Authors: Jhumpa Lahiri
Baba?
Yes, Bela?
Can we go back to the club another day?
Perhaps the next time we visit, her father said.
He told her he wanted her to rest, that it was a long journey back to Rhode Island. Five of the six weeks in India had passed. Already her father’s hair was beginning to grow back.
The rickshaw sped forward, past the huts and stalls that lined the road, selling flowers, selling sweets, selling cigarettes and sodas. When they approached the mosque on the corner, the rickshaw slowed down. A conch shell was being blown, to signal the start of the evening.
Stop here, her father told the driver, reaching for his wallet, saying that they would walk the rest of the way.
They took a bus from Logan Airport to Providence, then a taxi to the house. Bela was wearing the mirrored bangles around her wrist. Her face and arms were tanned. The braids her grandmother had tightly woven the evening of their departure reached the middle of her back.
Everything was just as they’d left it. The bright blue of the sky, the roads and homes. The bay in the distance, filled with sailboats. The beaches filled with people. The sound of a lawn mower. The salty air, the leaves on the trees.
As they approached the house she saw that the grass had grown nearly to her shoulders. The different varieties sprouted like wheat, like straw. It was tall enough to reach the mailbox, to conceal the shrubs on either side of the door. No longer green at that height, some sections reddish for lack of water. The pale specks at their tips seemed attached to nothing. Like clusters of tiny insects that didn’t move.
Looks like you’ve been away awhile, the taxi driver said.
He pulled into the driveway, helping her father to unload the suitcases from the trunk, bringing them up to the house.
Bela plunged into the grass as if it were the sea, her body briefly disappearing. Pushing her way through it, her arms spread wide. The feathery ends shimmered in the sunlight. Softly they scraped her face, the backs of her legs. She rang the doorbell, waiting for her mother to open the door.
When the door did not open, her father had to unlock it with his key. Inside the house they called out. There was no food in the refrigerator. Though the day was warm, the windows were shut and locked. The rooms dark, the curtains drawn, the soil of the houseplants dry.
At first Bela reacted as if to a challenge, a game. For it was the one game her mother had liked playing with her when she was little. Hiding behind the shower curtain, crouching in a closet, wedged behind a door. Never breaking down, never coughing after a few minutes elapsed and Bela could not find her, never once giving her a clue.
She walked like a detective through the house. Down the set of
half steps to the living room and kitchen, up the half steps to where the bedrooms were, where the hall was carpeted in the same tightly woven olive shade, unifying the rooms like a moss that spread from one doorway to the next.
She opened the doors and found certain things: bobby pins in the bathroom, a stapler on the dusty surface of her mother’s desk, a pair of scuffed sandals in the closet. A few books on the shelves.
Her father was sitting on the sofa, not seeing Bela as she approached, not even though she stood a few feet away. His face looked different, as if the bones had shifted. As if some of them weren’t there.
Baba?
On the table beside him was a sheet of paper. A letter.
He put out his hand, seeking hers.
I have not made this decision in haste. If anything, I have been thinking about it for too many years. You tried your best. I tried, too, but not as well. We tried to believe we would be companions to one another
.
Around Bela I am only reminded of all the ways I’ve failed her. In a way I wish she were young enough simply to forget me. Now she will come to hate me. Should she want to speak to me, or eventually to see me, I will do my best to arrange this
.
Tell her whatever you think will be least painful for her to hear, but I hope you will tell her the truth. That I have not died or disappeared but that I have moved to California, because a college has hired me to teach. Though it will be of no comfort to her, tell her that I will miss her
.
As for Udayan, as you know, for many years I wondered how and when we might tell her, what would be the right age, but it no longer matters. You are her father. As you pointed out long ago, and as I have long come to accept, you have proven yourself to be a better parent than I. I believe you are a better father than Udayan would have been. Given what I’m doing, it makes no sense for her connection with you to undergo any change
.
My address is uncertain, but you can reach me care of the university. I will not ask anything else of you; the money they offer will be enough. You are no doubt furious with me. I will understand if you do not wish to communicate. I hope that in time my absence will make things easier, not harder, for you and for Bela. I think it will. Good luck, Subhash, and good-bye. In exchange for all you have done for me, I leave Bela to you
.
The letter had been composed in Bengali, so there was no danger of Bela deciphering its contents. He conveyed a version of what it said, somehow managing to look into her confused face.
She was old enough to know how far away California was. When she asked when Gauri was coming back, he said he didn’t know.
He was prepared to calm her, to quell her shock. But it was she who comforted him in that moment, putting her arms around him, her strong slim body exuding its concern. Holding him tightly, as if he would float away from her otherwise. I’ll never go away from you, Baba, she said.
He knew the marriage, which had been their own choice, had become a forced arrangement day after day. But there had never been a conversation in which she expressed a wish to leave.
He’d sometimes thought, in the back of his mind, that after Bela went off to college, after she moved away from them, he and Gauri might begin to live apart. That a new phase could begin when Bela was more independent, when she needed them less.
He’d assumed, because of Bela, that Gauri would tolerate their marriage for now, as he’d been tolerating it. He never thought she would lack the patience to wait.
Of the three women in Subhash’s life—his mother, Gauri, Bela—there remained only one. His mother’s mind was now a wilderness. There was no shape to it any longer, no clearing. It had been overtaken, overgrown. She’d been converted permanently by Udayan’s death.
That wilderness was her only freedom. She was locked inside her home, taken out once each day. Deepa would prevent her from endangering herself, from embarrassing herself, from making further scenes.
But Gauri’s mind had saved her. It had enabled her to stand upright. It had cleared a path for her. It had prepared her to walk away.
