Unaccustomed Earth

by Jhumpa Lahiri

  My father went one evening to the airport to greet you. It was a school night for me. The dining table had been set since the afternoon. This was my mother’s way when she gave parties, though she had never prepared such an elaborate meal in the middle of the week. An hour before you were expected, she turned on the oven. She had heated up a panful of oil and begun to fry thick slices of eggplant to serve with the dal, filling the room with a haze of smoke, when my father called to say that though your plane had landed, one of your suitcases had not arrived. I was hungry by then, but it felt wrong to ask my mother to open the oven door and pull out all the dishes for my sake. My mother turned off the oil and I sat with her on the sofa watching a movie on television, something about the Second World War, in which a group of tired men were walking across a dark field. Cinema of a certain period was the one thing my mother loved wholeheartedly about the West. She herself never wore a skirt—she considered it indecent—but she could recall, scene by scene, Audrey Hepburn’s outfits in any given movie.

  I fell asleep at her side, and the next thing I knew I was sprawled on the sofa alone, the television turned off, voices filling another part of the house. I stood up, my face hot, my limbs cramped and heavy. You were all in the dining room, eating. Pans of food lined the table, and in addition to the water pitcher there was a bottle of Johnnie Walker that only your parents were drinking, planted between their plates. There was your mother, her slippery dark hair cut to her shoulders, wearing slacks and a tunic, a silk scarf knotted at her neck, looking only vaguely like the woman I’d seen in the pictures. With her bright lipstick and frosted eyelids, she looked less exhausted than my mother did. She had remained thin, her collarbones glamorously protruding, unburdened by the weight of middle age that now padded my mother’s features. Your father looked more or less the same, still handsome, still wearing a jacket and tie, a different style of glasses his concession to the new decade. You were pale like your father, long bangs combed over to one side of your face, your eyes distracted yet missing nothing. I had not expected you to be handsome. I had not expected to find you appealing in the least.

  “My goodness, Hema, already a lady. You don’t remember us, do you?” your mother said. She spoke to me in English, in a pleasant, unhurried way, with a voice that sounded amused. “Come, poor thing, we’ve kept you waiting. Your mother told us you went hungry because of us.”

  I sat down, embarrassed that you had seen me asleep on the sofa. Though you had all just flown halfway across the world, it was I who felt weary, despite my nap. My mother served me a plate of food, but her attention was on you and the fact that you were refusing seconds.

  “We had dinner before we landed,” you replied, a faint accent present in your English, but not the strong accent our parents shared. Your voice had deepened, no longer a child’s.

  “It’s remarkable, the amount of food you get in first class,” your mother said. “Champagne, chocolates, even caviar. But I saved room. I remembered your cooking, Shibani,” she added.

  “First class!” my mother exclaimed, with an intake of breath. “How did you end up there?”

  “It was my fortieth birthday gift,” your mother explained. She looked over at your father, smiling. “Once in a lifetime, right?”

  “Who knows?” he said, clearly proud of the extravagance. “It could become a terrible habit.”

  Our parents spoke of the old Cambridge crowd, mine telling yours about people’s moves and accomplishments, the bachelors who had married, the children who had been born. They spoke about Reagan winning the election, all the ways that Carter had failed. Your parents spoke of Rome, where you’d had a two-day layover to tour the city. Your mother described the fountains, and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel you had stood three hours in line to see. “So many lovely churches,” she said. “Each is like a museum. It made me want to be a Catholic, only to be able to pray in them.”

  “Do not die before seeing the Pantheon,” your father said, and my parents nodded, not knowing what the Pantheon was. I knew—I was, in fact, in the middle of learning about ancient Rome in my Latin class, writing a long report about its art and architecture, all of it based on encyclopedia entries and other books in the school library. Your parents spoke of Bombay and the home you had left behind, a flat on the tenth floor, with a balcony overlooking palm trees and the Arabian Sea. “A pity you didn’t visit us there,” your mother said. Later, in the privacy of their bedroom, my mother pointed out to my father that we had never been invited.

  After dinner I was told to show you the house and where you would sleep. Normally I loved to do this for guests, taking a proprietary pleasure in explaining that this was the broom closet, that the downstairs half-bath. But now I lingered over nothing, for I sensed your boredom. I was also nervous at being sent off with you, disturbed by the immediate schoolgirl attraction I felt. I was used to admiring boys by then, boys in my class who were and would remain unaware of my existence. But never someone as old as you, never someone belonging to the world of my parents. It was you who led me, climbing quickly up the stairs, opening doors, poking your head into rooms, unimpressed by it all.

  “This is my room. Your room,” I said, correcting myself.

  After dreading it all this time, now I was secretly thrilled that you would be sleeping here. You would absorb my presence, I thought. Without my having to do a thing, you would come to know me and like me. You walked across the room to the window, opened it, and leaned out into the darkness, letting cold air into the room.

