Unaccustomed Earth Read online

  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.

  He took responsibility for things, booking theater tickets, making reservations at restaurants, packing picnics and dragging Sudha off to Hampstead Heath. He was the first man she’d dated who was never late, never forgot to call when he said he would, and Sudha quickly recognized in him the same strain of competence she possessed. He enjoyed food and cooking, inspired to get up early and walk to a favorite bakery for pastries, surprising Sudha, the first morning she woke up in his flat in Shepherd’s Bush, with breakfast on a tray. He had lived alone for many years but quickly opened his life to her, giving her a key, lined drawers in his bureau, a glass shelf in his medicine cabinet. In his youth he had dreamed of being a painter, had enrolled at Chelsea Art School, but after a teacher told him he would not go far he never touched a canvas again. He was not bitter about this turn of events; like Sudha, he was a person who understood what his limits were. At the same time he could be exacting, writing withering reviews for his magazine, insisting on the best table at restaurants, sending back wine. Like Sudha he was moderate with alcohol, always ordering a bottle for the table but seldom consuming more than a glass or two.

  As Christmas approached she told her parents she had too much work and did not come home, when in fact she and Roger went away together, to Seville and then to the Costa del Sol. When she returned from Spain there was a message at the switchboard of her dormitory from her parents, asking her to call. When she did, from one of the pay phones in the lobby of the dorm, they told her that Rahul’s grades had not improved, that a letter had come from an adviser, expressing concern. He was in Wayland now for Christmas break; after one explosive fight, he’d stopped speaking to them. She was glad that Roger wasn’t there to overhear the call, that he’d kissed her good-bye in the taxi and gone back to his flat. She’d painted a hazy image of her family that he absorbed as if it were an endnote in a book, something stemming from her but safely tucked out of sight. “I can’t wait to meet them,” he told her, words that, Sudha hoped, made his intentions clear. Beyond the basic details he did not probe. And so she did not tell Roger about Rahul’s drinking, about his arrest, about the fact that she had not talked to her brother in months.

  Her parents asked her to speak to Rahul, saying he’d gone out for a walk, to try in a little while. She waited a few days. She was surprised after all these months by how upset she felt. And she was upset at her parents, too, for still depending on her to help. She called from Roger’s flat, putting the charges on a card while Roger was at work. Rahul had turned twenty in the first week of January, a thing she’d let pass without acknowledgment. He picked up the phone, and she wished him happy birthday now. It was noon in Massachusetts, early evening in London. The sky was dark through Roger’s kitchen window; at the counter, Sudha was setting out cheese and crackers and olives for her and Roger to eat together when he got home.

  “Things okay?” she asked.

  “Everything’s fine. Ma and Baba are getting totally hysterical over nothing.” Rahul spoke as if no strain existed between them, asking her how London was.

  “They said you failed two classes.”

  “They were lousy classes.”

  “Are you even going to your classes?”

  “Lay off, Didi,” he said, his mood turning.

  “Are you?” she persisted.

  There was a pause. She heard the flicking of a lighter, the first pent-up exhale of a cigarette. “I don’t want to be doing this.”

  “What do you want to do?” she asked, not bothering to conceal her exasperation.

  “I’m writing a play.”

  She was surprised by this information and found it promising that he was actually doing something. He had always been a good writer; once, when he was in high school, he’d written a response to one of the take-home essay questions she had on a philosophy exam at Penn, a question about Plato’s Euthyphro that her professor had approved of with a lengthy comment.

  She put an olive in her mouth, extracted the thin purple pit, and placed it on a painted dish she and Roger had bought together in Seville. “That’s great, Rahul. But you have to study, too.”

  “I want to drop out.”

  “Ma and Baba aren’t going to go for that. Finish college and then you can do whatever you want.”

  “I’m sick of wasting time. And I want my car back. I hate not driving. I feel trapped.”

  She controlled herself, not telling him that it was ludicrous to expect their parents to trust him on the road again. “It’s just two more years of your life, Rahul. Try to stick it out. Otherwise you’ll end up hating yourself.”

