Again it was anxiety that kept him up, though not the same anxiety that used to rouse him from sleep after Gauri first left and he was alone with Bela in the house, asleep in the next room. Aware that she was suffering, aware that he was the only person in the world responsible for raising her.
He remembered Bela as an infant, when the distinction between night and day did not exist for her: awake, asleep, awake, asleep, shallow alternating phases of an hour or two. He’d read somewhere that at the start of life these concepts were reversed, that time within the womb was the inverse of time outside of it. He remembered learning, the first time he was at sea, about how whales and dolphins swam close to the surface of the water, how they emerged to draw air into their lungs, each breath a conscious act.
He drew breath through his nostrils, hoping this essential function, as faithful as the beating of his heart, might release him for a few hours. His eyes were closed, but his mind was unblinking.
It was like this now since the news of Richard’s death: a disproportionate awareness of being alive. He yearned for the deep and continuous sleep that refused to accommodate him. A release from the nightly torment that took place in his bed.
When he was younger wakefulness would not have troubled him; he would have taken advantage of the extra hours to read an article, or step outside to look at the stars. At times even his body felt full of energy, and he wished it were daylight, so that he could get up and walk along the bike path. He would walk as far as the bench where he’d bumped into Richard two years ago, to sit and think.
Instead, in his bed, he found himself traveling into the deeper past, sifting at random through the detritus of his boyhood. He revisited the years before he left his family. His father returning from the market every morning, the fish his mother would slice and salt and fry for breakfast, silver-skinned pieces spilling out of a burlap bag.
He saw his mother hunched over the black sewing machine she used to operate with her feet, pumping a pedal up and down, unable to talk because of the pins she held between her lips. She sat before it in the evenings, hemming petticoats for her customers, stitching curtains for the house. Udayan would oil the machine for her, fix the motor from time to time. A bird in his yard in Rhode Island, its call a rapid stopping and starting, mimicked the sound of it.
He saw his father teaching him and Udayan how to play chess, drawing the squares on a sheet of paper. He saw his brother hunching over, cross-legged on the floor, extending his index finger as he was finishing up a meal, to consume the final sauce that coated his plate.
Udayan was everywhere. Walking with Subhash to school in the mornings, walking home in the afternoons. Studying in the evenings on the bed they’d shared. Books spread between them, memorizing so many things. Writing in a notebook, concentrating, his face just inches above the page. Lying beside him at night, listening to the jackals howling in the Tolly Club. Quick-footed, assured, controlling the ball in the field behind the lowland.
These minor impressions had formed him. They had washed away long ago, only to reappear, reconstituted. They kept distracting him, like pieces of landscape viewed from a train. The landscape was familiar, but certain things always jolted him, as if seen for the first time.
Until he left Calcutta, Subhash’s life was hardly capable of leaving a trace. He could have put everything belonging to him into a single grocery bag. When he was growing up in his parents’ house, what had been his? His toothbrush, the cigarettes he and Udayan used to smoke in secret, the cloth bag in which he carried his textbooks. A few articles of clothing. Until he went to America he had not had his own room. He had belonged to his parents and to Udayan, and they to him. That was all.
Here he had been quietly successful, educating himself, finding engaging work, sending Bela to college. It had been enough, materially speaking.
But he was still too weak to tell Bela what she deserved to know. Still pretending to be her father, still hoarding what had not been earned. Udayan had been right in calling him self-serving.
The need to tell her hung over him, terrified him. It was the greatest unfinished business of his life. She was old enough, strong enough to handle it, and yet, because she was all he loved, he could not muster the strength.
He was increasingly aware these days of how much he owned, of the ongoing effort his life required. The thousands of trips to the grocery store he had made, all the heaping bags of food, first paper, then plastic, now canvas sacks brought from home, unloaded from the trunk of the car and unpacked and stored in cupboards, all to sustain a single body. The pills he swallowed every morning. The cinnamon sticks he pried out of a tin to flavor the oil for a pot of curry or dal.
One day he would die, like Richard, and his things would remain for other people to puzzle over or sort through, to throw away. Already his brain had stopped holding on to directions he would never have to follow again, the names of people he would speak to only once. So much of what occupied his mind was negligible. There was only one thing, the story of Udayan, that he wanted to lay bare.
He recognized the house at once. It was the rooming house he’d once lived in with Richard, across from the hand pump and the village well. A white wooden house with black shutters. Because the addresses of the houses had changed since then, because there had not been a picture on the postcard Elise had given him, he had not known.
Elise smiled when she saw him, handing him his ticket off a fat spool, his change. She looked different today, wearing a loose shift of sage-colored linen, her silver hair framing her face, a pair of sunglasses on her head.
Thank you for coming. How have you been?
I know this house. I used to live here. With Richard.
You did?
When I first got here, yes. You didn’t know?
Her face changed, the smile fading, but there was a look of concern now in her eyes. I had no idea.
