Unlike Ruma, unlike her mother, unlike anyone Ruma had ever known, her father never ran the water while he soaped everything. He waited until the plates and pans were ready to be rinsed, and until then it was only the quiet, persistent sound of the sponge that could be heard.

  She took the phone. “Rum,” she heard Adam say. That was what he’d begun to call her, soon after they met. The first time he wrote her a letter, he’d misspelled her name, beginning, “Dear Room—”

  She pictured him collapsed on the bed in a hotel room in Calgary, where he’d gone this time, his shoes off, his tie loosened, ankles crossed. At thirty-nine he was still boyishly handsome, with the generous, curling brown-blond hair that Akash had inherited, a whittled marathoner’s body, cheekbones she secretly coveted. Were it not for the powerful depth of his voice and the glasses he wore these days for distance he could still pass for one of the easy-going, athletic boys she went to college with.

  “My dad’s here.”

  “We spoke.”

  “What did he say?”

  “The usual questions: ‘How are you? How are your parents?’” It was true; this was all her father ever had to say to Adam.

  “Have you eaten?”

  There was a pause before he replied. She realized he must have been watching something on the television as they were speaking. “I’m about to head off to dinner with a client. How’s Akash?”

  “Right here.” She put the receiver to his ear. “Say hi to Daddy.”

  “Hi,” Akash said, without enthusiasm. Then silence. She could hear Adam saying, “What’s going on, buddy? Having fun with Dadu?” But Akash refused to engage any further, staring at the page of his book, and eventually she put the phone back to her own ear.

  “He’s tired,” she said. “He’s about to fall asleep.”

  “I wish I could fall asleep,” Adam said. “I’m wiped.”

  She knew he’d been traveling since early morning, that he’d been working all day, would have to work through his dinner. And yet she felt no sympathy. “I can’t imagine my father living here,” she said.

  “Then don’t ask him to.”

  “I think the visit is his way of suggesting it.”

  “Then ask.”

  “And if he says yes?”

  “Then he moves in with us.”

  “Should I ask?”

  She heard Adam breathing patiently through his nose. “We’ve been over this a million times, Rum. It’s your call. He’s your dad.”

  She turned a page of Akash’s book, saying nothing.

  “I need to get going,” Adam said. “I miss you guys.”

  “We miss you, too,” she said.

  She hung up the phone, putting it beside the framed photograph on the bedside table, of Ruma and Adam on their wedding day, slicing into the tiered white cake. She could not explain what had happened to her marriage after her mother’s death. For the first time since they’d met, at a dinner party in Boston when she was a law student and he was getting his MBA, she felt a wall between them, simply because he had not experienced what she had, because both his parents were still living in the house in Lincoln, Massachusetts, where Adam had been raised. It was wrong of her, she knew, and yet an awareness had set in, that she and Adam were separate people leading separate lives. Though his absences contributed to her isolation, sometimes it was worse, not better, when Adam was home. Even with Akash to care for, part of her was beginning to prefer the solitude, without Adam hovering around, full of concern about her state of mind, her mood.

  Ten years ago her mother had done everything in her power to talk Ruma out of marrying Adam, saying that he would divorce her, that in the end he would want an American girl. Neither of these things had happened, but she sometimes thought back to that time, remembering how bold she’d had to be in order to withstand her mother’s outrage, and her father’s refusal to express even that, which had felt more cruel. “You are ashamed of yourself, of being Indian, that is the bottom line,” her mother had told Ruma again and again. She knew what a shock it was; she had kept her other involvements with American men a secret from her parents until the day she announced that she was engaged. Over the years her mother not only retracted her objections but vehemently denied them; she grew to love Adam as a son, a replacement for Romi, who had crushed them by moving abroad and maintaining only distant ties. Her mother would chat with Adam on the phone, even when Ruma was not at home, e-mailing him from time to time, carrying on a game of Scrabble with him over the Internet. When her parents visited, her mother would always bring a picnic cooler filled with homemade mishti, elaborate, syrupy, cream-filled concoctions which Ruma had never learned to make, and Adam loved.