  “Jesus, you sound just like them,” he said and hung up on her.

 
She returned to Boston in April, during the break after the Lent term, a diamond ring from Roger concealed on a chain beneath her sweater, and this made her feel dipped in a protective coating from her family. After January her parents had not bothered her again about Rahul, telling her, the one time she asked, that he’d gone back to school. She felt guilty for distancing herself but not enough to counsel her parents, not enough to speak to Rahul. She had a ten-thousand-word dissertation to write on deregulation for her degree, and she had Roger, had moved in with him by then. She was surprised to see Rahul standing at the airport with her parents. All three of them looked sad, preoccupied, her parents perking up only when they caught sight of her behind her trolley piled with bags.

  “Hey,” she said, walking up to him, hugging him, though initially his long arms remained at his side. “It’s good to see you.”

  “Welcome home,” he said, and when he stepped back, she saw that he was not smiling.

  “Is your semester finished already?”

  He shook his head, still refusing to meet her gaze, and then a small, odd-sounding laugh escaped from him. “I live here now.”

  She had come home to tell her family about Roger, to tell them she planned to move permanently to London and marry him, but it was Rahul they had to talk about first. During the ride home from the airport she pieced together what had happened. It was her mother who did the talking; her father drove, muttering to himself now and then about the condition of the traffic, and Rahul spent most of the time staring out the window, as if he occupied the back of a cab. Though he returned to Ithaca after Christmas break, he’d stopped going to classes, and two weeks ago, after being formally dismissed from the university, he moved back to Wayland.

  From what Sudha could tell, he was living in the house as if it were simply another vacation. He stayed in his room or watched television during the day. Their parents had sold his car, and so he never went out. Previously when he’d avoided them, there was something bristling in him, something about to explode. That energy was missing now. He no longer seemed upset with them, or with the fact that he was at home. For a while her parents told their friends that he was taking a leave of absence and then that he was in the process of transferring to BU. “Rahul needs a city in order to thrive,” they said; but he never applied to other schools. They told people Rahul was looking for a job, and then the lie became more elaborate, and Rahul had a job, a consulting job from home, when in fact he stayed home all day doing nothing. Their mother, who had always hoped her children would live under her roof, was now ashamed that this was the case.

  Eventually he got a job managing a Laundromat in Wayland three days a week. Her parents bought a cheap used car so that Rahul could drive into town. Sudha knew that the job embarrassed her parents. They had not minded him washing dishes in the past, but now they lived in fear of the day someone they knew would see their son weighing sacks of dirty clothes on a scale. Other Bengalis gossiped about him and prayed their own children would not ruin their lives in the same way. And so he became what all parents feared, a blot, a failure, someone who was not contributing to the grand circle of accomplishments Bengali children were making across the country, as surgeons or attorneys or scientists, or writing articles for the front page of The New York Times.

  Sudha was among those successful children now, her collection of higher degrees framed and filling up her parents’ upstairs hall. She was working as a project manager for an organization in London that promoted micro loans in poor countries. And she was spoken for. In the summer, she and Roger flew to Massachusetts so that he could meet Sudha’s family and ask formally for her hand. At Roger’s request they stayed not in Wayland but in a hotel in Boston; by now she knew him well enough to accept that he would maintain a limited exposure to her family, just as he guarded his body, on the beach, from the rays of the sun. “Better to be up front about these things at the start,” Roger had told Sudha in his kind but firm way, and she took this as another sign of his responsible nature, his vigilance toward their life together. The hotel arrangement was accepted by her parents without protest; Rahul had stripped them of their capacity to fight back. They accepted that she and Roger planned to have a registry wedding in London, that they were willing to have only a reception in Massachusetts, that Roger had been previously married, that he and Sudha had a fourteen-year gap. They approved of his academic qualifications, his ability, thanks to his wisely invested inheritance, to buy a house for himself and Sudha in Kilburn. It helped that he’d been born in India, that he was English and not American, drinking tea, not coffee, and saying “zed” not “zee,” superficial things that allowed her parents to relate to him. Sudha felt that they were not so much making room for Roger in the family as allowing him to take her away. But Rahul had not loosened his grip; he asked Roger questions, combing through the current issue of Roger’s art magazine that her parents had admired and set aside, doing his part to inspect his sister’s future husband for flaws.

