Unaccustomed Earth

  “Which is your favorite, KD?”

  “Boston Cream.”

  “I want that one, then.”

  “Me, too,” Rupa said.

  “Make it three,” I told the cashier.

  We sat in a booth, me on one side of the Formica table, my stepsisters on the other. They began eating enthusiastically, not pausing until they were finished, exchanging glances and a sisterly commentary I was not privy to. I ate my donut as well, surprised by how much smaller their mouths were, how much longer it took them to finish compared to me. I felt separate from them in every way but at the same time could not deny the things that bound us together. There was my father, of course, but he seemed to be the least relevant in a way. Like them I’d made that journey from India to Massachusetts, too old not to experience the shock of it, too young to have a say in the matter. They would recall all of this, perhaps not as clearly as I remember those first months at your parents’ home, but nevertheless they would remember. Like them I had lost a parent and was now being asked to accept a replacement. I wondered how well they remembered their father; Piu would only have been five at the time. Even my memories of my mother had begun to break apart in the three and a half years since her death, the thousands of days I had spent with her reduced to a handful of stock scenes. I was lucky, compared to Rupa and Piu, having had my mother for as long as I did. The knowledge of death seemed present in both sisters—it was something about the way they carried themselves, something that had broken too soon and had not mended, marking them in spite of their lightheartedness.

  “Liked that?” I asked.

  Both girls nodded, and Piu said, “Another tooth is loose.” She opened her mouth and pressed a tiny chocolate-stained lower tooth forward with her tongue.

  The coffee was too hot to drink, so I removed the lid and set it on the counter. Piu was looking out the window, at the cars pulling in and out of the lot. Rupa was eyeing the donuts on display, the dispensers of coffee, the tanks of bubbling red punch.

  “Would you like another?”

  She shook her head, avoiding my gaze. She was more reserved than Piu and seemed, at times, unimpressed by her new surroundings. “I would like to bring one home for Ma.”

  “The one with the colors on top,” Piu said, kneeling up in the booth and pointing. “That is prettiest.”

  Rupa disagreed. “I like the one that is covered in snow.”

  “Here’s a dollar,” I said, lifting my hips and reaching for my wallet. “Would you guys like to buy a couple more?”

  “We are not allowed to touch money,” Rupa said.

  “It’s only a dollar. Even if you were to lose it between here and there,” I said, glancing back at the cash register, “it wouldn’t be a big deal.”

  “Big deal?” Piu asked, knitting her dark brows together.

  “Not important.”

  They slid out of the booth and walked toward the counter, each of them holding a corner of the dollar bill as if it were a miniature banner in a parade. I had my back to the counter so I turned partway around to watch. I saw Rupa pointing, once and once more, then both of them sliding the dollar to the cashier. He folded over the top of the bag and moved it back and forth, unsure which of the girls to hand it to, eventually leaving it on the counter for Rupa.

  “Why didn’t you say anything?” I asked when they returned.

  Rupa handed me the change, looking defensive. “We have done something wrong?”

  “No. But you could have said the kind of donuts you wanted instead of pointing, you could have thanked the cashier when he gave them to you. And you should always start off by saying hello.”

  Rupa looked down at the table. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize. I’m just saying, you guys don’t have to be shy. The more you use your English in these situations, the better it will be. It’s already good.”

  “Not like yours,” Rupa said. “They will laugh at us in school.”

  “I am afraid to go to school,” Piu said, shaking her head and covering her eyes with her hands.

  It was not my intention to reassure them, but it seemed cruel not to. “Look, I know how you feel. A few kids might laugh in the beginning, but it doesn’t matter. They laughed at me, too. I came here from Bombay when I was sixteen and had to figure things out all over again. I was born here but it was still hard, leaving and then coming back again.”

  “It was before your mother died?” Piu asked. She asked this reverently, a bit sadly, as if she’d actually known my mother, or perhaps because it reminded her of her father, I could not tell.

  I nodded.

  “What was she like?”

  “She was—she was my mother,” I said, caught offguard by the question. I felt suddenly vulnerable in front of two little girls I’d known less than a day and yet who understood me better, in many ways, than friends who had known me for years. Four years ago my mother would have been the one sitting across from me, sipping her tea, complaining how tasteless it was, after one of our windy walks along the beach.

  “Do you have a picture of her?” Rupa asked. For a moment her gaze held mine.

  “No,” I lied, not wanting to show them the one I carried stuffed behind the ID cards in my wallet. It had been taken during a party in our flat in Bombay, long before her illness, from such a distance that it gave little impression of her face. I had put the photograph, cut down to size, into my wallet after she died, but since then I had never taken it out to look at it.

  “Why is there no picture of her in the house?” Rupa asked.

  “My father didn’t want any.”

  “Ma has been looking,” Piu said. “She has looked in every room. But she cannot find one.”

