Unaccustomed Earth (36 page)

“She is afraid because she cannot see neighbors,” Rupa added.

“And that we will fall into the swimming pool.”

I did not know how to respond to any of this, so I said nothing as I backed out of the long driveway and drove toward town. The closest Dunkin’ Donuts was less than fifteen minutes away, and when I approached it felt too soon. I wanted to continue driving, and so I kept going, heading toward the next town, where there was a beach my mother used to like for an occasional change of scenery. This required getting on the highway, and I found it satisfying, accelerating for a short while along the empty, impersonal road. The girls asked no questions about where we were going, each looking steadily out the back windows, the journey still brief enough that the lack of conversation did not feel strange. I entered the next town and took a road from which the gray line of the ocean was visible. I pointed this out to Rupa and Piu, but they said nothing. “We can either go into the drive-through or inside,” I said once we reached the donut shop. “You guys have a preference?”

“Which way is best?” Rupa asked.

“With the drive-through I get my coffee and drink it as we go back to the house. The other way, we sit inside.”

Rupa voted for the drive-through, Piu to go inside. “Tell you what,” I said. “We’ll go in, and on our way home I’ll get a refill in the drive-through.”

They seemed pleased that neither option would be denied to them and got out of the car, holding hands as they walked across the parking lot. The Dunkin’ Donuts was part of a shopping plaza with a liquor store, a Bed and Bath, and a place that sold party supplies. The lot was crammed with the cars of last-minute Christmas shoppers, but Dunkin’ Donuts was empty. Christmas carols played on the sound system, their trite melodies foreign to Rupa and Piu. I ordered my coffee and asked the girls what they wanted. They stared at the selections, Piu straining on tiptoe, Rupa with her mouth slightly open and her tongue planted in one corner of it. The decent thing to do was to lift Piu up so that she could get a better view, and when I offered, she raised her hands and came into my arms. She was heavier than I expected, and I placed her on the counter, where she continued to stare.

“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 need 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.