Unaccustomed Earth (19 page)

His aloofness troubled Sudha, but her parents said nothing. He seemed always to be in a slightly bad mood and in urgent need to get somewhere—to his job, to a gym where he went to lift weights, to the video store to return one of the foreign films he would watch when everyone else was asleep. She and Rahul never argued, but there were moments, when she crossed paths with him in the hallway or asked him to pass her the remote control, when she was briefly convinced he despised her. It was nothing he said or did—even in his avoidance he was always coolly polite—but she sensed that he had revised his opinion of her, that the Rahul who had once looked up to her and confided in her was replaced by a person she could only offend. She wondered when he would approach her for another run to the liquor store, but he never mentioned it. She gathered he had his own supply, stashed away somewhere; one night, when she was up late reading a magazine, she heard the sound of the ice machine grinding in the refrigerator, cubes dropping into a glass.

She learned from her mother that his second-semester grades had been bad; the first semester the lowest was a B, but now he’d gotten mostly C’s. He had dropped biology and organic chemistry and taken up film and English literature instead. “Can you talk to him?” her mother asked Sudha. “Find out what went wrong?” Sudha came to Rahul’s defense, saying that it was an enormous adjustment going from high school to college, that a lot of students had a hard time. Her father did not hide his disapproval, and while he did not confront Rahul, one day he said to Sudha, “He is floundering.” He did not approve of paying an astronomical tuition just so Rahul could watch French movies in a classroom. Her father had no patience for failure, for indulgences. He never let his children forget that there had been no one to help him as he helped them, so that no matter how well Sudha did, she felt that her good fortune had been handed to her, not earned. Both her parents came from humble backgrounds; both their grandmothers had given up the gold on their arms to put roofs over their families’ heads and food on their plates. This mentality, as tiresome as it sometimes felt, also reassured Sudha, for it was something her parents understood and respected about each other, and she suspected it was the glue that held them together.

Late one night, she knocked on Rahul’s door. He was lying in bed, listening to music on his headphones, leafing through a tattered copy of Beckett’s plays. He put the book on his chest when he saw her but didn’t remove the headphones. She saw a mug on the floor by the bed, filled with ice cubes and a clear liquid. He didn’t offer any, was playing their old game without her.

“So, what’s going on at school?” she asked.

He looked up at her. His eyes were reddish. “I’m on vacation.”

“Your grades weren’t good, Rahul. You need to work a little harder.”

“I did work hard,” he said.

“I know the first year can be tough.”

“I did work hard,” he repeated. “My professors hate me. Is that my fault?”

“I’m sure they don’t hate you,” she said. She considered crossing the room and sitting on the edge of the bed but remained where she was.

“What the fuck do you know?” he said, giving her a start.

“Look, I’m just trying to help.”

“I’m not asking you to help. You don’t need to fix anything. Has it ever occurred to you that my life might be fine the way it is?”

His words silenced her, cut to the bone. She’d always had a heavy hand in his life, it was true, striving not to control it but to improve it somehow. She had always considered this her responsibility to him. She had not known how to be a sister any other way.

“You don’t even live here,” he continued. “You think you can stroll in and make everything perfect before you disappear to London? Is that what you want to do?”

She looked at him, and then at the mug at the side of his bed, wondering how much he’d consumed in the course of the evening, where the bottle was hidden. She thought of her parents sleeping down the hall, unaware of what he was doing, and she felt indignant on their behalf. “You’re smart, Rahul. You’re a lot smarter than me. I don’t get it.”

He leaned over and picked up the cup from the floor. He took a sip and swallowed, then slid the cup under the bed, out of sight. “You don’t have to get it, Didi. You don’t have to get everything all the time.”

On Sudha’s last night before heading back to Philadelphia he surprised them, agreeing to go out to a restaurant to celebrate her impending departure for England. Their parents were in good moods, reminiscing about London, trying to remember the order of stops on the Piccadilly Line. Rahul was jovial, too, telling Sudha about all the writers’ homes and graves she should visit while she was there. He spoke with an aggressive authority, as if he’d been to Marx’s tomb himself, and for the first time it occurred to Sudha that perhaps Rahul was jealous of those years she and her parents had lived in England, those years when Rahul did not exist. He ordered a Singapore Sling and nursed it slowly through the meal. He mentioned nothing about having plans later on, but before the check came he looked at his watch and leapt up from the table, saying he was late for something, and left in his own car.