  It was after she’d had a child that Ruma’s relationship with her mother became harmonious; being a grandmother transformed her mother, bringing a happiness and an energy Ruma had never witnessed. For the first time in her life Ruma felt forgiven for the many expectations she’d violated or shirked over the years. She came to look forward to their nightly conversations, reporting the events of her day, describing what new things Akash had learned to do. Her mother had even begun to exercise, getting up at five in the morning, wearing an old Colgate sweatshirt of Ruma’s. She wanted to live to see her grandchildren married, she’d said. There were times Ruma felt closer to her mother in death than she had in life, an intimacy born simply of thinking of her so
often, of missing her. But she knew that this was an illusion, a mirage, and that the distance between them was now infinite, unyielding.

  After finishing with the dishes he dried them and then scrubbed and dried the inside of the sink, removing the food particles from the drainer. He put the leftovers away in the refrigerator, tied up the trash bag and put it into the large barrel he’d noticed in the driveway, made sure the doors were locked. He sat for a while at the kitchen table, fiddling with a saucepan whose handle—he’d noticed while washing it—was wobbly. He searched in the drawers for a screwdriver and, not finding one, accomplished the task with the tip of a steak knife. When he was finished he poked his head into Akash’s room and found both the boy and Ruma asleep. For several minutes he stood in the doorway. Something about his daughter’s appearance had changed; she now resembled his wife so strongly that he could not bear to look at her directly. That first glimpse of her earlier, standing on the lawn with Akash, had nearly taken his breath away. Her face was older now, as his wife’s had been, and the hair was beginning to turn gray at her temples in the same way, twisted with an elastic band into a loose knot. And the features, haunting now that his wife was gone—the identical shape and shade of the eyes, the dimple on the left side when they smiled.

  In spite of his jet lag he had trouble falling asleep, was distracted by the sound of a motorboat cutting now and then across the lake. He sat up in bed flipping absently through an issue of U.S. News & World Report, which he’d taken from the seat pocket on the plane, and then opened a guidebook to Seattle that had been placed on the bedside table, he guessed, for his benefit. He glanced at the photographs, of the new library and coffee shops and whole salmon displayed on beds of ice. He read about the average yearly rainfall, and the fact that it seldom snowed. Studying a map, he was surprised by how far he was from the Pacific Ocean, not realizing until now that mountains stood in the way. Though he had traveled such a distance, his surroundings did not feel foreign to him as they had when he went to Europe. There he was reminded of his early days in America, understanding only a word or two of what people said, handling different coins. Here, as on a summer night in Pennsylvania, moths fluttered against the window screen, and sometimes an insect would bang against it, startling him with its force.

  From his position in bed he took in the spacious, sparsely furnished room. When he was Ruma’s age, he had lived with his wife and children in a small apartment in Garden City, New Jersey. They’d converted a walk-in closet into a nursery when Romi and then Ruma were born. He had worried for his family’s safety in that apartment complex, the surveillance cameras in the lobby making him nervous rather than putting him at ease, but at the time, still working on his PhD in biochemistry, it was the best he could afford. He remembered his wife making meals on the electric stove in the tiny kitchen, the rooms smelling afterward of whatever she’d prepared. They lived on the fourteenth floor and she would dry her saris one by one over the narrow balcony railing. The bedroom in which Romi and Ruma had both been conceived was dreary, morning light never penetrating, and yet he considered it, still, the most sacred of spaces. He recalled his children running through the rooms, the pitch of their young voices. It was a part of their lives only he and his wife carried with them. His children would only remember the large house he’d bought in the suburbs with willow trees in the backyard, with rooms for each of them and a basement filled with their toys. And compared to where Ruma now lived even that house was nothing, a flimsy structure that he always feared could burn down from the flame of a match.

  Now that he was on his own, acquaintances sometimes asked if he planned to move in with Ruma. Even Mrs. Bagchi mentioned the idea. But he pointed out that Ruma hadn’t been raised with that sense of duty. She led her own life, had made her own decisions, married an American boy. He didn’t expect her to take him in, and really, he couldn’t blame her. For what had he done, when his own father was dying, when his mother was left behind? By then Ruma and Romi were teenagers. There was no question of his moving the family back to India, and also no question of his eighty-year-old widowed mother moving to Pennsylvania. He had let his siblings look after her until she, too, eventually died.

