Unaccustomed Earth

by Jhumpa Lahiri

  When Chitra returned she was followed by her daughters, two girls who at first glance, apart from a few inches in height, were indistinguishable. They were overdressed in our comfortably heated house, in thick sweaters and socks, incongruous Indian things that would soon be rejected, I knew, in favor of clothes from the mall. The sweaters were made of the same sickeningly bright shade of pink wool. The girls did not resemble Chitra very strongly. They were darker and sweeter-looking, with heart-shaped faces and two black ponytails on either side of their heads, adorned with red ribbons.

  “Would you like some of this?” I asked, pointing to the luchis still on my plate, and to my surprise they stepped forward and both put out a hand, cupping their giggling mouths with the other. I saw that one of the girls, the shorter one, was missing a front tooth.

  “Let Dada eat in peace,” Chitra said. She had treaded cautiously in terms of what I was to call her, but now referred to me without hesitation as the girls’ older brother.

  “You can call me Kaushik,” I said to the girls, and this made them put their hands back over their mouths and giggle more forcefully.

  “What about KD?” my father suggested.

  We all turned to him, puzzled, this man for whom we were now gathered together.

  “Short for Kaushik Dada,” he explained. I wondered if this was something that had just popped into his head or if he’d considered it carefully beforehand. He had always possessed an inventive streak when it came to words, writing Bengali poems on weekends and reading them aloud to my mother. From her comments I gathered that the poems were witty. It had been one of our family secrets, the fact that my civil engineer father was also a poet. Though I never asked about it, I’d assumed he’d stopped writing after my mother’s death, as he’d stopped doing so many things.

  “That’s clever,” Chitra said, speaking directly to my father for the first time since my arrival. She spoke approvingly, with the tone of someone who is used to acknowledging small achievements, and it was then that I remembered that she had been a schoolteacher in her former life. “Yes, KD is better.”

  I found the nickname inane, but my father seemed proud of it, and it was preferable to Chitra’s alternative. “And what do I call you?” I asked my stepsisters.

  “I am Rupa,” said the taller one, her voice husky, like her mother’s.

  “And I am Piu,” said the one missing the tooth.

  “We are very glad to be in your room,” Rupa added. She spoke stiffly, a bit distantly, as if reciting something she’d been forced to memorize. “We are very much appreciating.”

  They spoke to me in English, their accents and their intonation sounding as severe as mine must have sounded to your fully American ear when we arrived as refugees in your family’s home. I knew the accents would soon diminish and then disappear, as would their unstylish sweaters, their silly hairstyles.

  “Rupa and Piu are eager to see the Aquarium and the Science Museum,” my father said. “Perhaps you can take them one day, Kaushik.”

  I didn’t reply to this. “Very tasty,” I said instead in Bengali, referring to the food, something my mother had taught me to say after eating in the homes of other people. I got up to bring my plate to the kitchen.

  “You have not eaten,” Chitra said, intercepting me. She attempted to take the plate from my hand, but I held on to it and went to the kitchen to pour myself some of the Johnnie Walker my father stored in the cupboard over the dishwasher.

  “What do you need? I’ll get it for you,” Chitra said, following me. I was suddenly sickened by her, by the sight of her standing in our kitchen. I had no memories of my mother cooking there, but the space still retained her presence more than any other part of the house. The jade and spider plants she had watered were still thriving on the windowsill, the orange-and-white sunburst clock she’d so loved the design of, with its quivering second hand, still marking the time on the wall. Though she had rarely done the dishes, though it was in fact I who had mostly done the dishes in those days, I imagined her hands on the taps of the sink, her slim form pressed against the counter. Ignoring Chitra, I opened one cupboard for a glass and another for the Scotch, but all I found there now were boxes of cereal and packets of chanachur brought back from Calcutta.

  My father came into the kitchen as well. “Where’s the Scotch?” I asked him.

  He glanced at Chitra, and after some small silent communication between them she walked out. “I put it away,” he said once we were alone.

  “Why?”