She didn’t share what he’d told her with the rest of the group once the tour began. The layout had changed, the number of rooms fewer than they’d been. The rooms were sparsely furnished, the doorways fitted with iron latches, the furniture made of dark wood. The tables had dropped leaves that partially concealed their pedestals, like a modest woman’s skirt. The surface of the writing desk could be tucked away and locked. The lintel of the fireplace was made of oak.
He remembered nothing. And yet he had lived here, he had looked out through these small windows as he’d studied. A time so long ago, when he was new to Rhode Island, when Udayan was still alive. Here he had read Udayan’s letters. Here he had looked at a photograph of Gauri, wondering about her, not realizing that he was to marry her.
Elise pointed to the different styles of chairs that were popular: slat-back, banister back, fiddleback. The street had been the town’s commercial district, she told the group. Next door there had been a hat shop, and after that a barbershop, where the village men went to get shaved.
This house had first been a tailor’s shop and residence, then a lawyer’s office, then a family’s home for four generations. It was cut up into a rooming house in the sixties. When the last landlord died, he’d bequeathed it to the historical society, and slowly they had raised funds to restore it, collaborating with a local art gallery so that there would be exhibits in the rooms downstairs.
He was struck by the effort to preserve such places. The corner cupboard encased platters and bowls people had eaten from, candlesticks from which their light had burned. The kitchen walls displayed the ladles and griddles they had cooked with. The pine floors were the same hue they’d been when those people had walked through the rooms.
The effect was disquieting. He felt his presence on earth being denied, even as he stood there. He was forbidden access; the past refused to admit him. It only reminded him that this arbitrary place, where he’d landed and made his life, was not his. Like Bela, it had accepted him, while at the same time keeping a distance. Among its people, its trees, its particular geography he had studied and grown to love,
he was still a visitor. Perhaps the worst form of visitor: one who had refused to leave.
He thought of the two homes that belonged to him. The house in Tollygunge, which he had not returned to since his mother’s death, and the house in Rhode Island in which Gauri had left him, which he imagined would be his last. A relative managed the house in Tollygunge on his behalf, collecting the rent and depositing it into a bank account there, drawing on the income to oversee any repairs.
He would never go back to live there, and yet he could not bring himself to sell it; that small plot of land, and the prosaic house that stood on it, still bore family’s name, as his parents had hoped it would.
A doctor and his family lived in it now, the bottom floor serving as his chamber. Perhaps ignorant of its history, perhaps having heard some version of it from neighbors. No group would go out of its way to admire it, two hundred years from now.
At the end of the tour he added his name and phone number, his e-mail, to a list for the historical society. He accepted another postcard from Elise, announcing a plant sale the following month.
After their brief exchange she had paid him no special interest that afternoon, always speaking to the group. She had not approached him, as he hoped she might, when he had lingered alone in the upstairs hallway, in the part of the house that had felt most familiar to him.
He concluded it had been for the sake of the historical society that she’d invited him, that it had meant nothing else. But a few days later, she called.
You’re all right?
Why do you ask?
You seemed shaken the other day. I didn’t want to intrude.
She wanted to invite him to something else. Not a play or a concert, something he might have turned down. She said she remembered him mentioning, at Richard’s funeral, that he liked walking along the bike path. She belonged to a hiking club that got together once a month, to explore tucked-away landmarks and trails.
We’re meeting at the Great Swamp next time, so I thought of you, she said, before asking if he wanted to come along.
Chapter 3
The ginkgo leaves, yellow a few days ago, glow apricot now. They are the only source of brightness this morning. Rain from the night before has caused a fresh batch of leaves to fall onto the bluestone slabs that pave the sidewalk. The slabs are uneven, forced up here and there by the roots of the trees. The treetops aren’t visible through the windows of Bela’s room, two steps ground level. Only when she emerges from the stoop, pushing open a wrought-iron gate, to step out into the day.
The block is lined with row houses facing one another. Mostly inhabited, a few boarded up. She’s been in the neighborhood a few months, because the opportunity arose. She’d been living upstate, east of Albany. Driving down every Saturday to one of the farmers’ markets in the city, unloading the truck, setting up tents. Someone mentioned a room in a house.
It was an opportunity to live cheaply in Brooklyn for a while. There was a job she could walk to, clearing out a dilapidated playground, converting it into vegetable beds. She trains teenagers to work there after school, showing them how to shovel out the crabgrass, how to plant sunflowers along the chain-link fence. She teaches them the difference between a row crop and a cover crop. She oversees senior citizens who volunteer.
She lives with ten other people in a house meant for one family. They are people writing novels and screenplays, people designing jewelry, people whose computer start-ups have failed. People who’ve recently graduated from college, and older people with pasts they don’t care to discuss. They all keep to themselves, operating on different schedules, but they take turns feeding one another. There is one set of bills, one kitchen, one television, rotating chores. In the mornings they sign up for time slots to use the bathrooms. Once a week, on Sundays, those who can make it sit down to a collective meal.
