Unaccustomed Earth (6 page)

“That’s Luigi,” he said, as the camera focused briefly on their Italian guide.

“Who goes on these tours with you?” Ruma asked.

“They are mostly people like me, retired or otherwise idle,” he said. “A lot of Japanese. It is a different group in each country.”

“Have you made any friends?”

“We are all friendly with one another.”

“How many of you are there?”

“Perhaps eighteen or twenty.”

“And are you stuck with them all day, or do you have time on your own?”

“An hour here and there.”

“Who’s that?” she asked suddenly.

He stared, horrified, at the television screen, where for a few seconds Mrs. Bagchi choppily appeared, sitting at a small table at a café, stirring sugar with a tiny spoon into a tiny cup. And then he remembered offering to let Mr. Yamata, one of his Japanese companions, look through the lens. Without his realizing, Mr. Yamata must have pressed the record button. Mrs. Bagchi vanished, did not appear again. He was grateful the room was dark, that his daughter could not see his face. “Who do you mean?”

“She’s gone now. A woman who looked Indian.”

It was an opportunity to tell Ruma. It was more difficult than he’d thought, being in his daughter’s home, being around her all day. He felt pathetic deceiving her. But what would he say? That he had made a new friend? A girlfriend? The word was unknown to him, impossible to express; he had never had a girlfriend in his life. It would have been easier telling Romi. He would have absorbed the information casually, might even have found it a relief. Ruma was different. All his life he’d felt condemned by her, on his wife’s behalf. She and Ruma were allies. And he had endured his daughter’s resentment, never telling Ruma his side of things, never saying that his wife had been overly demanding, unwilling to appreciate the life he’d worked hard to provide.

Like his wife, Ruma was now alone in this new place, overwhelmed, without friends, caring for a young child, all of it reminding him, too much, of the early years of his marriage, the years for which his wife had never forgiven him. He had always assumed Ruma’s life would be different. She’d worked for as long as he could remember. Even in high school, in spite of his and his wife’s protests, she’d insisted, in the summers, on working as a busgirl at a local restaurant, the sort of work their relatives in India would have found disgraceful for a girl of her class and education. But his daughter was no longer his responsibility. Finally, he had reached that age.

“That is one thing I have observed on my travels,” he said as Siena’s sloping pink piazza flashed across the screen, Mrs. Bagchi concealed somewhere in the throng. “Indians are everywhere these days.”

Akash woke her the following morning, running into her room and tugging her arm. “Dadu went away.”

“What are you talking about?”

“He’s not here.”

She got up. It was quarter to eight. “He’s probably gone for a walk, Akash.” But when she looked out the window, she saw that the rental car wasn’t in the driveway.

“Is he coming back?”

“Hold on, Akash, let me think.” Her heart was pounding and she felt as she would sometimes on a playground, unable, for a few seconds, to spot Akash. In the kitchen she saw that her father had not had his breakfast; there was no bowl and spoon in the dish drainer, no dried-out tea bag on a plate beside the stove. She wondered if he’d been feeling ill, if he’d driven off in search of a pharmacy for aspirin or Alka-Seltzer. It would be like him, to do that and not wake her up. Once he’d had root canal surgery without telling anyone, coming home in the evening with his mouth swollen and full of gauze. Then she wondered if he’d discovered the boats moored to the dock they shared at the edge of the lake and taken one onto the water. There was no way to reach him; her father did not carry a cell phone. As for calling the police, she didn’t know the number of the rental car’s license plate. She picked up the phone anyway, deciding to call Adam, to ask him what to do. But just then she heard the sound of gravel crackling under tires.

“Where on earth did you go?” she demanded. There was nothing to indicate that her father was in any type of distress; he was carrying a flat box tied with string that looked like it had come from a bakery.

“I remembered, yesterday on the way to swimming, passing by a nursery. I thought I would drive by and see their hours.”

“But we’ve already decided on a nursery school for Akash.”

“Not a school. A place that sells plants. You get a fair amount of sun in the back, and the soil looks rich,” he said, looking out the window. “A rainy climate is good for the garden. I can plant a few shrubs, some ground covering if you like.”

“Oh,” she said.

“It is just six miles from your home. Next to it is a place that sells pastries. Here,” he said, opening the box and showing it to Akash. “Which would you like?”

“You don’t have to work on our garden, Baba. You said you wanted to rest.”

“It is relaxing for me.”

Flowers in the backyard had not occurred to her until now. And yet his offer appealed to her. She felt flattered by his interest in the place in which she lived, by his desire to make it more beautiful.

“You could have let me know you were going out,” Ruma said.

“I did,” he replied. “I left a note on the bureau downstairs, saying I was going for a drive.”

She turned to Akash, who had pulled apart a croissant and scattered flakes of dough across the front of his pajamas. She was about to blame him for being hasty in his search of her father’s room. But of course Akash was too small to see the top of the bureau, too young to read a note.

When the nursery opened her father went out again, taking Akash with him this time, transferring the car seat into the sedan. As they drove off, she realized that this was the first time she was leaving Akash exclusively in her father’s care. It was odd being alone in the house, and she worried that perhaps Akash would suddenly demand her presence. She used to feel that way in his infancy, when he would nurse every two hours, when being without him, even briefly, felt abnormal. An hour later her father and Akash returned, with bags of topsoil, flats full of flowers, a shovel, a rake, and a hose. Her father asked if he could borrow some old clothes of Adam’s, and Ruma gave him a pair of khakis and a torn oxford shirt, things Adam had set aside to give to the Salvation Army, and lent him a pair of Adam’s running shoes. The clothes were large on her father, the shoulders of the shirt drooping, the cuffs of the pants rolled up. For the rest of the day, with Akash playing at his side in a growing mountain of soil, her father pushed the shovel into the ground, hacking away at grass with a soft, forceful sound, wearing his baseball cap to protect his head from the sun. He worked steadily, pausing briefly at midday to eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich along with Akash, coming in at dusk only because he said the mosquitoes were out.

