Unaccustomed Earth Read online

  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.

  “I’m sorry we haven’t seen your new apartment,” she said to her father. “Adam doesn’t have any vacation for a while. But we’ll come after the baby’s born.”

  “There is nothing to see there. Just a TV and a sofa and my things. There is no space for all of you to stay. Not like here.”

  “I’d like to see it anyway,” she said. “We can stay in a hotel.”

  “There is no need, Ruma. No need to travel all that way, just to see an apartment,” her father said. “You are a mother now,” he added. “No need to drag your children.”

  “But that’s what you and Ma did, taking us to India all those times.”

  “We had no alternative. Our parents weren’t willing to travel. But I will come here again to see you,” he said, looking approvingly into the distance and taking a sip of his tea. “I like this place.”

  “My dad’s planting flowers in the backyard,” she told Adam that night on the phone.

  “Does he plan to be around to take care of them?”

  His flippancy irritated her, and she felt defensive on her father’s behalf. “I don’t know.”

  “It’s Thursday, Ruma. How long are you going to torture yourself?”

  She didn’t feel tortured any longer. She had planned to tell Adam this, but now she changed her mind. Instead she said, “I want to wait a few more days. Make sure everyone gets along.”

  “For God’s sake, Ruma,” Adam said. “He’s your father. You’ve known him all your life.”

  And yet, until now, she had not known certain things about him. She had not known how self-sufficient he could be, how helpful, to the point where she had not had to wash a dish since he’d arrived. At dinner he was flexible, appreciating the grilled fish and chicken breasts she began preparing after the Indian food ran out, making do with a can of soup for lunch. But it was Akash who brought out a side of her father that surprised Ruma most. In the evenings her father stood beside her i
n the bathroom as she gave Akash his bath, scrubbing the caked-on dirt from his elbows and knees. He helped put on his pajamas, brush his teeth, and comb back his soft damp hair. When Akash had fallen asleep one afternoon on the living-room carpet, her father made sure to put a pillow under his head, drape a cotton blanket over his body. By now Akash insisted on being read to at night by her father, sleeping downstairs in her father’s bed.

  The first night Akash slept with her father she went downstairs to make sure he’d fallen asleep. She saw a sliver of light under her father’s door and heard the sound of his voice, reading Green Eggs and Ham. She imagined them both under the covers, their heads reclining against the pillows, the book between them, Akash turning the pages as her father read. It was obvious that her father did not know the book by heart, as she did, that he was encountering it for the first time in his life. He read awkwardly, pausing between the sentences, his voice oddly animated as it was not in ordinary speech. Still, his effort touched her, and as she stood by the door she realized that for the first time in his life her father had fallen in love. She was about to knock and tell her father that it was past Akash’s bedtime, that he should turn out the light. But she stopped herself, returning upstairs, briefly envious of her own son.

  The garden was coming along nicely. It was a futile exercise, he knew. He could not picture his daughter or his son-in-law caring for it properly, noticing what needed to be done. In weeks, he guessed, it would be overgrown with weeds, the leaves chewed up by slugs. Then again, perhaps they would hire someone to do the job. He would have preferred to put in vegetables, but they required more work than flowers. It was a modest planting, some slow-growing myrtle and phlox under the trees, two azalea bushes, a row of hostas, a clematis to climb one of the posts of the porch, and in honor of his wife, a small hydrangea. In a plot behind the kitchen, unable to resist, he also put in a few tomatoes, along with some marigolds and impatiens; there was just time for a small harvest to come in by the fall. He spaced out the delphiniums, tied them to stalks, stuck some gladiola bulbs into the ground. He missed working outside, the solid feeling of dirt under his knees, getting into his nails, the smell of it lingering on his skin even after he’d scrubbed himself in the shower. It was the one thing he missed about the old house, and when he thought about his garden was when he missed his wife most keenly. She had taken that from him. For years, after the children had grown, it had just been the two of them, but she managed to use up all the vegetables, putting them into dishes he did not know how to prepare himself. In addition, when she was alive, they regularly entertained, their guests marveling that the potatoes were from their own backyard, taking away bagfuls at the evening’s end.

  He looked over at Akash’s little plot, the dirt carefully mounded up around his toys, pens and pencils stuck into the ground. Pennies were there, too, all the spare ones he’d had in his pocket.

  “When will the plants come out?” Akash called out from the swimming pool, where he stood crouching over a little sailboat.

  “Soon.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Not so soon. These things take time, Akash. Do you remember what I taught you this morning?”

  And Akash recited his numbers in Bengali from one to ten.

