Unaccustomed Earth (23 page)

Rahul and Neel were not in the sitting room where she expected to find them, not playing among the toys scattered across the carpet. A children’s show was on television but no one was watching it. Downstairs in the kitchen the high chair had not been wiped, and gummy bits of pasta were submerged in a puddle of water on the surface of the tray. The balloon from the zoo had been tied to the side, reaching almost to the ceiling. All the upper cupboards were open, but nothing seemed to have been removed from them. Quickly Sudha shut them, a cold sweat forming on her lips.

“They haven’t left, the push chair’s still here,” Roger said.

As she raced up the steps she heard the sound of water splashing and chided herself for panicking. “It’s okay,” she called out. “He’s giving Neel a bath.”

She found Neel in the tub, filling his sippy cup with water and pouring it out. He was sitting without the plastic ring they normally put him in so that he wouldn’t tip over. He was trembling but otherwise happy, intent on his task, the water up to the middle of his chest, the mere sight of him sitting there, unattended, causing Sudha to emit a series of spontaneous cries and a volt of fear to seize her haunches. The water was no longer warm. One slip and he would have been facedown, his fine dark hair spread like a sunburst, the strands waving as the rest of him was still.

“Where’s your uncle?” Roger demanded, even though Neel did not yet have the words to reply. He yanked Neel out of the tub, making him burst into tears.

They found Rahul in Roger’s study, asleep, a glass tucked beneath the daybed. In their bedroom, the sweater chest was open, the necks of the bottles poking out, nestled in woolly arms. They went back to Roger’s study and were unable to rouse Rahul, Sudha shaking his shoulder as she held Neel. Roger leaned over Rahul’s duffel, stuffing it with clothes.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“What does it look like, Sudha?”

“He’ll do that when he gets up.”

Roger stood up, his face not at all kind. “I’m making it easier for him. I don’t want your brother to set foot in our home or come near our child ever again.”

Because they could not scream at Rahul they began to scream at each other, the strange calm that had followed their discovery in the bathtub now shattered.

“You’re the one who told him we trusted him,” she said. “You agreed to go out.”

“Don’t blame this on me,” Roger said. “I barely know him. Don’t you dare blame a bit of this on me.”

“I’m not,” she said, beginning to cry. “I’m sorry. I should have told you.”

“Told me what?”

She was sobbing now, too hard for any words to come out, Neel beginning to cry again in reaction. Roger went up to her, holding her by the shoulders, his arms outstretched. “Told me what?”

And somehow, in spite of how hard she was crying, she told him, about the very first time Rahul had come to visit her at Penn, and how he hadn’t even liked beer, and then about all the cans they’d hidden over the years and how eventually it was no longer a game for him but a way of life, a way of life that had removed him from her family and ruined him.

Roger looked around the study with its book-lined walls, its cabinets full of files, postcards of noble portraits pinned over the desk. A disgusted look appeared on his face. And then he looked at Sudha, his disgust for her just as plain. “You lied to me. I’ve never lied to you, Sudha. I would never have kept something like this from you.”

She nodded. She was still crying, tightly holding Neel. Roger took their son from her arms and left her there with Rahul, who was flat on his back, one leg hanging over the edge of the daybed, his slackened face to the wall.

All night she did not sleep, Roger stiff as a board on his side. They’d gone to bed hungry, the three steaks tossed into the freezer. Rahul had never woken up. She knew Roger was right, knew that if it had been his sibling she would have said and done the same. She thought of her parents, who had believed their children were destined to succeed, had fumbled when one failed. After everything Rahul had put them through they never renounced him, never banished him. They were incapable of shutting him out. But Roger was capable, and Sudha realized, as the wakeful night passed, that she was capable, too.

She drifted off around daybreak, then woke up an hour later, hearing the shower running. It ran for a long time. She became nervous and considered knocking, but then she heard the door open, and a few minutes later, footsteps padding down the stairs.