  Chitra was sitting on the window seat when we got back, watching for my car. The anxiety in her face was obvious, but she didn’t ask what had taken us so long. Piu and Rupa didn’t give her a chance, rushing up as if they hadn’t seen her for days, handing her the donuts and telling her what a fun trip it was, how generous I’d been, Piu reporting that they’d paid for the donuts themselves. It was obvious that the girls liked me and that, because of her daughters’ approval, Chitra was willing to like me, too. But I needed to be alone. The open plan of the house meant it was impossible to watch television or listen to music without engaging with them. Instead I sat on the bed in the guestroom, looking at the yard and leafing through the Globe. Then I went for a run, five cold miles on the winding roads. When I returned, they were eating a heavy Bengali lunch, hunched over plates of rice and dal and the previous night’s leftovers. I turned down Chitra’s invitation to join them and instead, after my shower, dragged the phone into the guestroom and called Jessica.

  “Why don’t you just come here?” she suggested. I wished I could, wished I could simply get into my car and drive to her parents’ home. But I wasn’t capable of walking out, not yet. When I went to return the phone to its place in the hallway, I realized that they were all upstairs, napping, the way my relatives did in India. For the first time since my arrival I stretched out on the sectional, to watch television, and without meaning to I fell asleep myself. They were downstairs when I woke up, within arm’s reach but behaving as if I were not there. It was already getting dark outside, the arcing lamp spreading its light over the cocktail table. The channel had been changed to a talk show. Chitra was combing and retying the girls’ hair and then proceeded to comb her own. She worked through it with her fingers, a stunning mass that had been contained, until now, in a braid, the smooth strands cascading nearly to her waist. The sight of it repulsed me; I could not help thinking of the hair that had fallen out in clumps from my mother’s head, the awful wig she’d worn even in the hospital, up until the day she died, that artificial part of her more healthy-looking than anything else.

  Rupa sat behind Chitra, massaging her mother’s scalp and plucking out a few gray hairs while Chitra leaned back and closed her eyes. I gathered that this was a regular routine, something that took place without the ne
ed for instructions or comment. I sat up and watched, imagining the rest of Chitra’s hair turning gray one day, imagining her growing into an old woman alongside my father the way my mother was meant to. That thought made me conscious, formally, of my hatred of her. As if aware of what I was thinking, Chitra opened her eyes and looked at me, embarrassed, quickly gathering her hair around her hand. She got up and went to the kitchen, returning a few minutes later with a pot of tea and cups of Ovaltine on a tray. There were two types of chanachur in cereal bowls, and on a small plate, a donut cut into four pieces.

  “Now will you take tea?” she asked me.

  I accepted, lifting from the tray the cup she’d already prepared, with separately heated milk and too much sugar.

  “This is from Haldiram,” she said, passing me one of the cereral bowls. “Best in all Calcutta.”

  “No, thank you.”

  “This room is cold,” she continued. “The wind comes straight through the glass. Why aren’t there curtains?”

  “It would spoil the view,” I said.

  “The steps are also slippery.” She pointed to the floating staircase leading to the second floor. “And there is no railing. I am afraid Rupa and Piu will fall.”

  I turned to look at the thick pieces of wood arranged like empty shelves ascending the white walls. Even at her weakest, my mother had gone up and down them without protest.

  “Why is there no railing?” Chitra repeated.

  “Because we liked it that way,” I said, aware that I sounded pedantic. “Because that’s what makes it beautiful.”

  We had nothing else to say to one another. We sat and watched one program and then the next as Chitra worked on something with a crochet hook, and I wondered how I was going to survive the next four weeks in her company. We were all waiting for my father, waiting for him to return and explain, if only by his presence, why we were sitting together drinking tea. When he did, he asked me to give him a hand outside; there was a Christmas tree tied to the roof of his car. “I would have gone tomorrow,” I said, helping him to untie the rope that held it in place. I was without gloves, a fact that made the task, in the frigid evening air, both easy and painful. We dragged the tree inside and propped it in one corner of the living room, next to the high stone fireplace. Chitra and the girls gathered around.

  “But it’s just like all the other trees outside,” Chitra said, pointing through the glass wall.

  “It’s different, actually.” I said. “On the property we have pine trees. This is a spruce.”

  Somewhere in the basement there was a box, my father said, containing the stand, the lights, ornaments to hang from the branches. They were from our first winter in the house, the last Christmas my mother celebrated, and I was surprised my father hadn’t tossed them out. He asked me to go down and look for the box. Our basement lacked the sedimented clutter of most, given that we’d lived in the house only a handful of years and that for most of that time my mother had been dead and I had been away at college. There had been no period of haphazard accumulation, only events that had caused things to be taken away. Still, there were a number of boxes stacked up against the walls, empty ones that once contained the television and the stereo speakers, others still taped up, full of inessential items my parents had had shipped from Bombay and never bothered to unpack.