  In bed that night, after Akash had fallen asleep beside him, he wrote Mrs. Bagchi a postcard. It was safer, he decided, than sending an e-mail from Ruma’s computer, a mode of communication he could not bring himself fully to trust. He had bought the card off a rack at the hardware store where he had bought Akash’s swimming pool. The picture was a view of ferries on Elliott Bay, a sight he had not seen. In Europe he was always careful to buy postcards only of places he’d been to, feeling dishonest otherwise. But here he had no choice. He composed the letter in Bengali, an alphabet Ruma would not be able to decipher. “I am planting Ruma a garden,” he began. “Akash has grown and is learning to swim. The weather is pleasant, no rain here in summer. I am looking forward to Prague,” he ended. He did not sign his name. He looked through his wallet, where on a folded slip of paper he had written down Mrs. Bagchi’s mailing address. He carried only a few addresses with him: his son and his daughter and now Mrs. Bagchi, all written on slips of paper that lived behind his driver’s license and Social Security card. He filled out the address in English, and finally, at the top, her name.

  He wondered where the nearest post office was. Would Ruma find it odd if he were to ask her for a stamp? He could take it back with him to Pennsylvania and mail it from there, but that seemed silly. He decided he could tell Ruma that he needed to mail a bill. There was a public mailbox two miles down the road; at some point before leaving he could drop it there. He didn’t know where to put the postcard now. It was not an easy room to hide things in: the surfaces were clear, the corners visible, the closet bare apart from his few shirts. At some point in the day Ruma came downstairs—he never could tell when—in order to make his bed and check the hamper for laundry and wipe away the water that he splattered, in the course of brushing his teeth and shaving, at the sides of the sink. He considered putting the postcard in the pocket of his suitcase, but was too tired to get out of bed. Instead, he tucked it between the pages of the Seattle guidebook on the side table, and then, as an extra precaution, put the book into the table drawer.

  He turned to face his sleeping grandson, the long lashes and rounded cheeks reminding him of his own children when they were young. He was suddenly conscious that he would probably not live to see Akash into adulthood, that he would never see his grandson’s middle age, his old age, this simple fact of life saddening him. He imagined the boy years from now, occupying this very room, shutting the door as Ruma and Romi had. It was inevitable. And yet he knew that he, too, had turned his back on his parents, by settling in America. In the name of ambition and accomplishment, none of which mattered anymore, he had forsaken them. He kissed Akash lightly on the side of his head, smoothing the curling golden hair with his hand, then switched off the lamp, filling the room with darkness.

  Saturday morning, the day before her father was scheduled to leave, the garden was finished. After breakfast, he showed Ruma what he’d done. The shrubs were still small, with mulch around their bases and enough space to distinguish one from the next, but he said they’d grow taller and closer together, showing her with his hand the height she could anticipate by next summer. He told her how often to water, and for how long, to wait until the sun had gone down. He showed her the bottle of fertilizer he’d bought, and told her when to add it to the watering. Patiently she listened as Akash dashed in and out of his pool, but she absorbed little of what her father said.

  “Watch out for these beetles,” he said, plucking an insect off a leaf and flicking it away. “The hydrangea won’t bloom much this year. The flowers will be pink or blue depending on the acidity of your soil. You’ll have to prune it back, eventually.”

  She nodded.

  “They were always your mother’s favorite,” her father added. “In this country, that is.”

  Ruma looked at the plant, at the dark green leaves with serrated edges. She had not known.

  “Make sure to keep the tomatoes off the ground.” He leaned over, readjusting one of the plants. “This stake should be enough to support them, or you could use a little string. Don’t let them dry out. If the sun is strong check them twice a day. If frost comes before they’ve ripened, pick them and wrap them up in newspaper. And cut down the delphinium stalks in the fall.”

  “Maybe you could do that,” she suggested.

  He stood up awkwardly, a hand gripping the front of his thigh. He took off his baseball cap and wiped his forehead with his arm. “I have a trip scheduled. I’ve already bought the ticket.”

  “I mean after you get back, Baba.”

  Her father had been looking down at his dirt-rimmed fingernails, but now he raised his face and looked around him, at the garden and at the trees.

  “It is a good place, Ruma. But this is your home, not mine.”


  She had expected resistance, so she kept talking. “You can have the whole downstairs. You can still go on your trips whenever you like. We won’t stand in your way. What do you say, Akash,” she called out. “Should Dadu live with us in here? Would you like that?”

  Akash began jumping up and down in the pool, squirting water from a plastic dolphin, nodding his head.

  “I know it would be a big move,” Ruma continued. “But it would be good for you. For all of us.” By now she was crying. Her father did not step toward her to comfort her. He was silent, waiting for the moment to pass.

  “I don’t want to be a burden,” he said after a while.

  “You wouldn’t. You’d be a help. You don’t have to make up your mind now. Just promise you’ll think about it.”

  He lifted his head and looked at her, a brief sad look that seemed finally to take her in, and nodded.