“I meant to clean up the high chair,” Rahul said when she joined him in the kitchen. He was dressed in one of Roger’s bathrobes, squinting, as if the subterreanean space were flooded with light. His voice was gruff, the effects of the liquor clear in the delicate yet awkward way he was moving about. He had filled the kettle with water, turned on the gas, measured coffee into the glass pot. “Sorry about that.”

“I thought you were better.”

He glanced at her, only for a second. He looked like an idiot to her, dull and slow.

“What the hell happened, Rahul?”

He didn’t reply.

“Is it me?” she asked. For she had wondered this, during the long hours she had lain awake: wondered if seeing her had reminded him of the past, of those nights they had defied their parents together, pouring warm beer into cups of ice and forging a link all their own.

The water began to boil, the kettle emitting a thin whistle. She switched off the gas, poured the water into the coffeepot. “You have to go to the airport,” she said.

“My flight isn’t until evening.”

“Now, Rahul. You have to get dressed and go now. You left Neel in the bathtub.” Her voice quavered and at the same time it was beginning to rise, the sickening image flooding her all over again.

“I did?”

“Yes, Rahul,” she said, fresh tears streaming down her face. “You passed out and you left our baby alone in a tub. You could have killed him, do you understand?”

He turned away, his back to her. He pressed his head to a cupboard, twisting it slightly to either side, swearing to himself under his breath. Then, still without facing her, he said, “But he’s okay, right, Didi? I peeked into his room this morning and he was asleep in his crib just fine.”

“You have to go now.” Her words were coming out in almost a whisper. She was aware that she sounded like a broken record. Fury had raged through her all night; that storm cloud had unleashed its rain, and now she was simply tired.

“I’ve stayed away from it for months,” he said. “I don’t know what happened. I just had the tiniest bit—”

“Stop,” she said, and he did. “I don’t want to hear your explanation. Do you understand me? I don’t want to hear it.”

He didn’t try to speak again. He went upstairs to dress and get his bag and then stood in the sitting room as she called a minicab for Heathrow. She held out fifty pounds to cover the fare and he took it from her. Then he left, going out to the street before the cab arrived. When it pulled up to the house she went to the window, held back the lace curtain, and watched him slip into the backseat. Then the cab pulled away, leaving her to stare out at the gray morning light. She wasn’t aware of when she’d stopped crying. She felt wide awake suddenly. She heard Neel upstairs, stirring in his crib. In another minute he would cry out, wanting her, expecting breakfast; he was young enough so that Sudha was still only goodness to him, nothing else. She returned to the kitchen, opened a cupboard, took out a packet of Weetabix, heated milk in a pan. Something brushed against her ankles, and she saw that the balloon tied to the back of Neel’s high chair was no longer suspended on its ribbon. It had sagged to the floor, a shrunken thing incapable of bursting. She clipped the ribbon with scissors and stuffed the whole thing into the garbage, surprised at how easily it fit, thinking of the husband who no longer trusted her, of the son whose cry now interrupted her, of the fledgling family that had cracked open that morning, as typical and as terrifying as any other.

Nobody’s Business

E
very so often a man called for Sang, wanting to marry her. Sang usually didn’t know these men. Sometimes she had never even heard of them. But they’d heard that she was pretty and smart and thirty and Bengali and still single, and so these men, most of whom also happened to be Bengali, would procure her number from someone who knew someone who knew her parents, who, according to Sang, desperately wanted her to be married. According to Sang, these men always confused details when they spoke to her, saying they’d heard that she studied physics, when really it was philosophy, or that she’d graduated from Columbia, when really it was NYU, calling her Sangeeta, when really she went by Sang. They were impressed that she was getting her doctorate at Harvard, when really she’d dropped out of Harvard after a semester and was working part time at a bookstore on the square.

