Authors: Jhumpa Lahiri
When she was there she slept in her old bed. She rubbed camphoraceous salves onto her arms and legs, and soaked herself in the bathtub. She allowed him to cook for her, to take care of her, briefly, in this simple way. She watched old movies on television with him, and they went on walks around Ninigret Pond, or through the groves of rhododendrons in Hope Valley, as they used to do when she was small.
Still, she required a certain amount of time to herself, so that even during the course of her visits she would stay up late after he’d gone to bed, baking loaves of zucchini bread, or she would borrow his car and go for a drive, not inviting him to go with her. He knew, even when she returned, that part of her was closed off from him. That her sense of limits was fierce. And though she seemed to have found herself, he feared that she was still lost.
At the end of each visit she zipped her bag and left him, never saying when she’d be back. She disappeared, as Gauri had disappeared, her vocation taking precedence. Defining her, directing her course.
• • •
Over the years her work started merging with a certain ideology. He saw that there was a spirit of opposition to the things she did.
She was spending time in cities, in blighted sections of Baltimore and Detroit. She helped to convert abandoned properties into community gardens. She taught low-income families to grow vegetables in their backyards, so that they wouldn’t have to depend entirely on food banks. She dismissed Subhash when he praised her for these efforts. It was necessary, she said.
In Rhode Island, she went through his refrigerator, chiding him for the apples he continued to buy from supermarkets. She was opposed to eating food that had to be transported long distances. To the patenting of seeds. She talked to him about why people still died from famines, why farmers still went hungry. She blamed the unequal distribution of wealth.
She reproached Subhash for throwing out his vegetable scraps instead of composting them. Once, during a visit, she went to a hardware store to buy plywood and nails, building a bin in his backyard, showing him how to turn the pile as it cooled.
What we consume is what we support, she said, telling him he needed to do his part. She could be self-righteous, as Udayan had been.
He worried at times about her having such passionate ideals. Nevertheless, when she was gone, even though it was quicker and cheaper simply to go to the supermarket, he began to drive out to a farm stand on Saturday mornings, to get his fruits and vegetables, his eggs for the week.
The people who worked there, who weighed his items and placed them in his canvas bag, who added up what he owed with the stub of a pencil instead of at a cash register, reminded him of Bela. They brought back to mind her pragmatic simplicity. Thanks to Bela he grew conscious of eating according to what was in season, according to what was available. Things he’d taken for granted when he was a child.
Her dedication to bettering the world was something that would fulfill her, he imagined, for the rest of her life. Still, he was unable to set aside his concern. She had eschewed the stability he had worked
to provide. She’d forged a rootless path, one which seemed precarious to him. One which excluded him. But, as with Gauri, he’d let her go.
A loose confederation of friends, people she spoke of fondly but never introduced him to, provided her with an alternate form of family. She spoke of attending these friends’ weddings. She knitted sweaters for their children, or sewed them cloth dolls, mailing them off as surprises. If there was any other partner in her life, a romantic interest, he was unaware of it. It was always just the two of them, whenever she came.
He learned to accept her for who she was, to embrace the turn she’d taken. At times Bela’s second birth felt more miraculous than the first. It was a miracle to him that she had discovered meaning in her life. That she could be resilient, in the face of what Gauri had done. That in time she had renewed, if not fully restored, her affection for him.
And yet sometimes he felt threatened, convinced that it was Udayan’s inspiration; that Udayan’s influence was greater. Gauri had left them, and by now Subhash trusted her to stay away. But there were times Subhash believed that Udayan would come back, claiming his place, claiming Bela from the grave as his own.
In their bedroom, in Tollygunge, she combs out her hair before bed. The door bolt is fastened, the shutters closed. Udayan lies inside the mosquito netting, holding the shortwave on his chest. One leg folded, the ankle resting on the other knee. On the bedcover, beside him, he keeps a small metal ashtray, a box of matches, a packet of Wills.
It is 1971, the second year of their marriage. Almost two years since the party’s declaration. A year since the offices of
Deshabrati
and
Liberation
were raided. The issues Udayan continues to read are secretly published and circulated. He hides them under the mattress. Their content has been deemed seditious, and possessing them might now be used as evidence of a crime.
Ranjit Gupta is the new police commissioner, and the prisons are swelling. The police seize comrades from their homes, from their campuses, from safe houses. They confine them in lockups throughout the city, extracting confessions. Some emerge after a few days. Others are detained indefinitely. Cigarette butts are pressed into their backs, hot wax is poured into their ears. Metal rods pushed into their rectums. People who live near Calcutta’s prisons cannot sleep.
One day, within a few hours, four students are shot dead near College Street. One of them had nothing to do with the party. He’d been passing through the gates of the university, to attend a class.
Udayan turns off the radio. Do you regret your decision? he asks.
Which decision?
Becoming a wife?
She holds the comb still for a moment, glancing at his reflection in the mirror, unable to see his face clearly through the mosquito netting. No.
Becoming my wife?
She gets up and lifts the netting, sitting on the edge of the bed. She stretches out beside him.
No, she says once more.
They’ve arrested Sinha.
When?
A few days ago.
He says this without discouragement. As if it has nothing to do with him.
What does it mean?
It means either they’ll get him to talk, or they’ll kill him.
She sits up again. She starts braiding her hair for sleep.
But he draws her fingers away. He undrapes her sari, letting the material fall from her breasts, revealing the skin between her blouse and petticoat. He drapes her hair around her shoulders.