  Were he to have gone first, his wife would not have thought twice about moving in with Ruma. His wife had not been built to live on her own, just as morning glories were not intended to grow in the shade. She was the opposite of Mrs. Bagchi that way. The isolation of living in an American suburb, something about which his wife complained and about which he felt responsible, had been more solitude than she could bear. But he enjoyed solitude, as Mrs. Bagchi did. Now that he had retired he spent his days volunteering for the Democratic Party in Pennsylvania, work he could do from his computer at home, and this, in addition to his trips, was enough to keep him occupied. It was a relief not to have to maintain the old house, to mow and rake the lawn, to replace the storm windows with screens in summer, only to have to reverse the process a few months later. It was a relief, too, to be living in another part of the state, close enough so things were still familiar, but far enough to feel different. In the old house he was still stuck in his former life, attending by himself the parties he and his wife had gone to, getting phone calls in the evenings from concerned friends who routinely dropped off pots of chicken curry or, assuming he was lonely, visited without warning on Sunday afternoons.

  He was suddenly tired, his vision blurring and the words in the guidebook lifting off the page. Beside the small pile of books there was a telephone. He set down the book, lifted the receiver, checked for a dial tone, and set it down again. Before coming to Seattle he had given Mrs. Bagchi his daughter’s phone number in an e-mail, but it was understood that she was not to call. She had loved her husband of two years more than he had loved his wife of nearly forty, of this he was certain. In her wallet she still carried a picture of him, a clean-shaven boy in his twenties, the hair parted far to one side. He didn’t mind. In a way he preferred knowing that her heart still belonged to another man. It was not passion that was driving him, at seventy, to be involved, however discreetly, however occasionally, with another woman. Instead it was the consequence of being married all those years, the habit of companionship.

  Without his wife, the thought of his own death preyed on him, knowing that it might strike him just as suddenly. He’d never experienced death up close; when his parents and relatives had died he was always continents away, never witnessing the ugly violence of it. Then again, he had not even been present, technically, when his wife passed away. He had been reading a magazine, sipping a cup of tea from the hospital cafeteria. But that was not what caused him to feel guilty. It was the fact that they’d all been so full of assumptions: the assumption that the procedure would go smoothly, the assumption that she would spend one night in the hospital and then return home, the assumption that friends would be coming to the house two weeks later for dinner, that she would visit France a few weeks after that. The assumption that his wife’s surgery was to be a minor trial in her life and not the end of it. He remembered Ruma sobbing in his arms as if she were suddenly very young again and had fallen off a bicycle or been stung by a bee. As in those other instances he had been strong for her, not shedding a tear.

  Sometime in the middle of the night she’d woken up in Akash’s bed and stumbled into her own. Normally Akash came into her bed at dawn, falling asleep beside her for another few hours before waking her up and wanting cereal. She didn’t mind Akash coming into her bed, especially when Adam was out of town. But this morning the bed was empty. She no longer felt sick in the mornings. Instead, her first thought was of food; she wanted a burrito, or one of the egg and cheese sandwiches from the bagel shop near their old apartment in Park Slope, a reminder that all through the night, as she slept, her body had been hard at work. In the kitchen she saw that the dinner dishes, washed and dried, were at one side of the countertop. In the drainer was a clean bowl, spoon, juice glass, and mug. Beside the stove, on a saucer, was a drying t
ea bag, reserved for a second use. She heard Akash’s voice coming from somewhere outside, but couldn’t see him through the window. She went onto the porch, where the sound of his voice was more distinct. “But I didn’t see a turtle,” she heard him say, and she gathered that he and her father had taken a walk down to the lake.

  She took her prenatal vitamin, put on water for tea. She was making toast when her father and Akash came in through the kitchen door.

  “We went to the lake and Dadu put me into a movie,” Akash said excitedly, pointing to the video camera strung around her father’s neck.

  “You’re wet,” she observed, noticing that the straps of his sandals and the front of his shorts were darkened by water. She turned to her father. “What happened?”

  “Nothing, nothing. We thought we saw a turtle, and Akash wanted to touch it,” he said to Ruma. “He is asking for cereal.”

  “Come on, first you need to change,” she said to Akash. When she returned she saw that her father had opened up the cupboard. “Is this the one he takes?” he asked, holding up a box of Cheerios.

  She nodded. “When did you wake up, Baba?”

  “Oh, I was up before five. I sat on the porch and had my breakfast, and then Akash joined me and we went outside.”

  “I can take over,” she said, watching her father pour milk into the cereal bowl.

  “I don’t mind. Have your food.”

  She opened the fridge for butter and jam, prepared her tea. When she was finished, her father took the kettle, put the dried-out tea bag into the same cup that was in the dish drainer, and added the remaining hot water.

  “Dadu, outside?” Akash said, tugging on her father’s pants.