  I slit the tape with my car key and lifted the flaps of a few of the boxes. One contained old engineering books of my father’s. Another had a dinner set wrapped in pages of The Times of India, plates I had eaten off for years but forgotten until now, with a pattern of small orange diamonds around the rim. I found my enlarger, tongs, a set of trays, and old bottles of fixer for the darkroom I’d set up during my last year of high school. There were times my mother came down and kept me company, sitting quietly in the blackness as I struggled to load film onto the developing reel. Together we would breathe in the chemical smells, their corrosiveness, from which my hands were protected by rubber gloves, nothing compared to what was taking place inside her body. She would keep time for me with her watch, familiarizing herself with the process enough to be able to tell me when to pour the series of fluids in and out of the processing tank, both of us knowing that I’d have to buy a timer, eventually. “It must be something like this,” she said once in that perfectly dark, silent, sealed-up space, and I understood without her saying so that she was imagining what it might be like to be dead. “This is how I want to think of it.”

  The box I was looking for was labeled “X-MAS” in my mother’s hand, not on the side so that it was easily identifiable, but in a corner on top. I had no sentimental attachment to the items inside, and yet I didn’t want to see them. The thought of Chitra going through the box, watching her sift through everything, upset me just as it had upset me, throughout the day, to watch her handle the cutlery, the teakettle, at one point to hold the telephone and speak with my father to learn that he was on his way home. When my father had tried to remove the signs of my mother from the house I blamed him for being excessive, but now I blamed him for not having done enough.

  “I can’t find it,” I said, after returning upstairs. My father did not press the issue, did not insist on going down and looking for it himself. He behaved differently around Chitra, was more accepting of the minor defeats of life. I offered to go to a drugstore and buy what we needed, glad to have another reason to leave the house. When I came back my father and I trimmed the tree together, Chitra and the girls watching us from the sectional. We placed the tree in the stand and tightened the screws and draped lights over the branches. There was nothing personal or idiosyncratic to put on it, just a box of sapphire-blue balls, so that it looked less like a tree in someone’s home and more like one in the corner of a bank or an office lobby. But Rupa and Piu were delighted, exclaiming that they’d never seen anything more beautiful. My father went upstairs and returned with a shopping bag full of gifts. They’d all been wrapped at whatever store he bought them in, the same green-and-gold paper professionally taped and tied. He distributed them under the tree, eight boxes altogether. “Two for each of you,” he said to no one in particular. Rupa and Piu got up and went to look at them then, excited to find their names written on the tags.

  “Can we open them?” Piu asked Chitra, Chitra who did not know the answer.

  “Not until Christmas morning,” I said. “Until then you can just look. And maybe shake them a little.”

  “So lovely,” Chitra said, impressed now that the tree had been trimmed.

  “Kaushik, what about a picture?” my father suggested.

  I shook my head. I had left my camera, my father’s old Yashica, at school.

  “But you always have it with you.” That look of irritated disappointment, the one that had appeared the day my mother died and was missing now that he’d married Chitra, passed briefly across my father’s face.

  “I forgot it,” I said. It was true, I did always have the camera with me. Even on quiet weekends when I came home and my father and I saw no one I would bring it, taking it with me on walks. This time I had left it behind, knowing that I would not want to document anything.

  “I don’t understand,” my father said.

  “Neither do I,” I replied. “You haven’t wanted a picture of anything in years.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “It is.”

  We were stating facts and at the same time arguing, an argument whose depths only he and I could fully comprehend. I went to the kitchen to pour myself a drink, bringing it with me to the dining table when Chitra announced, a few minutes later, that dinner was ready. No one said anything during the meal. When we were done eating, Chitra cleared all the plates and took them into the kitchen, just as she had the night before, allowing my father and me to relax after dinner in a way that we’d never been able to during the last years of my mother’s life. We no longer had to assume the responsibility of scraping the plates and loading the dishwasher so that my mother could rest. I sat finishing my drin
k, and Rupa and Piu slithered out of their seats and returned to the sectional to watch more television. My father got up and followed them, settling into his recliner with the newspaper. He opened it to a large ad for Lechmere that featured cameras for sale, circling things with a ballpoint pen.

  Two days later was Christmas Eve, and my father stayed home from work, suggesting that we all go, the five of us, into Boston to show Chitra and the girls the city. I had no excuse and so I joined them, sitting in the backseat of my father’s car, between Rupa and Piu. Though we were only going for a short ride, the trip felt strangely momentous. For the last two years of my mother’s life, when she was always in and out of the hospital, we had gone nowhere, taken no trips for pleasure apart from those occasional walks along the beach. The last thing in my life that was anything close to a vacation was the layover in Rome with my parents, on our way back from Bombay. All I had learned about New England was the immediate region that surrounded our house, and the way to Mass General, making the trip back and forth until it was no longer necessary.

  My father drove us first into Cambridge to look at Harvard and MIT, Chitra asking me why I had chosen a college so far away when I could have attended those schools instead. I ignored her question, as I ignored so many of the things she said to me. “He wanted to get out of Massachusetts,” my father explained.