Unaccustomed Earth

  “It’s a deal,” he said.

  They looked at their reflections in the mirror, she in her torn skirt and dingy bra, he naked, his penis flaccid, his face covered with bright white shaving cream. Megan shook her head. “What a vision we’ll be.”

  He’d assumed they’d walk to the school—it was just across the road, a few minutes over a sloping field. But Megan was wearing heels and didn’t want to get them muddy, so they got into the car. The seats were still full of evidence of their daughters—abandoned books, tiny dolls, the plastic horses Maya had begun collecting. Only the car seats were gone, transferred into his in-laws’ car for the weekend. He thought of the girls now at their grandparents’, playing in the treehouse his father-in-law had built for their occasional visits, his mother-in-law providing slices of pound cake and juice boxes for a tea party. His daughters looked nothing like him, nothing like his family, and in spite of the distance Amit felt from his parents, this fact bothered him, that his mother and father had passed down nothing, physically, to his children. Both Maya and Monika had inherited Megan’s coloring, without a trace of Amit’s deeply tan skin and black eyes, so that apart from their vaguely Indian names they appeared fully American. “Are they yours?” people sometimes asked when he was alone with them, in stores, or at the playground in the park.

  After just two minutes they pulled off the road and turned up the wide tree-lined drive that led to the gates of the school. The leaves were glossy and abundant, but his memories were of the blazing branches of autumn and the purplish light of the mountains, the shadows that spread in their curves and dips, and the snow that covered the tops of the gates in winter. The school itself was more or less as he remembered it, embarrassingly large and well maintained, pieces of rounded abstract sculpture here and there on the grass.

  “This place is nicer than where I went to college,” Megan said as they walked across the campus, taking in the pristine buildings, the sculptures.

  “It’s a bit over the top,” he said. When they’d first met Megan had been impressed by his prep school education, but at the same time she’d teased him about it. She was not bitter toward the privileged, but she was sometimes judgmental; were he not Indian, Megan would have probably avoided someone like him. She was the youngest of five children, her father a policeman, her mother a kindergarten teacher. She’d gotten a job after graduating from high school, in a photocopy store during the days and as a telemarketer in the evenings, not beginning college until she was twenty, going part time because she’d had to continue working. In that sense, she worked harder than anyone he’d ever known, including his own father and his parents’ uniformly successful crowd of Bengali friends. Megan’s ordinary background had displeased his parents, as had the fact that she was five years older than he was. Her stark prettiness, her refusal to wear contact lenses, her height, had not charmed them. The fact that she was a doctor did not make up for it. If anything, it made their disappointment in Amit worse.

  He noticed new wings tacked onto some of the buildings, modern elements of steel and glass alongside the brick and white cupolas. His parents had plucked him out of public school in Winchester, Massachusetts, where he’d been raised, and sent him here, for they’d decided when Amit was in the eighth grade to move back to India. He still remembered the night his parents told him their plans. They were sitting in a seafood restaurant on the Cape, in Cotuit, overlooking the water, the table heaped with the bright red claws and shells from which his father had effortlessly extracted the meat for all of them. His father began by saying he was growing restless on the faculty of Harvard Medical School, that there was a hospital in Delhi where he believed he was needed. Amit had been stunned by his parents’ decision—his parents, unlike most other Bengalis in Massachusetts, had always been dismissive, even critical, of India, never homesick or sentimental. His mother had short hair and wore trousers, putting on saris only for special occasions. His father kept a liquor cabinet and liked a gin and tonic before his meals. They both came from wealthy families, had both summered in hill stations and attended boarding schools in India themselves. The relative affluence of America never impressed them; in many ways they had lived more privileged lives in India, but they left the country and had not looked back.