  “Ever go out on the roof?” you asked. You did not wait for me to answer, and the next thing I knew you’d lifted the screen and were gone. I rushed over to the window, and when I leaned outside I couldn’t see you. I imagined you slipping on the shingles, falling into the shrubbery, my being blamed for the accident, for standing by stupidly as you did such a brazen thing. “Are you okay?” I called out. The logical thing would have been to say your name, but I felt inhibited and did not. Eventually you came back around, seating yourself on the incline over the garage, gazing down at the lawn.

  “What’s behind the house?”

  “Woods. But you can’t go there.”

  “Who said?”

  “Everyone. My parents and all the teachers in school.”

  “Why not?”

  “A boy got lost in them last year. He’s still missing.” His name was Kevin McGrath, and he’d been two grades behind me. For a week we’d heard nothing but helicopters, dogs barking, searching for some sign of him.

  You did not react to this information. Instead, you asked, “Why do people have yellow ribbons tied to their mailboxes?”

  “They’re for the hostages in Iran.”

  “I bet most Americans had never even heard of Iran before this,” you said, causing me to feel responsible both for my neighbors’ patriotism and for their ignorance.

  “What’s that thing to the right?”

  “A swing set.”

  The word must have amused you. You faced me and smiled, though not kindly, as if I’d invented the term.

  “I missed the cold,” you said. “This cold.” The remark reminded me that none of this was new to you. “And the snow. When will it snow again?”

  “I don’t know. There wasn’t much snow for Christmas this year.”

  You climbed back into the room, disappointed, I feared, by my lack of information. You glanced at yourself in my white-framed mirror, your head nearly cut off at the top. “Where’s the bathroom?” you asked, already halfway out the door.

  That night, lying on the cot in my parents’ room, wide awake though it was well past midnight, I heard my mother and father talking in the dark. I worried that perhaps you would hear them, too. The bed where you slept was just on the other side of the wall, and if I had been able to stick my hand through it, I could have touched you. My parents were at once critical of and intimidated by yours, perplexed by the ways in which they had changed. Bombay had made them more American than Cambridge had,
my mother said, something she hadn’t anticipated and didn’t understand. There were remarks concerning your mother’s short hair, her slacks, the Johnnie Walker she and your father continued to drink after the meal was finished, taking it with them from the dining room to the living room. It was mainly my mother who talked, my father listening and murmuring now and then in tired consent. My parents, who had never set foot in a liquor store, wondered whether they should buy another bottle—at the rate your parents were going, that bottle would be drained by tomorrow, my mother said. She remarked that your mother had become “stylish,” a pejorative term in her vocabulary, implying a self-indulgence that she shunned. “Twelve people could have flown for the price of one first-class ticket,” she said. My mother’s birthdays came and went without acknowledgment by my father. I was the one who made a card and had him sign it with me on the first of every June. Suddenly my mother sat up, sniffing the air. “I smell smoke,” she said. My father asked if she had remembered to turn off the oven. My mother said she was certain she had, but she asked him to get up and check.

  “It’s a cigarette you smell,” he said when he came back to bed. “Someone has been smoking in the bathroom.”

  “I didn’t know Dr. Choudhuri smoked,” my mother said. “Should we have put out an ashtray?”

  In the morning you all slept in, victims of jet lag, reminding us that despite your presence, your bags crowding the hallways, your toothbrushes cluttering the side of the sink, you belonged elsewhere. When I returned from school in the afternoon you were still sleeping, and at dinner—breakfast for you—you all declined the curry we were eating, craving toast and tea. It was like that for the first few days: you were awake when we slept, sleeping when we were awake; we were leading antipodal lives under the same roof. As a result, apart from the fact that I wasn’t sleeping in my own room, there was little change. I drank my orange juice and ate my bowl of cereal and went off to the bus stop as usual. I spoke to no one of your arrival; I almost never revealed details of my home life to my American friends. As a child, I had always dreaded my birthdays, when a dozen girls would appear in the house, glimpsing the way we lived. I don’t know how I would have referred to you. “A family friend,” I suppose.

  Then one day I came home from school and found your parents awake, their ankles crossed on top of the coffee table, filling up the sofa where I normally sat to watch The Brady Bunch and Gilligan’s Island. They were chatting with my mother, who was in the recliner with a bowl in her lap, peeling potatoes. Your mother was dressed in a nylon sari of my mother’s, purple with red dots in various sizes. Distressing news of your mother’s missing suitcase had come: it had been located in Rome but had been placed on a flight to Johannesburg. I remember thinking that the sari looked better on your mother than on mine; the intense purple shade was more flattering against her skin. I was told that you were outside in the yard. I did not go out to look for you. Instead I practiced the piano. It was nearly dark by the time you came in, accepting the tea that I was still too young to drink. Your parents drank tea as well, but by six o’clock the bottle of Johnnie Walker was on the coffee table, as it would be every night that you stayed with us. You had gone out in only a pullover, your father’s costly camera slung around your neck. Your face showed the effects of the cold, your eyes blazing, the borders of your ears crimson, your skin glowing from within.

  “There’s a stream back there,” you said, “in those woods.”