Sang’s housemates, Paul and Heather, could always tell when it was a prospective groom on the phone. “Oh. Hi,” Sang would say, sitting at the imitation-walnut kitchen table, rolling her eyes, coin-colored eyes that were sometimes green. She would slouch in her chair, looking bothered but resigned, as if a subway she were riding had halted between stations. To Paul’s mild disappointment, Sang was never rude to these men. She listened as they explained the complicated, far-fetched connection between them, connections Paul vaguely envied in spite of the fact that he shared a house with Sang, and a kitchen, and a subscription to the
Globe.
The suitors called from as far away as Los Angeles, as close by as Watertown. Once, she told Paul and Heather, she had actually agreed to meet one of these men, and he had driven her north up I-93, pointing from the highway to the corporation he worked for. Then he’d taken her to a Dunkin’ Donuts, where, over crullers and coffee, he’d proposed.

Sometimes Sang would take notes during these conversations, on the message pad kept next to the phone. She’d write down the man’s name, or “Carnegie Mellon,” or “likes mystery novels” before her pen drifted into scribbles and stars and tick-tack-toe games. To be polite, she asked a few questions, too, about whether the man enjoyed his work as an economist, or a dentist, or a metallurgical engineer. Her excuse to these men, her rebuttal to their offers to wine and dine her, was always the same white lie: she was busy at the moment with classes, its being Harvard and all. Sometimes, if Paul happened to be sitting at the table, she would write him a note in the middle of the conversation: “He sounds like he’s twelve” or “Total dweeb” or “This guy threw up once in my parents’ swimming pool,” waving the pad for Paul’s benefit as she cradled the phone to her ear.

It was only after Sang hung up that she complained. How dare these men call? she’d say. How dare they hunt her down? It was a violation of her privacy, an insult to her adulthood. It was pathetic. If only Paul and Heather could hear them, going on about themselves. At this point, Heather would sometimes say, “God, Sang, I can’t believe you’re complaining. Dozens of men, successful men, possibly even handsome, want to marry you, sight unseen. And you expect us to feel sorry for you?” Heather, a law student at Boston College, had been bitterly single for five years. She told Sang the proposals were romantic, but Sang shook her head. “It’s not love.” In Sang’s opinion it was practically an arranged marriage. These men weren’t really interested in her. They were interested in a mythical creature created by an intricate chain of gossip, a web of wishful Indian-community thinking in which she was an aging, overlooked poster child for years of bharat natyam classes, perfect SATs. Had they any idea who she actually was and how she made a living, in spite of her test scores, which was by running a cash register and arranging paperback books in pyramid configurations, they would want nothing to do with her? “And besides,” she always reminded Paul and Heather, “I have a boyfriend.”

“You’re like Penelope,” Paul ventured one evening. He had lately been rereading Lattimore’s Homer, in preparation for his orals in English literature the following spring.

“Penelope?” She was standing at the microwave, heating some rice. Paul watched as she removed the plate and mixed the steaming rice with a spoonful of the dark red-hot lime pickle that lived next to his peanut butter in the door of the refrigerator.

“From the
Odyssey
?” Paul said gently, a question to match her question. He was tall without being lank, with solid fingers and calves, and fine straw-colored hair. The most noticeable aspect of his appearance was a pair of expensive designer glasses, their maroon frames perfectly round, which an attractive salesgirl in a frame shop on Beacon Street had talked him into buying. Paul had not liked the glasses, even as he was being fitted for them, and had not grown to like them since.

“Right, the
Odyssey,
” Sang said, sitting down at the table. “Penelope. Only I can’t knit.”

“Weave,” he said, correcting her. “It was a shroud Penelope kept weaving and unweaving, to ward off her suitors.”

Sang lifted a forkful of the rice to her lips, blowing on it so that it would cool. “Then, who’s the woman who knits?” she asked. She looked at Paul. “You would know.”

Paul paused, eager to impress her, but his mind had drawn a blank. He knew it was someone in Dickens, had the paperbacks up in his room. “Be right back,” he said. Then he stopped, relieved. “
A Tale of Two Cities,
” he told her. “Madame Defarge.”