  At the restaurant his father pulled out the admissions packet for Langford, showing photographs of the campus, smiling students gathered around classroom tables, teachers standing in front of blackboards, caught midsentence by the camera’s lens. Academically it was far superior to the school he’d been attending, his father told him, mentioning the percentage of Langford graduates who went on to Ivy League colleges. Amit realized, as his father spoke, that the position in Delhi had been accepted, their house in Winchester already put up for sale. There was no question of his going to school in Delhi; it wasn’t worth the trouble to adjust to education in a different country, his father said, given that eventually Amit would be attending an American college.

  From Langford, during Christmas after each academic year came to an end, Amit went to Delhi to be with his parents, staying in their flat full of servants in Chittaranjan Park, in a barren room set aside for his stays. He never enjoyed his visits to Delhi, his broken Bengali of no use in that city. It made him miss Calcutta, where all his relatives lived, where he was used to going. His parents had moved to Delhi the year of Indira Gandhi’s assassination, and the riots that subsequently raged there, the curfews and the constant vigilance with which his parents had to live, meant that Amit remained cooped up inside, without friends, without anything to do. In that sense it was a relief to him to return to this peaceful town. Four years later his parents were back in America, moving to Houston. In Delhi his father had perfected a laser technique to correct astigmatism that earned him invitations to work and teach in hospitals all over the world. After five years in Houston they’d moved yet again, to Lausanne, Switzerland. They lived in Saudi Arabia now.

  At Langford, Amit was the only Indian student, and people always assumed that he’d been born and raised in that country and not in Massachusetts. They complimented him on his accent, always telling him how good his English was. He’d arrived when he was fifteen, for sophomore year, which at Langford was called the fourth form, and by that time friendships and alliances among the boys of his class were already in place. At his high school in Winchester he’d been a star student, but suddenly he’d had to work doggedly to maintain his grades. He had to wear a jacket every morning to his classes and call his teachers “masters” and attend chapel on Sundays. Quickly he learned that his parents’ wealth was laughable compared to the majority of Langford boys. There was no escape at the end of the day, and though he admitted it to no one, especially not his parents when they called from Delhi every weekend, he was crippled with homesickness, missing his parents to the point where tears often filled his eyes, in those first months, without warning. He sought traces of his parents’ faces and voices among the people who surrounded and cared for him, but there was absolutely nothing, no one, at Langford to remind him of them. After that first semester he had slipped as best as he could into this world, swimming competitively, calling boys by their last names, always wearing khakis because jeans were not allowed. He learned to live without his mother and father, as everyone else did, shedding his daily dependence on them even though he was still a boy, and even to enjoy it. Still, he refused to forgive them.

  Every Thanksgiving, he and the other students who had nowhere to go were taken in by Pam’s family—boys who were from Santiago and Tehran and other troubled parts of the world, or were the sons of diplomats and journalists who moved around even more frequently than Amit’s parents. They would eat in the Bordens’ house, located at one end of the campus, with Pam and her three brothers, all of whom went to different boarding schools but always came home for the holidays. For Amit it was the highlight of each year. He and all the other boys were in love with Pam, who was the only girl in her family, the only girl on campus, the only girl, it ha
d felt back then, in the world. They would pray to be seated close to her at the table, and for weeks afterward they would talk about her, imagining her life at Northfield Mount Hermon, imagining what her breasts looked like, or the feel of her light brown poker-straight hair, wondering what it was like in the morning, messily trailing over her back. They wondered about the room upstairs, where Pam slept when she came home. They noticed if she ate white meat or dark, and they noticed the year she did not eat any turkey at all.

  She seemed fully aware of their admiration, flattered but off-limits. She was that rare, unsettling thing, a teenage girl already conscious of her power over men while at the same time uninterested in them. She was comfortable with the opposite sex in a way most girls were not, perhaps because she’d grown up in a house full of boys. The Bordens were forthright people, all of them, even the children, trained to act as friendly hosts for the students who washed up at their holiday table. Pam would talk to Amit and the others, asking each of them about their courses as if she were her mother’s age and not a girl of fifteen. And then they would disappear from her consciousness until the following year. After the meal, Headmaster Borden would take them out onto the lawn for a game of touch football with Pam’s brothers. Or they stayed inside, where Mrs. Borden, who taught French at the school, would conduct complicated word games or charades.