  “I’ve stopped taking it. I sleep better at night, I find.”

  “Since when?”

  “For some time now. Also, I didn’t want to alarm Chitra.”

  “Alarm her?”

  “She’s a bit old-fashioned.” He pulled out the stepstool that lived in a space beside the refrigerator and unfolded it. He climbed to the top and opened up a cupboard above our refrigerator that was difficult, even with the stepstool, to reach, and took out a half-empty bottle.

  I wanted to ask my father what on earth had possessed him to marry an old-fashioned girl half his age. Instead I said, taking the bottle from his hand, “I hope it’s all right if I alarm her.”

  “Just be quiet about it, especially around the girls.”

  My parents had never been quiet about their fondness for Johnnie Walker, around me, around anyone. After my mother’s death, just after I turned eighteen, it was I who filled her shoes, nursing one watered-down glass and then another in the evenings in order to keep my father company before we could both justify going to bed. I almost never drank the stuff at college, preferring beer, but whenever I came home I craved the taste, unable to avoid the thought of my mother when I happened to see an ad for it on a billboard or in a magazine.

  “I thought tomorrow, while I’m at work, you could go pick up a tree,” my father said. “There’s a place not too far down 128. Perhaps the girls would want to join you. They’re terribly excited about it.”

  I looked at him, confused. Until now it had not fully registered that my father would be at work during the days, that I would be alone with Chitra and her daughters.

  “You mean a Christmas tree?” For the past three years, since my mother’s death, we had not celebrated the holiday at our house. Instead we had fallen into a pattern of accepting invitations at the homes of friends, appearing in the mornings fully dressed while the other family would still be in their pajamas. I would receive a single box containing a sweater or a button-down shirt and watch the family’s children open dozens of gifts. In Bombay my mother had always thrown a party on Christmas Day, stringing lights throughout our flat and putting presents under a potted hibiscus. It was a time of year she spoke fondly about Cambridge, about your family and the others we had left behind, saying the holiday wasn’t the same without the cold weather, the decorated shops, the cards that came in the mail.

  “I suppose we’ll have to get some presents,” my father added. “We still have a few days. It needn’t be extravagant.”

  I knew Chitra and her girls were probably huddled together in the dining area listening to every word my father and I exchanged, but that didn’t stop me from saying, “Those girls are barely half my age. Do you expect me to play with them?”

  “I don’t expect you to do anything,” my father replied evenly. He was unshaken by my remark, perhaps even relieved that we were now officially in opposition, that there was no longer a need to pretend. It was as if he had already played out this scene several times in his mind and was weary of it. “I am only asking if you mind picking up a tree.”

  I had yet to pour my drink. I’d been standing with my back to the kitchen counter, one hand holding a glass, the other the bottle my father had retrieved for me from its hiding place. I poured it now, taking it as my mother did, with one ice cube, not adding water. I drank what I poured, then poured another.

  “Easy,” my father said.

  I glanced in his direction. After my mother’s death he had acquired an
expression that permanently set his features in a different way. It was less an expression of sadness than of irritated resignation, the way he used to look if a glass slipped and broke from my hands when I was little, or if the day happened to be cloudy when we had planned a picnic. That was the expression that had come to his face the morning we stepped into my mother’s hospital room for the last time, that subsequently greeted me whenever I came home from college, that still seemed directed at my mother for letting him down. But the expression was missing now. “Not easy,” I said, shaking my head at my own reflection suspended against the black backdrop of evening. “It’s not easy for me.”