Sudha went home with her parents, was up watching
Spellbound
on the VCR when the phone rang. It was Rahul calling from the local police station. He’d been pulled over on a quiet road near Mill Pond for wavering in his lane. His blood alcohol content was not extreme, but because he was under twenty-one it was enough to get him arrested. He asked Sudha to come to the station alone, to bring three hundred dollars in cash. But it was past midnight, and besides, the keys to her parents’ car were in the pocket of her father’s pants, in their bedroom. She woke up her father, told him to get dressed. Together they went to post bail and release Rahul from the cell. Her father drove, his face creased with sleep, seeming disoriented in the town he’d lived in for years. They stopped at an ATM and withdrew money. “You go,” her father said when they reached the station. “I prefer to wait in the car.” His voice faltered as he spoke, as it had the day he’d called Sudha in college, to tell her his father died. And so she spared her father that humiliation, that pain, entering a place where handcuffed criminals were brought. When she saw Rahul he was sober, the pads of his fingers blackened from ink. It was a Sunday night, the arraignment scheduled for the following day. “Will you go with me?” he asked as they walked back to the car, and he was shaken enough for her to assure him that she would.

“It’s ridiculous,” her mother said the next morning as Rahul slept. She blamed the police for overreacting. “It’s not like he had an accident. He was only going forty miles an hour. They probably stopped him just for being Indian.” Her father said nothing. He sat sipping his tea and reading the
Sunday Globe.
He’d said nothing on the way home.

“That wasn’t the problem,” Sudha said slowly, forcing cold butter across the surface of her toast.

“What are you saying, Sudha?” her mother asked, sounding bothered. Her father did not put down his paper, but she sensed that he had stopped reading. Sudha knew that what she was about to say was something they expected and also viscerally feared, like disobedient children who are about to be slapped. That it was up to her to deliver the blow.

“I think Rahul might have a drinking problem.”

“Sudha, please,” her mother said. After a pause she added, “I gather everyone at American colleges drinks.” She spoke as if drinking were an undergraduate hobby, a phase one outgrew.

“Not like that.”

“Didn’t you drink in college?”

“Not like that,” Sudha repeated. Not enough to get arrested, she was tempted to say.

“That’s the problem with this country,” her mother said. “Too many freedoms, too much having fun. When we were young, life wasn’t always about fun.”

Sudha pitied her mother, pitied her refusal to accommodate such an unpleasant and alien fact, her need to blame America and its laws instead of her son. She sensed that her father understood, but he refused to engage in the conversation, refused to confront Rahul when he eventually came downstairs, showered and penitent, promising never to do such a thing again. Her parents had always been blind to the things that plagued their children: being teased at school for the color of their skin or for the funny things their mother occasionally put into their lunch boxes, potato curry sandwiches that tinted Wonderbread green. What could there possibly be to be unhappy about? her parents would have thought. “Depression” was a foreign word to them, an American thing. In their opinion their children were immune from the hardships and injustices they had left behind in India, as if the inoculations the pediatrician had given Sudha and Rahul when they were babies guaranteed them an existence free of suffering.

She was excited to be in London, curious to know the land of her birth. Before leaving she had applied for her British passport, a document her parents had not obtained for her when she was born, and when she presented it at Heathrow the immigration officer welcomed her home. Her parents went with her and stayed ten days, settling her into her hall of residence off Tottenham Court Road. They reminded her to look right before crossing the street, bought her cardigans from Marks and Spencer’s to see her through the winter. They took her to Balham on the Tube to show her the house where she’d been an infant. Together they made a trip to Sheffield, three hours away through the countryside, where their old landlord Mr. Pal now lived with his family. They did not speak of Rahul unless forced to by friends, and when they did, it was always the same unobjectionably impressive facts about him—that he was at Cornell, a sophomore now. These facts gave her parents a feeble hope: as if college, where he’d begun to fall apart, would magically put him together again.