  In his final year at Langford Amit was admitted to Columbia University. No one else from his class was going there, but then one day Headmaster Borden told Amit that Pam had decided on Columbia, too. “Keep an eye on her for me,” the headmaster said, but it was Pam who’d called first in that same ambassadorial way her parents had, even though New York City, and the world of college, was as foreign to her as it was to him. Suddenly, because she had decided so, they were friends. They would go to dinner twice a week after the religion class they took together, either to Café Pertutti, treating themselves to creamy plates of pasta, or to La Rosita for caffè con leche and rice and beans. After that they would study in the same small room in Butler Library, sitting across from each other on armchairs, reading Milton and Marx. Odd things made him love her. The fact that she never put her books into a backpack or a bag, hugging them instead against her chest. That she always appeared somehow underdressed, still wearing a fringed suede jacket at a time of year when everyone else was bundled in wool and down. That the last two letters in her name were the first two in his, a silly thing he never mentioned to her but caused him to believe that they were bound together.

  He’d wondered at first if it was romantic but quickly realized that she was involved in affairs, that he was just a friend. She was used to being surrounded by men who, like her brothers, were protective of her, loyal to her, who paid court without seducing her. And she had appointed Amit to play that role while they were in college. She would ask him to investigate boys she was curious about, learning about their reputations, their history, before deciding whether to pursue them. In exchange she would give him advice on how to approach other girls, how most effectively to flirt with them. It was Pam who had coached Amit through his first college relationship, with Ellen Craddock, going out of her way and befriending Ellen just for the sake of being able to throw her and Amit together on College Walk.

  Only once had Amit worked up the nerve to make a pass at Pam, in their sophomore year, kissing her after getting drunk at a party and putting his hand on her breast, on top of a dark green turtleneck sweater she was wearing. She had kissed him back, allowed him to touch her, but then she’d drawn away, as if she’d known all along that one day this would happen. “Now we know what that feels like,” she told him, and he knew then that it was impossible, that she did not like him in that way. She had indulged him, just as her family had indulged him once a year in their home, offering a small piece of herself and then shutting the door.

  Although Pam still lived in New York, selling foreign rights at a literary agency, these days they saw each other, at best, once or twice a year, usually by accident, on a subway or a street corner or a crowded exhibit at the Metropolitan. But he was permanently on her mailing list, and therefore he received cards at Christmas, and even on his birthday—she was the type to remember that sort of thing. When she learned that Amit and Megan had gotten married, she sent them candlesticks from Tiffany’s. And when the girls were born, expensive gifts arrived, European dresses and cashmere blankets for their strollers. There had been no phone call from her to tell him she was getting married, only the invitation. And after all these years, Amit felt both quietly elated and solicitous, as contact from Pam and the Bordens had always made him feel, causing him to set aside whatever it was that he was doing and pay them his full attention.

  Guests were gathered under a beautiful tree where a bar had been set up, offering cocktails before the ceremony. On the lawn were rows of white folding chairs, overlooking the deceptively gentle milky-blue mountains. Over them, the sun was just beginning to set. It was here, at this precise spot, that he’d graduated. He’d looked different that day, leaner in frame, his hair still predominantly black. It was Pam, in college, who’d forbidden him to color it, telling him it was distinguished, that women would be drawn to it. He hadn’t believed her but she was right; every woman he’d ever been involved with had confessed, at one point or another, that they found his gray hair sexy.

  “Other side,” Megan said as they approached the crowd. He moved over to her left and matched his stride to hers. Side by side they took their place in the line for drinks. There was the usual array of bottles, and two punch bowls full of lemonade.

  “Spiked or unspiked?” the bartender asked. They got two glasses of the spiked and approached the lawn, sipping their sweet, potent drinks. He looked around at the faces, at men carrying toddlers on their shoulders, mothers shushing babies in their carriers, nannies chasing after older children. The nannies seemed young, high school students, he guessed, hired for the occasion. The fathers were pointing to the trees, to the clouds that spread and shifted over the valley. He recognized no one and missed his daughters.