  My mother became nervous then, warning you not to go there, as she had so often warned me, as I had warned you the night you came, but your parents did not share her concern. What had you photographed? they asked instead.

  “Nothing,” you replied, and I took it personally that nothing had inspired you. The suburbs were new to you and to your parents. Whatever memories you possessed of America were of Cambridge, a place that I could only dimly recall.

  You took your tea and disappeared to my room as if it were yours, emerging only when summoned for dinner. You ate quickly, not speaking, then returned upstairs. It was your parents who paid me court, who asked me questions and complimented me on my manners, on my piano playing, on all the things I did to help my mother around the house. “Look, Kaushik, how Hema makes her lunch,” your mother would say as I prepared a ham or turkey sandwich after dinner and put it in a paper bag to take to school the next day. I was still very much a child, while you, just three years older, had already eluded your parents’ grasp. You did not argue with them and yet you did not seem to talk to them very much, either. While you were outside I’d heard them tell my mother how unhappy you were to be back. “He was furious that we left, and now he’s furious that we’re here again,” your father said. “Even in Bombay we managed to raise a typical American teenager.”

  I did my homework at the dining table, unable to use the desk in my room. I worked on my ancient Rome report, something that had interested me until your arrival. Now it seemed silly, given that you’d been there. I longed to work on it in privacy, but your father talked to me at length about the structural aspects of the Colosseum. His civil engineer’s explanations went over my head, were irrelevant to my needs, but to be polite I listened. I worried that he would want to see whether I had incorporated the things he said, but he never bothered me about that. He hunted through his bags and showed me postcards he’d purchased, and though it had nothing to do with my report, he gave me a two-lire coin.

  When the worst of your jet lag had subsided we went to the mall in my parents’ station wagon. Your mother needed bras, one item that she could not borrow from my voluptuous mother. At the mall our fathers sat together in a sunken area of benches and potted plants, waiting, and you were given some money and allowed to wander off while I accompanied our mothers to the lingerie department in Jordan Marsh. Your mother led us there, with the credit card your father had handed to her before they parted. Normally we went to Sears. On her way to the bras she bought black leather gloves and a pair of boots that zipped to the knee, never looking at the price before taking something off the shelf. In the lingerie department it was me the saleswoman approached. “We have lovely training models, just in,” she said to your mother, believing that I was her daughter.

  “Oh, no, she’s far too young,” my mother said.

  “But look, how sweet,” your mother said, fingering the style the saleswoman presented on a hanger, lacy white with a rosebud at its center. I had yet to get my period and, unlike many of the girls at school, still wore flower-printed undershirts. I was ushered into the fitting room, your mother watching approvingly as I took off my coat and sweater and tried on the bra. She adjusted the straps and attached the hook at the back. She tried things on as well, topless beside me without shame, though it embarrassed me to see her large, plum-colored nipples, the surprising droop of her breasts, the dark patches of underarm hair that gave off a faintly acrid but not altogether unpleasant smell. “Perfect,” your mother said, running her finger below the elastic, along my skin, adding, “I hope you know that you’re going to be very beautiful one day.” Despite my mother’s protests, your mother bought me my first three bras, insisting that they were a gift. On the way out, at the makeup counter, she bought a lipstick, a bottle of perfume, and an assortment of expensive creams that promised to firm her throat and brighten her eyes; she was uninterested in the Avon products my mother used. The reward for her purchases at the makeup counter was a large red tote bag. This she gave to me, thinking that it would be useful for my books, and the next day I took it to school.

  After a week your father began his new job, at an engineering firm forty miles away. At first my father got up early and dropped him off before returning to Northeastern to teach his economics classes. Then your father bought an Audi with a stick shift. You stayed home with our mothers—your parents wanted to wait until they’d bought their home to see which school you would go to. I was stunned, and envious—half a year without school! To my added chagrin, you were not expected to do anything around the
house, never to return your plate or glass to the sink, never to make my bed, which I would see from time to time through the partly open door to my room in a state of total disarray, the blanket on the floor, your clothes heaped on my white desk. You ate enormous amounts of fruit, whole bunches of grapes, apples to their cores, a practice that fascinated me. I did not eat fresh fruit then; the textures and intensity of flavors made me gag. You complained about the taste, or lack of taste, but nevertheless decimated whatever my parents brought home from Star Market. I would find you, when I came home in the afternoons, always at the same end of the sofa, the toes of your thin bare feet hooked around the edge of the coffee table, reading books by Isaac Asimov that you’d picked off my father’s shelves in the basement. I hated Doctor Who, the one show you liked on television.

  I did not know what to make of you. Because you’d lived in India, I associated you more with my parents than with me. And yet you were unlike my cousins in Calcutta, who seemed so innocent and obedient when I visited them, asking questions about my life in America as if it were the moon, astonished by every detail. You were not curious about me in the least. One day a friend at school invited me to see The Empire Strikes Back on a Saturday afternoon. My mother said that I could go, but only if you were invited as well. I protested, telling her that my friend did not know you. Despite my crush, I didn’t want to have to explain to my friend who you were and why you were living in our house.