After her parents left she grew busy with her classes, and with the new friends she made who came from all over the world, joining them to study and sightsee and visit pubs. Perhaps because it was her birthplace, she felt an instinctive connection to London, a sense of belonging though she barely knew her way around. In spite of the ocean that now separated her from her parents, she felt closer to them, but she also felt free, for the first time in her life, of her family’s weight. Still, she could not drink anymore without thinking of Rahul, always conscious that the second pint she drained, satisfied at the end of a night out, would not have been enough for him. At the arraignment she’d sat next to him in the crowded courtroom, waiting for his name to be called, listening as the charges were read. She was there to stand by him, to support him, but in that place of judgment she was not on his side. His license was suspended for six months and he was ordered to attend some alcohol education classes in Ithaca. In the end her father had had to pay nearly two thousand dollars in fines and fees. The arrest was mentioned in
The Wayland Town Crier,
a paper her parents received.

In November, wandering through the National Gallery, she met a man. She had been admiring
The Arnolfini Marriage
by van Eyck, lingering in front of it after a cluster of people had passed. It was an oil painting of a couple in a bedroom holding hands, with a small dog standing at their feet. The man wore a fur-trimmed purple cape and an overly large black straw hat. The woman wore an emerald-green gown that trailed like a heavy curtain onto the floor, some of the material gathered up in her left hand. She had a white veil on her head and looked possibly pregnant, Sudha wasn’t sure. There was a window behind the man, with a piece of fruit, an apricot or a tangerine, on the sill. On the wall hung a convex mirror that reflected everything in the painting.

“Come closer,” the man next to Sudha said, ushering her a few steps forward so that no one could cross their line of vision. “Otherwise you can’t really see.” He started talking about the mirror, how it was the focal point of the painting, capturing the floor and the ceiling, the room and the world outside, and then she saw that it reflected not only the couple but also a pair of men standing in the doorway, peering into the room just as she was. “One of them is van Eyck,” the man said. “That’s what the inscription above the mirror says. It’s Latin for
‘van Eyck was here.’
” He spoke softly, as if for Sudha alone, with the singsong British cadence that was already influencing Sudha’s speech. His dark hair was slightly long, and he kept raking it with his fingers away from his face. She could smell the slightly spiced soap on his skin. He wore a tweed blazer and corduroy pants, and carried a raincoat draped over one arm. He told her that the two men in the doorway of the painting were witnessing the couple’s union, adding that the painting was intended to serve as a marriage certificate. “Of course, that’s just one interpretation,” the man said. “Some argue that it’s a betrothal scene.”

She studied the details he spoke of, the glow of the paint, conscious of their shared gaze. “What about the shoes? Do they mean something?” Sudha heard herself asking, pointing to a pair of abandoned wooden clogs in the foreground, and then to some red slippers by the carpet.

The man turned to Sudha then. He was older than she expected, closer to forty judging from the eyes, clear blue eyes that settled calmly upon different points of her face. His expression was serious, placidly cast, but the sides of his mouth now rose up in a smile. “I suspect it means they’re standing on holy ground. Either that or she just went shopping.”

She had not known that day what a famous painting it was, but the man never made her feel ignorant. They walked to other paintings, the man bending his head down toward Sudha’s and talking about them, and eventually he asked if she would like to join him for tea. His name was Roger Feather-stone. He had a PhD in art history, was an editor at an art magazine and had also written a book about Renaissance portraiture. He wooed Sudha consistently, romantically: flowers every time he knocked on the door, gifts of gloves and earrings and perfume. He was an only child who had grown up in English boarding schools; his father had worked overseas for Singer sewing machines and now both his parents were dead. Roger was born in India, spent the first three years of his life in Bombay but remembered nothing. He had been married in his twenties to a girl he’d known at Cambridge; after two years she left him, renounced her possessions, and joined a Buddhist monastery in Tibet.