  “Lots of kids here,” Megan said.

  “The girls would have enjoyed this.”

  “But then we wouldn’t be able to enjoy ourselves. Cheers.”

  “Cheers.” Because they were standing side by side they raised their glasses into the air in front of them, without looking at each other.

  It felt strange to be drinking at the school. He remembered the covert parties, the bottles that would be smuggled into the dorms and consumed Friday and Saturday nights, always fearful of the proctor’s rounds.

  “I feel old,” he said to Megan. He saw a face that was familiar, smiling at him, walking over. The stylish tortoiseshell glasses were new, but he remembered the friendly blue eyes, the wavy brown hair, the cleft in the chin. They had shared a number of classes, been lab partners, he suddenly remembered, in chemistry. His father and Pam’s father had grown up together; he had always referred to the headmaster as “Uncle Borden.” He remembered the last name, Schultz, but not the first.

  “Sarkar,” Schultz said. “Amit Sarkar, right?”

  Amit extended a hand, Schultz’s first name coming to him just then. “Great to see you. This is my wife, Megan. Megan, this is Tim.”

  The smile disappeared from Schultz’s face. “It’s Ted.”

  “Ted, of course, Ted. I’m so sorry. Ted, meet my wife, Megan.” He felt like an idiot, as mortified by his error as he would have been in his first term at Langford, when he worked so hard to please. He berated himself for using a name at all, for not letting it emerge naturally in the course of conversation. “I’m sorry,” he said again as Ted and Megan shook hands. “It’s been a long day. A long drive.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Ted said, in a way that only made Amit feel worse. “Your parents still in India?”

  “They came back. And then they left again.”

  “Where are you living these days?”

  It turned out that Ted lived in Manhattan, to
o. He was divorced and working at a law firm.

  “Do you guys know this guy Pam’s marrying? The one she’s finally going to settle for instead of one of us?”

  “I’ve never met Ryan,” Amit said, wondering what Megan would make of Ted’s comment.

  “All I know is he writes for television,” Ted said. “One of those law shows that makes my job look glamorous. That’s why they’re moving to L.A. Apparently one of the actors for the show is supposed to be here.”

  They looked around for someone who might be a celebrity. It was an attractive crowd, many of the women in black cocktail dresses. Amit remembered Megan’s skirt and took a step toward her, putting his arm around her waist.

  “How did you two meet?” Ted asked.

  “Med school,” Megan said.

  “Oh. Dr. Sarkar, I’m impressed.”

  “Just her,” Amit said. “She stuck it out. I didn’t.”

  A string quartet began to play and people drifted toward their seats. Amit and Megan chose chairs at the back, Megan complaining that her heels were sinking into the grass. They put their empty glasses under their seats. Everyone turned around as the man Pam was about to marry walked between the chairs and took his place at the center where a clergyman was standing. Ryan looked well into his forties, tall, tanned, with a salt and pepper beard, his handsome features lined. And then Pam appeared, coming down the aisle with her father, then her mother and her brothers behind. Mrs. Borden was unchanged, her cropped sandy hair styled in the same practical way, her figure still trim. She turned her head to smile reassuringly at the guests on either side of her. All their lives the Bordens had presided over similarly large gatherings, weekly assemblies and homecoming games and graduations, and in a way this was no different. The only person he didn’t recognize was a girl of about twelve or so, with a long, pretty face and a somber expression, carrying a bouquet of flowers. He guessed it was one of Pam’s nieces or younger cousins. Pam wore a sleeveless dress with a train, made of crumpled ivory material. The effect was not so much a dress as a long bedsheet that she had wrapped around herself, a careless yet perfect vision. She carried yellow freesias casually in one hand, smiling and waving to people with the other. To this day she was the most beautiful woman he had ever known.