Unaccustomed Earth (44 page)

All day I was oblivious. I was out with my mother and two aunts, being fitted for blouses, selecting jewels. We had spent hours on a thin futon, drinking Cokes and eating mutton rolls, as men in a sari shop unfolded the greater part of their inventory. I went along with all of it, chose a red Benarasi to wear. But the whole time I was thinking of you, fearful of the mistake I was making. I was still slightly jet-lagged, hungry for meals we were used to eating together, for the taste of good coffee and wine. On the crowded street, walking back to my parents’ flat off Triangular Park, I searched foolishly for your face. “A terrible thing has happened,” the gatekeeper told us when we arrived.

On television, in a pink sitting room with stark fluorescent light, I saw images of the Indian and Sri Lankan coastline, glimpses from vacationers’ video cameras never intended to capture such a thing. I saw a massive surge of water moving so quickly that the tape seemed to be playing at an unnatural speed. At first it was only the damage in South India and Sri Lanka I was aware of, the fishing villages that had been obliterated, tourists stranded on Vivekananda’s Rock. And then I learned that Thailand had also been hit very badly.

I did not know where you were in Thailand, only that you planned to be on a beach. I had not asked you the details, thinking, as I prepared to leave you, that such information would make it worse. The next morning I went to the newsstand and bought the papers, studying every picture, looking for your name in one of the credits, hoping you had been lucky and that you had continued to do your work. I went to an Internet center, drew up your Web site. I saw the last images you had posted. A faint sliver of the shoreline we had seen from Volterra. Three blackened faces, supposed to be Etruscan divinities, that loomed over our heads. And then, scenes of another coast. Two children playing, a gentle turquoise sea.

At the end of that week, Navin arrived to marry me. I was repulsed by the sight of him, not because I had betrayed him but because he still breathed, because he was there for me and had countless more days to live. And yet without his even realizing it, firmly but without force, Navin pulled me away from you, as the final gust of autumn wind pulls the last leaves from the trees. We were married, we were blessed, my hand was placed on top of his, and the ends of our clothing were knotted together. I felt the weight of each ritual, felt the ground once more underfoot. Our honeymoon in Goa was canceled. Navin said it didn’t feel right to swim in the polluted waters that surrounded India at that time.

I returned to my existence, the existence I had chosen instead of you. It was another winter in Massachusetts, thirty years after you and your parents had first gone away. In February, Giovanna got in touch to say she had heard the news from Paola. A small obituary ran in
The New York Times.
By then I needed no proof of your absence from the world; I felt it as plainly and implacably as the cells that were gathering and shaping themselves in my body. Those cold, dark days I spent in bed, unable to speak, burning with new life but mourning your death, went unquestioned by Navin, who had already begun to take a quiet pride in my condition. My mother, who called often from India to check on me, had heard, too. “Remember the Chaudhuris, the family that once stayed with us?” she began. It might have been your child but this was not the case. We had been careful, and you had left nothing behind.

A Note About the Author

Jhumpa Lahiri’s debut collection,
Interpreter of Maladies,
won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, as well as the PEN/Hemingway Award, the
New Yorker
Debut of the Year, and an Addison M. Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. It was an international best seller, translated into more than thirty languages.
The Namesake,
her first novel, was a
New York Times
Notable Book, a finalist for the
Los Angeles Times
Book Prize, and was selected as one of the best books of the year by
USA Today
and
Entertainment Weekly,
among others. Ms. Lahiri was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2006. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and two children.

Also by Jhumpa Lahiri

The Namesake

Interpreter of Maladies

This Is a Borzoi Book Published by Alfred A. Knopf and Alfred A. Knopf Canada

Copyright © 2008 by Jhumpa Lahiri

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

www.aaknopf.com

www.randomhouse.ca

“Hell–Heaven,” “Nobody’s Business,” “Once in a Lifetime,” and “Year’s End” originally appeared in
The New Yorker.

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc. Knopf Canada and colophon are trademarks.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lahiri, Jhumpa.

Unaccustomed earth : stories / by Jhumpa Lahiri.—1st ed.

p.       cm.

1. Bengali Americans—Fiction. 2. Bengali (South Asian people)—United States—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3562.A316U53 2008

813'.54—dc22         2007017612

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Lahiri, Jhumpa

Unaccustomed earth / Jhumpa Lahiri.

eISBN: 978-0-307-26868-6

I. Title.

PS3562.A316U54 2008   813'.54   C2007-905080-8

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

With thanks to the National Endowment for the Arts, and special thanks to Robin Desser.

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