The next morning her father drove back to the nursery to get more things: a bale of peat moss, bags of mulch and composted manure. This time, in addition to the gardening supplies, he brought back an inflatable kiddie pool, in the form of a crocodile spouting water from its head, which he set up in the yard and filled with the hose. Akash spent all day outdoors, splashing in the pool and squirting water into the garden, or searching for the worms her father dug up. Again her father worked almost continuously until dusk. With Akash outside all day, Ruma had time to do a few things around the house, small and large things she’d been putting off. She paid the bills that were due at the month’s end, filed away piles of the paperwork her life with Adam generated, and then began to sort through Akash’s clothing, weeding drawers of what he’d outgrown, bringing up larger things from plastic tubs stored in the basement. Depending on whether she had a boy or a girl, she’d have to save the smaller clothes or give them away. It would be another four weeks until the amnio, allowing them to learn the sex. She wasn’t showing significantly, had yet to feel any kicks. But unlike the last time she didn’t doubt the presence of life inside her.

She dug out her maternity wear, the large-paneled pants and tunics that she would soon require. After sorting through the clothing, she turned to the unfinished bookcase in Akash’s room, which she’d been meaning to paint ever since she bought it, over ten years ago in Boston, to hold her law books. She removed all the toys and books and began to put them in the corner. She would ask her father to help her carry it outside, so that she could paint in the yard. At one point Akash came into the room, surprising her. He was barefoot, his golden legs covered with dirt. She wondered if he would be upset with her for touching his things, but he regarded the pile as if it were perfectly normal and then began picking items out of it.

“What are you up to?” she asked him.

“Growing things.”

“Oh? What are you planting?”

“All this stuff,” he said, his arms full, walking out of the room. She followed him outside, where she saw that her father had created a small plot for Akash, hardly larger than a spread-open newspaper, with shallow holes dug out at intervals. She watched as Akash buried things into the soil, crouching over the ground just as her father was. Into the soil went a pink rubber ball, a few pieces of Lego stuck together, a wooden block etched with a star.

“Not too deep,” her father said. “Not more than a finger. Can you touch it still?”

Akash nodded. He picked up a miniature plastic dinosaur, forcing it into the ground.

“What color is it?” her father asked.

“Red.”

“And in Bengali?”

“Lal.”

“Good.”

“And
neel
!” Akash cried out, pointing to the sky.

While her father was in the shower, she made tea. It was a ritual she liked, a formal recognition of the day turning into evening in spite of the sun not setting. When she was on her own, these hours passed arbitrarily. She was grateful for the opportunity to sit on the porch with her father, with the teapot and the bowl of salted cashews and the plate of Nice biscuits, looking at the lake and listening to the vast breeze work its way through the treetops, a grander version of the way Akash used to sigh when he was a baby, full of contentment, in the depths of sleep. The leaves flickered as if with internal light, shivering though the air was not cold. Akash was asleep, exhausted from playing outdoors all day, and the house was filled with silence.

“If I lived here I would sleep out here in the summers,” her father said presently. “I would put out a cot.”

“You can, you know.”

“What?”

“Sleep out here. We have an air mattress.”

“I am only talking. I am comfortable where I am.

“But,” he continued, “if I could, I would build a porch like this for myself.”

“Why don’t you?”

“The condo would not allow it. It would have been nice in the old house.”

When her father mentioned their old house, tears sprang to her eyes. In a way it was helpful to be in a place her mother had never seen. It was one of the last conversations she had had with her mother, telling her about Adam’s new job, which back then was only a remote possibility, as they rode together to the hospital. “Don’t go,” her mother had said from the front seat. “It’s too far away. I’ll never see you again.” Six hours after saying this, her mother was dead. Ruma suddenly wanted to ask her father, as she’d wanted to ask so many times, if he missed her mother, if he’d ever wept for her death. But she’d never asked, and he’d never admitted whether he’d felt or done those things.

“If you were to have built one, where would you have put it?”

He considered. “Off the dining room, I suppose. That side of the house was coolest.”

She tried to think of her parents’ house transformed this way. She imagined a wall in the dining room broken down, imagined speaking to her mother on the telephone, her mother complaining as the workmen hammered and drilled. Then she saw her parents sitting in the shade, in wicker chairs, having tea as she and her father were now. For when she pictured that house in her mind, her mother was always alive in it, impossible not to see. With the birth of Akash, in his sudden, perfect presence, Ruma had felt awe for the first time in her life. He still had the power to stagger her at times—simply the fact that he was breathing, that all his organs were in their proper places, that blood flowed quietly and effectively through his small, sturdy limbs. He was her flesh and blood, her mother had told her in the hospital the day Akash was born. Only the words her mother used were more literal, enriching the tired phrase with meaning: “He is made from your meat and bone.” It had caused Ruma to acknowledge the supernatural in everyday life. But death, too, had the power to awe, she knew this now—that a human being could be alive for years and years, thinking and breathing and eating, full of a million worries and feelings and thoughts, taking up space in the world, and then, in an instant, become absent, invisible.