Unaccustomed Earth Read online

  “Soon, Babu. Let me finish.”

  As she ate her breakfast she mentioned the places they could see during the course of his visit—before his arrival she had looked up hours of admission, ticket prices, and in her mind she’d already conceived of an itinerary, something to keep them occupied each day. She hadn’t had the time or energy to explore much of downtown Seattle, and thought the week with her father would provide the opportunity. “There’s the Space Needle of course,” she began. “And Pike Place Market. There’s an aquarium along the waterfront I’ve been meaning to take Akash to. They have ferry rides across Puget Sound that are supposed to be nice. We could go to Victoria for the day. And then there’s the Boeing factory, if you’re interested. They give tours.”

  “Yes,” her father said. He looked tired to her, his eyes small behind his glasses. “To be honest,” he said, “I wouldn’t mind a rest from all that.”

  She was confused; she had assumed her father would want to see Seattle with his video camera, just as he was interested in seeing so many other places in the world these days. “Well, otherwise, there’s not much else to do here.”

  “I don’t need to be entertained.”

  “That’s not what I meant. Whatever you’d like, Baba.” Her confusion was followed by worry. She wondered if there was something he wasn’t telling her. She wondered how it was in the condominium, whether there were too many stairs to climb, if he had any neighbors who knew or cared about him. She remembered a statistic she’d heard, about long-term spouses typically dying within two years of one another, the surviving spouse dying essentially of a broken heart. But Ruma knew that her parents had never loved each other in that way.

  “Are you all right?”

  He looked up at her; he’d been leaning close to Akash, making faces to distract him as he finished the cereal. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, are you feeling all right?”

  “I am feeling fine. I was just hoping for a vacation from my vacations,” he said. “The tours are work, in their own way.”

  She nodded. “I understand.” She did understand, for deep down she knew that there was nothing wrong with her father. Though it upset her to admit it, if anything, he seemed happier now; her mother’s death had lightened him, the opposite of what it had done to her.

  He took a worn white handkerchief from his pocket, wiped remnants of milk and cereal off Akash’s face. The gesture reminded her of being small, and the little ways her father had come to her rescue, pulling out a handkerchief if she’d spilt food on her clothes, or needed to blow her nose, or had scraped her knee. “Let a few days go by. Maybe then we can take a boat ride.”

  After breakfast Akash had his weekly swimming lesson. She expected her father to stay at home, but he said he wanted to go, bringing his video camera along. He offered to drive them to the pool in the rental car, but because the car seat was in the SUV, Ruma drove. She had learned to drive in high school, but then for years she had lived in cities and not owned a car, so that until now it was an activity she associated only with visiting her parents: taking the car to drop off videos, or going with her mother to the mall. It was something she had to get used to in Seattle—having to fill the car with gas, making sure there was air in the tires. Though she was growing familiar with the roads, with the exits and the mountains and the quality of the light, she felt no connection to any of it, or to anyone. She had exchanged only pleasantries with her neighbors—a retired husband and wife on one side, two gay professors at the University of Washington on the other. There were some women she would talk to as she sat watching Akash in the swimming pool, but at the end of each class they never suggested getting together. It felt unnatural to have to reach out to strangers at this point in her life.

  She was used to the friends she’d left behind in Brooklyn, women she met in prenatal yoga and through a mommy group she’d joined after Akash was born, who had known the everyday details of her life. They’d kept her company when she went into labor, handed down the clothes and blankets their children had outgrown. Those friends had been a five- or ten-minute walk from her apartment, some of them in the building itself, and back when she worked part time they could meet her at a moment’s notice, pushing their strollers through Prospect Park. They had gotten to know Ruma’s mother when she came to visit on weekends, and some of them had driven down to Pennsylvania for the funeral. At first, after the move, these friends sent Ruma e-mails, or called from their cell phones as they sat in the playground without her. But given the time change and the children always at their sides, it was impossible to carry on a meaningful conversation. For all the time she’d spent with these women the roots did not go deep, and these days, after reading their e-mails, Ruma was seldom inspired to write back.

  The car was silent apart from the sound the tires made on the road, and the slicing sound of cars passing in the opposite direction. Akash was playing with one of his toy trains, running its wheels along the surface of the door and the back of Ruma’s seat. She was aware of her father quietly monitoring her driving, glancing now and then at the speedometer, looking along with her when she was about to switch lanes. She pointed out the grocery store where she now shopped, the direction of Mount Rainier, not visible today.

  “There’s the exit Adam takes to go to work,” she said.

  “How far it is?”

  When she was younger she would have corrected him; “How far is it?” she would immediately have said, irritated, as if his error were a reflection of her own shortcomings. “I don’t know. I think it takes him about forty minutes each way.”

  “That’s a lot of driving. Why didn’t you choose a house closer by?”

  “We don’t mind. And we fell in love with the house.” She wondered whether her father would consider this last remark frivolous.

  “And you? Have you found work in this new place?”

  “Part-time litigation work is hard to find,” she said. “Preschool is only until noon, and Adam and I don’t want Akash in a daycare.”

