Chapter One
Unaccustomed Earth
After her mother’s death, Ruma’s father retired from the pharmaceutical company
where he had worked for many decades and began traveling in Europe, a continent
he’d never seen. In the past year he had visited France, Holland, and most
recently Italy. They were package tours, traveling in the company of strangers,
riding by bus through the countryside, each meal and museum and hotel
prearranged. He was gone for two, three, sometimes four weeks at a time. When he
was away Ruma did not hear from him. Each time, she kept the printout of his
flight information behind a magnet on the door of the refrigerator, and on the
days he was scheduled to fly she watched the news, to make sure there hadn’t
been a plane crash anywhere in the world.
Occasionally a postcard would arrive in Seattle, where Ruma and Adam and their
son Akash lived. The postcards showed the facades of churches, stone fountains,
crowded piazzas, terra-cotta rooftops mellowed by late afternoon sun. Nearly
fifteen years had passed since Ruma’s only European adventure, a month-long
EuroRail holiday she’d taken with two girlfriends after college, with money
saved up from her salary as a para- legal. She’d slept in shabby pensions,
practicing a frugality that was foreign to her at this stage of her life, buying
nothing but variations of the same postcards her father sent now. Her father
wrote succinct, impersonal accounts of the things he had seen and done:
“Yesterday the Uffizi Gallery. Today a walk to the other side of the Arno. A
trip to Siena scheduled tomorrow.” Occasionally there was a sentence about the
weather. But there was never a sense of her father’s presence in those places.
Ruma was reminded of the telegrams her parents used to send to their relatives
long ago, after visiting Calcutta and safely arriving back in Pennsylvania.
The postcards were the first pieces of mail Ruma had received from her father.
In her thirty-eight years he’d never had any reason to write to her. It was a
one-sided correspondence; his trips were brief enough so that there was no time
for Ruma to write back, and besides, he was not in a position to receive mail on
his end. Her father’s penmanship was small, precise, slightly feminine; her
mother’s had been a jumble of capital and lowercase, as though she’d learned to
make only one version of each letter. The cards were addressed to Ruma; her
father never included Adam’s name, or mentioned Akash. It was only in his
closing that he acknowledged any personal connection between them. “Be happy,
love Baba,” he signed them, as if the attainment of happiness were as simple as
that.
In August her father would be going away again, to Prague. But first he was
coming to spend a week with Ruma and see the house she and Adam had bought on
the Eastside of Seattle. They’d moved from Brooklyn in the spring, for Adam’s
job. It was her father who suggested the visit, calling Ruma as she was making
dinner in her new kitchen, surprising her. After her mother’s death it was Ruma
who assumed the duty of speaking to her father every evening, asking how his day
had gone. The calls were less frequent now, normally once a week on Sunday
afternoons. “You’re always welcome here, Baba,” she’d told her father on the
phone. “You know you don’t have to ask.” Her mother would not have asked. “We’re
coming to see you in July,” she would have informed Ruma, the plane tickets
already in hand. There had been a time in her life when such presumptuousness
would have angered Ruma. She missed it now.
Adam would be away that week, on another business trip. He worked for a hedge
fund and since the move had yet to spend two consecutive weeks at home. Tagging
along with him wasn’t an option. He never went anywhere interesting-usually
towns in the Northwest or Canada where there was nothing special for her and
Akash to do. In a few months, Adam assured her, the trips would diminish. He
hated stranding Ruma with Akash so often, he said, especially now that she was
pregnant again. He encouraged her to hire a babysitter, even a live-in if that
would be helpful. But Ruma knew no one in Seattle, and the prospect of finding
someone to care for her child in a strange place seemed more daunting than
looking after him on her own. It was just a matter of getting through the
summer-in September, Akash would start at a preschool. Besides, Ruma wasn’t
working and couldn’t justify paying for something she now had the freedom to do.
In New York, after Akash was born, she’d negotiated a part-time schedule at her
law firm, spending Thursdays and Fridays at home in Park Slope, and this had
seemed like the perfect balance. The firm had been tolerant at first, but it had
not been so easy, dealing with her mother’s death just as an important case was
about to go to trial. She had died on the operating table, of heart failure;
anesthesia for routine gallstone surgery had triggered anaphylactic shock.
After the two weeks Ruma received for bereavement, she couldn’t face going back.