  My father had already left for work by the time I woke up the next morning. For a while I remained in bed, not knowing what time it was, confused, initially, as to why I was in the guestroom and why I could hear the sound of muffled girlish laughter drifting down through the ceiling. The guestroom was located on the first floor of the house, in its own wing off a corridor behind the kitchen. I occupied a double bed, the mattress positioned on a platform low to the ground. On the opposite wall was a sliding glass door facing the backyard and the pool, covered by a black tarp. When we first moved into the house my mother had devoted a disproportionate amount of attention to setting up the guestroom, shopping for the grasshopper-green quilt on the bed, curtains for the sliding glass door, an alarm clock for the bedside table, a soap dish for the adjoining bathroom, asking me to hang a pink and purple Madhubani painting over the chest of drawers. I didn’t know who she was expecting to come and stay with us, but by then we indulged her in whatever pastime lifted her spirits. I was grateful for it now, glad not to be upstairs in my old bedroom which shared a wall with my parents’ room. It had been awful enough hearing my mother’s raspy breathing at night, her moans. Now it would be Chitra and my father I would have heard conversing before bed, their bodies I would have to imagine under a blanket side by side.

  To my knowledge the only person who’d ever occupied our guestroom was a nurse named Mrs. Gharibian, who had come to tend to my mother after her needs became too much for my father and me and before my mother decided that she wanted to die in the hospital and not at home. Mrs. Gharibian was a middle-aged woman with short brown hair and a soft Southern accent. She had married an Armenian and learned to make all sorts of snacks from her mother-in-law. She would bring Tupperware containers full of lamb turnovers and stuffed grape leaves, food that now reminds me of my mother dying, putting them in the refrigerator for my father and me to eat, also stocking the house with milk and bread without being asked. Normally she left in the evenings, but for two weeks she spent the nights with us, administering morphine injections and emptying the bed-pans, making notes in a little cloth book that looked as if it ought to contain recipes. Something about her quietly optimistic manner made me believe that Mrs. Gharibian had the power to sustain my mother, not to cure her but to keep her alive indefinitely. “This is the worst part,” she told me once. “You’re holding your breath, thinking it’s still ahead, but this really is the worst of it, for you and for her.” At the time her words had not soothed me; I could imagine nothing worse than the moment my mother no longer drew air in and out of her lungs, no longer took us in through her weary eyes. I could imagine nothing worse than not being able to look at her face every day, its beauty grossly distorted but never abandoning her. But in the days after her death I realized Mrs. Gharibian had been right, there had been nothing worse than waiting for it to come, that the void that followed was easier to bear than the solid weight of those days.

  I pulled on a sweater, cracked open the sliding door, lit a cigarette. The season’s leaves had not been raked, were scattered everywhere and drifting in the breeze. The swimming pool had made my summer vacations from college tolerable, but last summer, which I’d spent house-sitting in Brooklyn with a friend whose parents had gone to Europe, my father had not bothered to fill it with water, and last night at dinner he mentioned that the filter needed to be replaced. Our first summer in the house my mother had used the pool religiously, forty lengths back and forth before breakfast. By the following summer, when she was weak from chemotherapy, she would only wade or dangle her legs on hot days, and at the end of that summer she died.

  Inside, I could hear the television—as soon as I emerged from the guestroom I would have to see them. I put on my jeans, annoyed that I could not simply walk through the house in boxers. In the bathroom I brushed my teeth and took the time to shave. I craved coffee but not food. Dinner had been another embarrassment of riches. Chitra hovered over my father and me and the girls, eating privately after we were done, the way our maids would in Bombay. I imagined another crowded plate waiting for me on the dining table, but there was no breakfast prepared, nothing offered when I approached Chitra and her daughters in the living room. They were sitting with their feet up on the sectional, watching an episode of Family Feud. They were dwarfed by the soaring ceiling, washed out by the morning sun the room received. The girls were dressed, but Chitra was wearing a zippered housecoat in a frumpy red-and-yellow calico print. Without makeup or jewelry she looked even younger. She was drinking a cup of tea, my mother’s biscuit tin open beside her.

  “Good morning,” I said.

  “Good morning,” Piu and Rupa chimed back, their eyes quickly returning to the television.

  “I’ll get your tea,” Chitra said, putting her cup on the cocktail table and preparing to get up. “I didn’t make any for you. Your father told me you like to sleep late when you visit home.”

  “It’s okay,” I told her. “Don’t get up. I don’t need any.”