  “In order to practice here you will have to take another bar exam?” her father asked.

  “No. There’s reciprocity with New York.”

  “Then why not look for a new job?”

  “I’m not ready yet, Baba.” She had not bothered to contact any firms in Seattle, not called up the trusts and estates attorney one of the partners at her old firm had given her the name of, suggesting maybe Ruma could write briefs on a case-by-case basis. She realized she’d never explicitly told her father that she intended, for the next few years, to be at home. “We’re still getting settled.”

  “That I understand. I am only asking if you have a time frame in mind.”

  “Maybe when the new baby starts kindergarten.”

  “But that is over five years from now. Now is the time for you to be working, building your career.”

  “I am working, Baba. Soon I’ll be taking care of two children, just like Ma did.”

  “Will this make you happy?”

  She didn’t answer him. Her mother would have understood her decision, would have been supportive and proud. Ruma had worked fifty-hour weeks for years, had earned six figures while Romi was still living hand to mouth. She’d always felt unfairly cast, by both her parents, into roles that weren’t accurate: as her father’s oldest son, her mother’s secondary spouse.

  “They won’t be young forever, Ruma,” her father continued. “Then what will you do?”

  “Then I’ll go back.”

  “You’ll be over forty. It may not be so simple.”

  She kept her eyes on the road, pushing a button that turned on the radio, filling the car with the determined drone of a reporter’s voice. She had never been able to confront her father freely, the way she used to fight with her mother. Somehow, she feared that any difference of opinion would chip away at the already frail bond that existed between them. She knew that she had disappointed him, getting rejected by all the Ivy Leagues she’d applied to. In spi
te of Romi’s itinerant, uncertain life, she knew her father respected him more for having graduated from Princeton and getting a Fulbright to go abroad. Ruma could count the arguments she’d had with her father on one hand. In high school, after she’d gotten her license, he’d refused to insure her on the family car so that she could drive it on her own. In college, when it was time to declare her major, he’d tried to convince her to choose biology instead of history. He had balked at the cost of law school, but when she’d gotten into Northeastern he had paid for it all the same. And he had argued, when she and Adam were planning their wedding, that an outdoor ceremony was unwise, recommending an institutional banquet hall instead of the bluff on Martha’s Vineyard she and Adam desired as a location. As it turned out the weather was perfect, the sun beating brilliantly on the ocean as they exchanged their vows. And yet, even to this day, Ruma suffered from nightmares of the white tent and folding chairs and hundreds of guests soaked by rain.

  She pulled into the parking lot where the swimming pool was. Inside the building, she told her father to wait on the benches where they could watch the class through a window, while she went into the locker room to change Akash into his bathing suit. When she joined her father he was busy with his camera, putting in a new tape and adjusting the settings. “There’s Akash,” she said, pointing to where he sat, wrapped in a towel, waiting for the class to begin. She had thought Akash was too young to go into the pool without her, that they would have to take the earlier class, in which parents went into the water as well. But there were no spots in that class, and from the very beginning Akash had separated from her willingly, leaping into the arms of the instructor, an auburn-haired teenage girl.

  For the next thirty minutes her father taped Akash continuously: having the flotation device strapped on his back, jumping into the pool, blowing bubbles and practicing kicks. Her father stood up from the bench where Ruma sat, the lens of the video camera nearly touching the window. He had not paid this sort of attention when Ruma and Romi were growing up. Back then it was their mother who sat watching their swimming lessons, who held her breath, terrified, as they climbed the ladder and waved at her, then plunged off the high diving board. Her father had not taught Romi to throw a baseball, and he had not taken them to learn to skate on the pond, a short walk through the woods behind their neighborhood, that froze every winter.

  In the car on the way home, her father brought up the topic of her career again. “Work is important, Ruma. Not only for financial stability. For mental stability. All my life, since I was sixteen, I have been working.”

  “You’re retired.”

  “But I cannot stay unoccupied. That is why I am traveling so much. It is an extravagance, but I don’t need all the money I’ve saved up.

  “Self-reliance is important, Ruma,” he continued. “Life is full of surprises. Today, you can depend on Adam, on Adam’s job. Tomorrow, who knows.”

  For a split second she took her eyes off the road, turning to him. “What are you suggesting? What are you saying?”

  “Nothing. Only, perhaps, that it makes me nervous that you are not employed. It is not for my sake, you understand. My concern is for you. I have more than enough money to last until I am dead.”

  “Who else is dead?” Akash called out from the backseat.

  “No one. We are only talking silly things. Oh dear, what a nice train you have, has it left the station?” her father inquired, turning back to Akash.

  That night after dinner he showed his videos. First, to Akash’s delight, they watched the footage of the swimming class, and then he showed videos of Europe: frescoes in churches, pigeons flying, the backs of people’s heads. Most of the images were captured through the window of the tour bus, as a guide explained things about the monuments they were passing. He had always been careful to keep Mrs. Bagchi out of the frame, but as he watched the video enlarged on his daughter’s television, he realized there were traces throughout—there was Mrs. Bagchi’s arm resting on the open window of the bus, there was her blue leather handbag on a bench.

  “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.