Overseeing her clients’ futures, preparing their wills and refinancing their
mortgages, felt ridiculous to her, and all she wanted was to stay home with
Akash, not just Thursdays and Fridays but every day. And then, miraculously,
Adam’s new job came through, with a salary generous enough for her to give
notice. It was the house that was her work now: leafing through the piles of
catalogues that came in the mail, marking them with Post-its, ordering sheets
covered with dragons for Akash’s room.
“Perfect,” Adam said, when Ruma told him about her father’s visit. “He’ll be
able to help you out while I’m gone.” But Ruma disagreed. It was her mother who
would have been the helpful one, taking over the kitchen, singing songs to Akash
and teaching him Bengali nursery rhymes, throwing loads of laundry into the
machine. Ruma had never spent a week alone with her father. When her parents
visited her in Brooklyn, after Akash was born, her father claimed an armchair in
the living room, quietly combing through the Times, occasionally tucking a
finger under the baby’s chin but behaving as if he were waiting for the time to
pass.
Her father lived alone now, made his own meals. She could not picture his
surroundings when they spoke on the phone. He’d moved into a one-bedroom
condominium in a part of Pennsylvania Ruma did not know well. He had pared down
his possessions and sold the house where Ruma and her younger brother Romi had
spent their childhood, informing them only after he and the buyer went into
contract. It hadn’t made a difference to Romi, who’d been living in New Zealand
for the past two years, working on the crew of a German documentary filmmaker.
Ruma knew that the house, with the rooms her mother had decorated and the bed in
which she liked to sit up doing crossword puzzles and the stove on which she’d
cooked, was too big for her father now. Still, the news had been shocking,
wiping out her mother’s presence just as the surgeon had.
She knew her father did not need taking care of, and yet this very fact caused
her to feel guilty; in India, there would have been no question of his not
moving in with her. Her father had never mentioned the possibility, and after
her mother’s death it hadn’t been feasible; their old apartment was too small.
But in Seattle there were rooms to spare, rooms that stood empty and without
purpose.
Ruma feared that her father would become a responsibility, an added demand,
continuously present in a way she was no longer used to. It would mean an end to
the family she’d created on her own: herself and Adam and Akash, and the second
child that would come in January, conceived just before the move. She couldn’t
imagine tending to her father as her mother had, serving the meals her mother
used to prepare. Still, not offering him a place in her home made her feel
worse. It was a dilemma Adam didn’t understand. Whenever she brought up the
issue, he pointed out the obvious, that she already had a small child to care
for, another on the way. He reminded her that her father was in good health for
his age, content where he was. But he didn’t object to the idea of her father
living with them. His willingness was meant kindly, generously, an example of
why she loved Adam, and yet it worried her. Did it not make a difference to him?
She knew he was trying to help, but at the same time she sensed that his
patience was wearing thin. By allowing her to leave her job, splurging on a
beautiful house, agreeing to having a second baby, Adam was doing everything in
his power to make Ruma happy. But nothing was making her happy; recently, in the
course of conversation, he’d pointed that out, too.
How freeing it was, these days, to travel alone, with only a single suitcase to
check. He had never visited the Pacific Northwest, never appreciated the
staggering breadth of his adopted land. He had flown across America only once
before, the time his wife booked tickets to Calcutta on Royal Thai Airlines, via
Los Angeles, rather than traveling east as they normally did. That journey was
endless, four seats, he still remembered, among the smokers at the very back of
the plane. None of them had the energy to visit any sights in Bangkok during
their layover, sleeping instead in the hotel provided by the airline. His wife,
who had been most excited to see the Floating Market, slept even through dinner,
for he remembered a meal in the hotel with only Romi and Ruma, in a solarium
overlooking a garden, tasting the spiciest food he’d ever had in his life as
mosquitoes swarmed angrily behind his children’s faces. No matter how they went,
those trips to India were always epic, and he still recalled the anxiety they
provoked in him, having to pack so much luggage and getting it all to the
airport, keeping documents in order and ferrying his family safely so many
thousands of miles. But his wife had lived for these journeys, and until both
his parents died, a part of him lived for them, too. And so they’d gone in spite
of the expense, in spite of the sadness and shame he felt each time he returned
to Calcutta, in spite of the fact that the older his children grew, the less
they wanted to go.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Unaccustomed Earth
by Jhumpa Lahiri
Copyright © 2008 by Jhumpa Lahiri.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Knopf
Copyright © 2008
Jhumpa Lahiri
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-307-26573-9