  She spoke to me in Bengali, I to her in English, as had been the case the night before. I thought that my slack Americanized pronunciation would be lost on her, but she seemed to follow what I said.

  Chitra frowned, confused. “No tea in the morning?” The girls also looked away from the television, waiting for my answer.

  “I need coffee. It’s what I have at school. I’m used to it now.”

  “But there is no coffee in the kitchen. Not that I have seen.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I’ll grab some at Dunkin’ Donuts.” Before she had the chance to ask, I continued, “It’s a place that sells donuts. Donuts are a kind of cake, with a hole in the center.”

  “The store is far?”

  “Just a few minutes.”

  “But you must take the car?”

  I nodded, and she looked disappointed. “Without a car there is nowhere to go?”

  “Not really. Can you drive?”

  She shook her head.

  “It’s not hard. I’m sure you could get a license.”

  “Oh, no,” she said, not as if she were incapable, but as if driving were beneath her. “I would not like to learn.”

  “I’ll be back in a while,” I said. I noticed that the girls were looking up at me and I hesitated. “Would you like to come along?”

  “Yes, please,” Rupa and Piu said at the same time. They looked at Chitra, and she nodded in assent.

  I went back to the guestroom to get my wallet and keys, and when I returned the girls were already in their coats, matching red parkas that my father must have bought for them after they arrived. The thick zippers and bright nylon shells of the coats transformed their appearance, suddenly lending them a legitimately American air. They sat together in the back of my car among the newspapers, empty soda bottles, course books, cassette tapes. “Sorry for the mess,” I said, tossing everything off the seat and onto the floor. They fastened their seat belts carefully, prying one of the buckles out of its gap, Rupa helping Piu. Chitra stood in her housecoat looking through the storm door. She was trusting me to take her children to a place she’d never heard of and would not be able to find. Still, she waved and forced a small smile. I stepped on the clutch, about to reverse the car, when Chitra opened the storm door, poking her head out. “And I will be all right?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I will be saf
e alone, in this house?”

  “Of course,” I said, stunned that it would be the first time, nearly laughing at her. “Enjoy it.”

  “She does not allow us to go outside,” Piu said. “Not without her.”

  “She is afraid because she cannot see neighbors,” Rupa added.

  “And that we will fall into the swimming pool.”

  I did not know how to respond to any of this, so I said nothing as I backed out of the long driveway and drove toward town. The closest Dunkin’ Donuts was less than fifteen minutes away, and when I approached it felt too soon. I wanted to continue driving, and so I kept going, heading toward the next town, where there was a beach my mother used to like for an occasional change of scenery. This required getting on the highway, and I found it satisfying, accelerating for a short while along the empty, impersonal road. The girls asked no questions about where we were going, each looking steadily out the back windows, the journey still brief enough that the lack of conversation did not feel strange. I entered the next town and took a road from which the gray line of the ocean was visible. I pointed this out to Rupa and Piu, but they said nothing. “We can either go into the drive-through or inside,” I said once we reached the donut shop. “You guys have a preference?”

  “Which way is best?” Rupa asked.

  “With the drive-through I get my coffee and drink it as we go back to the house. The other way, we sit inside.”

  Rupa voted for the drive-through, Piu to go inside. “Tell you what,” I said. “We’ll go in, and on our way home I’ll get a refill in the drive-through.”

  They seemed pleased that neither option would be denied to them and got out of the car, holding hands as they walked across the parking lot. The Dunkin’ Donuts was part of a shopping plaza with a liquor store, a Bed and Bath, and a place that sold party supplies. The lot was crammed with the cars of last-minute Christmas shoppers, but Dunkin’ Donuts was empty. Christmas carols played on the sound system, their trite melodies foreign to Rupa and Piu. I ordered my coffee and asked the girls what they wanted. They stared at the selections, Piu straining on tiptoe, Rupa with her mouth slightly open and her tongue planted in one corner of it. The decent thing to do was to lift Piu up so that she could get a better view, and when I offered, she raised her hands and came into my arms. She was heavier than I expected, and I placed her on the counter, where she continued to stare.