People still talk about the shooting a few years ago, in the middle of the day, outside the drugstore on the corner. They talk about a fourteen-year-old boy, whose parents live across the street, who was killed. Most people get their groceries from bodegas or run-down supermarkets. But now there’s a coffee shop with an espresso machine, wedged among the other storefronts. There are fathers in suits, walking children to school.
One of the houses at the end of the block is shrouded with netting. The peeling facade is being scraped down to reveal a base layer of thickly ridged gray. Climbing roses, a combination of orange and red, are in bloom in the small plot behind the gate. The name of the contractor, according to the sign posted out front, is Italian, but the workmen come from Bangladesh. They speak in the language Bela’s parents had used with one another. A language she’d understood better than she’d spoken in her childhood. A language she stopped hearing after her mother left.
Her mother’s absence was like another language she’d had to learn, its full complexity and nuance emerging only after years of study, and even then, because it was foreign, a language never fully absorbed.
She can’t understand what these men are saying. Just some words here and there. The accent is different. Still, she always slows down when she passes them. She’s not nostalgic for her childhood, but this aspect of it, at once familiar and foreign, gives her pause. Part of her wonders whether the dormant comprehension in her brain will ever be jostled. If one day she might remember how to say something.
Some days she sees the workmen sitting on the stoop of the house, taking a break, joking with one another, smoking cigarettes. One of them is older, with a wispy white beard nearly to his chest. She wonders how long they’ve lived in America, whether and in what way they might be related. She wonders if they like it here. Whether they’ll return to Bangladesh, or stay permanently. She imagines them living in a group house, as she does. She sees them sitting down to dinner together at the end of their long day, eating rice with their hands. Praying at a mosque in Queens.
What do they make of her? Of her faded gray jeans, the unlaced boots on her feet? Long hair she’ll tie back later, most of it tucked for now inside her hooded sweatshirt. A face without makeup, a day-pack strapped across her chest. Ancestors from what was once a single country, a common land.
Apart from their vocabulary, their general coloring, none of these men resemble her father. But somehow they remind her of him. They cause her to think of him in Rhode Island, to wonder how he’s doing.
Noel reminds her in another way of her father. He lives in the house, with his girlfriend, Ursula, and their daughter, Violet, in two rooms on the top floor that Bela’s never seen. Noel spends his days with Violet; Ursula, a cook in a restaurant, a pretty woman with a pixie haircut, is the one who works.
Bela sees Noel taking Violet to kindergarten in the mornings and, a few hours later, bringing her home. She sees him taking her to the park, teaching her to ride a bike. She sees him running behind his daughter as she struggles to gain her balance, grabbing on to a woolen scarf he’s tied around her chest. She sees him fixing Violet’s dinners, grilling a single hamburger for her on the hibachi behind the house.
Violet doesn’t begrudge Ursula all the time she’s away. Nor does Noel. They kiss her good-bye in the mornings, they fall into her arms when she comes home, sometimes with desserts from the restaurant. Because she’s the exception, and not the rule, Violet forms a different relationship to Ursula. Less frequent contact, but more intense. She adjusts her expectations, just as Bela once did.
Noel and Ursula sometimes knock on Bela’s door as they prepare their own dinner, later at night, after Violet has gone to bed. There is always plenty, she is always welcome, they say. Bread and cheese, a big salad Ursula tosses with her fingers. Ursula is always a little wired when she gets home from her shifts at the restaurant. She likes to roll a joint for the three of them, listen to music, tell stories about her day.
Bela enjoys spending time with them, and tries to be generous in kind. She looks after Violet, if Ursula and Noel want to go see a movie. She’s taken Ursula out to the community garden, sendi
ng her back with herbs and sunflowers for her restaurant. But she doesn’t want to come to depend on them. She says no when Noel and Ursula decide, on Ursula’s birthday, to have a picnic on Fire Island. She’s been in too many friendships with other couples like Noel and Ursula. Couples who go out of their way to include her, to offer her the company she lacks, only to remind her that she’s still on her own.
She’s used to making friends wherever she goes, then moving on, never seeing them again. She can’t imagine being part of a couple, or of any other family. She’s never had a romantic relationship that’s endured for any length of time.
She feels no bitterness, seeing Noel and Violet and Ursula together. Their closeness fascinates her, also comforts her. Even before her mother left, they’d never really been a family. Her mother had never wanted to be there. Bela knows this now.
Visiting her father last summer, she’d learned that he was seeing someone. Not just anyone, but someone she knew. Mrs. Silva had been her history teacher. But Bela was asked, the day they all went out to breakfast, to call her Elise.
She’d been astonished to learn of their involvement; the most significant figure of her upbringing, paired with a minor one. She’d been secretly upset by it, at first. But she knew it was unfair of her, given that she barely saw her father, given that she continued to measure out her contact with him, whether to deny herself or to deny him, she could not be sure.
She saw he’d been nervous, telling her. She saw that he was afraid she would react badly, that maybe she would use this as further cause to keep away. Intuiting his hesitance, not wishing to intimidate him, she had reassured him, saying she was happy he’d found a companion, that of course she wished him well.