  “Roger’s a good guy,” Rahul told her when the two of them were alone in the kitchen clearing plates. “Congratulations.”

  “Thanks. Thanks for being here,” she said. She meant it; she’d never brought a man to the house, hadn’t realized how nervous she’d be.

  “Got nowhere else to go.”

  “So, how are things?” she asked. “It’s not driving you crazy, living at home this way?”

  “It’s not so bad.”

  She was grateful that he was talking to her, afraid to pressure him. She was aware of a horrible imbalance between them. She felt accused, simply because her life wasn’t broken in the same way.

  “How’s the Laundromat?”

  He shrugged.

  “Are you still writing your play?”

  “It was stupid.”

  Not knowing what else to do she stepped forward to hug him, and it was then that she smelled the liquor, sweet, strong, unmistakable. During lunch he’d gotten up from the table once; now she realized he’d gone wherever the bottle was hidden. He was not drunk, there was nothing about his behavior to indicate that he’d had more than a single drink. But the fact that he’d consumed the alcohol in stealth, that he could not endure her family’s company without it, made her realize that Rahul was not simply fond of drinking, or a social drinker, or a binge drinker, which were all the ways she’d rationalized it until now.

  “You’re welcome to visit us in London any time,” she offered, saddened by the fact that she did not mean it.

  “I don’t have any money.”

  “I’m sure Baba would buy you a ticket.”

  “I don’t want his money,” Rahul said.

  You live in his house, she wanted to point out. You eat the food Ma puts on the table. You let them put gas in your car. But she said none of this, knowing that if she did, the door he tentatively held open for her benefit would slam once more in her face.

  In the months before Sudha’s wedding reception, planned for the fall, Rahul began dating a woman named Elena. Elena was an aspiring actress, and she was a waitress at a diner in Waltham. He had conveyed these facts to Sudha when she came back to Wayland ten days before the reception, without Roger, who would be flying in for the party alone. “I’ve never felt this way before, Didi,” he told her. A few days before the reception he brought Elena home. Sudha was a married woman now, but being without Roger made her anxious, that protective coating he provided suddenly thinning. Elena was thirty, eight years older than Rahul. But she could have passed for a high school student, wearing tight jeans and a tank top, her long brown hair fastened at one side with a barrette, dark liner rimming her eyes. She was quiet, speaking only when spoken to, not working to charm Sudha’s parents as Roger had. She told them she’d grown up in Mattapoisett and had gone to Emerson. She did not eat the rice Sudha’s mother served with lunch, saying it caused her bloating. Rahul kept his arm around her thin shoulders, kissing her dreamily in front of everyone. He spoke on Elena’s behalf, saying she had once made a com
mercial for an allergy medicine. He kept mentioning someone named Crystal; it turned out that Crystal was Elena’s daughter from a previous boyfriend.

  Sudha’s parents said nothing as this information was divulged. They had welcomed Elena, filled their table in her honor as they had done for Roger, making chitchat about the Big Dig and the menu for Sudha and Roger’s reception. But then, as Sudha and her mother were bringing out tea and a bowl of pantuas in their syrupy bath, Rahul announced that he and Elena were engaged.

  Sudha froze behind a chair, gripping the spoons she was in the process of distributing. The room seemed to tilt; she pressed down on the tablecloth as if a forceful wind were about to come and blow everything away. She looked down at the diamond on her finger, imagining the same thing on Elena’s hand, wondering where in the world her brother would get the money to buy a ring. The Darjeeling brought out for special occasions grew too strong in the pot, the reddish-brown pantuas still crowded together in their serving bowl.

  “That’s not possible,” their father said finally, breaking the silence that he had been maintaining, it seemed to Sudha, for over a year.