What else had her mother left behind? On Bela’s right arm, just above the elbow, in a spot she had to twist her arm to see, a freckled constellation of her mother’s darker pigment, an almost solid patch at once discreet and conspicuous. A trace of the alternative complexion she might have had. On the ring finger of her right hand, just below the knuckle, was a single spot of this same shade.
In the house in Rhode Island, in her room, another remnant of her mother began to reveal itself: a shadow that briefly occupied a section of her wall, in one corner, reminding Bela of her mother’s profile. It was an association she noticed only after her mother was gone, and was unable thereafter to dispel.
In this shadow she saw the impression of her mother’s forehead, the slope of her nose. Her mouth and chin. Its source was unknown. Some section of branch, some overhang of the roof that refracted the light, she could not be sure.
Each day the image disappeared as the sun traveled around the house; each morning it returned to the place her mother had fled. She never saw it form or fade.
In this apparition, every morning, Bela recognized her mother, and felt visited by her. It was the sort of spontaneous association one might make while looking up at a passing cloud. But in this case never breaking apart, never changing into anything else.
The effort of being with her was gone. In its place was a fatherhood that was exclusive, a bond that would not have to be unraveled or revised. He had his daughter; alone he maintained the knowledge that she was not his. The reduced elements of his life sat uneasily, one beside the other. It was neither victory nor defeat.
She entered the seventh grade. She was learning Spanish, ecology, algebra. He hoped the new building, the new teachers and courses, the routine of moving from class to class, would distract her. Initially this seemed to be the case. He saw her organizing a three-ring binder, writing in the names of her subjects on the tabbed dividers, taping her schedule inside.
He rearranged his hours at work, no longer going in as early, making sure he was there in the mornings to fix her breakfast and see her off. He watched her setting out each day for the bus stop, a backpack strapped to her shoulders, heavy with textbooks.
One day he noticed that beneath her T-shirts, her sweaters, her chest was no longer flat. She’d shed some part of herself in Tollygunge. She was on the verge of a new type of prettiness. Blossoming, in spite of having been crushed.
She became thinner, quieter, keeping to herself on weekends. Behaving as Gauri used to do. She no longer sought him out, wanting to take walks together on Sundays. She said she had homework to do. This new mood settled upon her swiftly, without warning, like an autumn sky from which the light suddenly drained. He did not ask what was wrong, knowing what the answer would be.
She was establishing her existence apart from him. This was the real shock. He thought he would be the one to protect her, to reassure her. But he felt cast aside, indicted along with Gauri. He was afraid to exert his authority, his confidence as a father shaken now that he was alone.
She asked if she could change her bedroom and move into Gauri’s
study. Though this rattled him, he allowed it, telling himself that the impulse was natural. He helped her to set up the room, spending a day moving her things into it, hanging her clothes in the closet, retaping her posters to the walls. He put her lamp on Gauri’s desk, her books on Gauri’s shelves. But within a week she decided she preferred her old room and said she wanted to move back into it again.
She spoke to him only when necessary. Certain days, she did not speak to him at all. He wondered if she’d told her friends what had happened. But she did not seek his permission to see them, and none visited her at the house. He wondered if it would have been easier if they still lived close to campus, in an apartment complex that was filled with professors and graduate students and their families, and not in this isolated part of the town. He blamed himself for taking her to Tollygunge, for giving Gauri the opportunity to escape. He wondered what Bela had made of his mother, of the things she’d heard about Udayan. Though she never mentioned either of them, he wondered what she’d gleaned.
In December he turned forty-one. Normally Bela liked to celebrate his birthday. She’d get Gauri to give her a little money so that she could buy him some Old Spice from the drugstore, or a new pair of socks. Last year, she’d even baked and frosted a simple cake. This year, when he returned from work, he found her in her room as usual. After they finished eating dinner, there was no card, no small surprise. Her retreat from him, her new indifference, was too deep.
One day when he was at work, Bela’s guidance counselor called. Bela’s performance in middle school was concerning. According to her teachers she was unprepared, distracted. On the recommendation of her sixth-grade teacher she’d been placed in upper-level classes, but they were proving to be too great a challenge.
Put her in different classes, then.
But it wasn’t just that. She no longer seemed connected to the other students, the counselor said. In the cafeteria, at the lunch table, she sat alone. She hadn’t signed up for any clubs. After school she had been seen walking by herself.
She takes the bus home from school. She lets herself in and does her homework. She is always there when I return.
But he was told that she’d been seen, more than once, wandering through various parts of the town.
Bela has always liked going on walks with me. Perhaps it relaxes her, to get some fresh air.
There were roads where cars traveled quickly, the counselor said. A small highway not meant for pedestrians. Not the interstate, but a highway all the same. This was where Bela had last been spotted. Balancing on the guardrail beside the shoulder lane, her arms raised.
She’d accepted a ride home from a stranger who’d stopped to ask if she was all right. Fortunately, it had turned out to be a responsible person. Another parent at the school.
The counselor requested a meeting. She asked both Subhash and Gauri to attend.
He felt his stomach turning over on itself. Her mother no longer lives with us, he managed to say.
Since when?
Since summer.
You should have notified us, Mr. Mitra. You and your wife sat down with Bela before you separated? You prepared her?
He got off the phone. He wanted to call Gauri and scream at her. But he had no phone number, only the address at the university where she taught. He refused to write to her. Stubbornly, he wanted to keep the knowledge of Bela, of how Gauri’s absence was affecting her, to himself. You have left her with me and yet you have taken her away, he wanted to say.
He began to drive Bela, the same evening every week, to see a psychologist the guidance counselor had suggested, in the same suite of offices where his optometrist was. He’d resisted at first, saying he would talk to Bela, that there was no need. But the counselor had been firm.