Leave it like this tonight.
The hair sheds into his hands, strands of it scattering onto the bed. Then the weight is gone, it turns short again, of a coarser texture, streaked with gray.
But in the dream Udayan remains a boy in his twenties. Three decades younger than Gauri is now, almost a decade younger than Bela. His wavy hair is swept back from his forehead, his waist narrow compared to his shoulders. But she is a woman of fifty-six, the years made present by virtue of the resilience they have taken away.
Udayan is blind to this disjuncture. He pulls her to him, unhooking her blouse, seeking pleasure from her dormant body, her neglected breasts. She tries to resist, telling him that he should have nothing to do with her. She tells him that she has married Subhash.
The information has no effect. He removes the rest of her clothes, the touch of her husband feeling forbidden. For she is coupled naked with a boy who appears as youthful as a son.
When she was married to Udayan, her recurring nightmare was that they had not met, that he had not come into her life. In those moments returned the conviction she’d had before knowing him, that she would live her life alone. She had hated those first disorienting moments after waking up in their bed in Tollygunge, inches away from him, still cloistered in an alternate world in which they had nothing to do with one another, even as he held her in his arms.
She’d known him only a few years. Only beginning to discover who he was. But in another way she had known him practically all her life. After his death began the internal knowledge that came from
remembering him, still trying to make sense of him. Of both missing and resenting him. Without that there would be nothing to haunt her. No grief.
She wonders what he might have looked like now. How he would have aged, the illnesses he might have suffered, the diseases to which he might have succumbed. She tries to imagine the flat stomach softening. Gray hairs on his chest.
In all her life, apart from when Subhash asked, and the day she told Otto Weiss, she has not spoken to a single person about what had happened to him. No one else knows to ask. What had happened in Calcutta in the last years of his life. What she’d seen from the terrace in Tollygunge. What she’d done for him, because he’d asked.
In California, in the beginning, it was the living that haunted her, not the dead. She used to fear that Bela or Subhash would materialize, sitting in a lecture hall, or walking into a meeting. She used to look up from the podium to scan the room on the first day of a new class, half expecting one of them to be occupying a chair.
She used to fear that they would find her on the sunny campus, on one of the sidewalks that led from one building to another. Confronting her, exposing her. Apprehending her, the way the police had apprehended Udayan.
But in twenty years no one had come. She had not been summoned back. She had been given what she’d demanded, granted exactly the freedom she had sought.
By the time Bela was ten, Gauri had been able, somehow, to imagine her doubled, at twenty. By then Bela had spent most of her time at school, she’d spent weekends sometimes at the home of a friend. She’d had no trouble spending two weeks at overnight Girl Scout camp in summer. She’d sat between Gauri and Subhash at dinner, put her plate into the sink when finished and then drifted upstairs.
Still, Gauri had waited until she’d been offered a job, until the occasion of Subhash’s return to Calcutta. She knew that the errors she’d made during the first years of Bela’s life were not things she could go back and fix. Her attempts kept collapsing, because the foundation
was not there. Over time this feeling ate away at her, exposing only her self-interest, her ineptitude. Her inability to abide herself.
She’d convinced herself that Subhash was her rival, and that she was in competition with him for Bela, a competition that felt insulting, unjust. But of course it had not been a competition, it had been her own squandering. Her own withdrawal, covert, ineluctable. With her own hand she’d painted herself into a corner, and then out of the picture altogether.
During that first flight across the country the plane was so bright she’d put on sunglasses. For much of it she had been able to see the ground, her forehead pressed against the oval window. Below her a river glinted like a crudely bent wire. Brown and gold earth was veined with crevasses. Precipices rose like islands, cracked from the sun’s heat.
There were black mountains on which nothing, no grass or trees, seemed to grow. Thin lines that twisted unpredictably, with tributaries arriving nowhere. Not rivers, but roads.
There was a geometric section, like a patterned carpet in shades of pink and green and tan. Composed of circular shapes in various sizes, close together, some slightly overlapping, some with a slice neatly missing. She learned from the person sitting next to her that they were crops. But to Gauri’s eyes they were like a pile of faceless coins.
They crossed the unpopulated desert, featureless and flat, and finally reached the opposite edge of America, and the low sprawl of Los Angeles, dense and ongoing. A place she knew would contain her, where she knew she would be conveniently lost. Within her was the guilt and the adrenaline unleashed by what she’d done, the sheer exhaustion of effort. As if, in order to escape Rhode Island, she’d walked every step of the way.
She entered a new dimension, a place where a fresh life was given to her. The three hours on her watch that separated her from Bela and Subhash were like a physical barrier, as massive as the mountains she’d flown over to get here. She’d done it, the worst thing that she could think of doing.
After her first job she’d moved briefly north, to teach in Santa Cruz, and then in San Francisco. But she had come back to Southern California to live out her life, in a small college town flanked by
biscuit-colored mountains on the other side of the freeway. A campus mainly of undergraduates, at a small but well-run school built after World War II.
It was impossible, at such an intimate institution, to lead an anonymous life. Her job was not only to teach students but to mentor them, to know them. She was expected to maintain generous office hours, to be approachable.
In the classroom she led groups of ten or twelve, introducing them to the great books of philosophy, to the unanswerable questions, to centuries of contention and debate. She taught a survey of political philosophy, a course on metaphysics, a senior seminar on the hermeneutics of time. She had established her areas of specialization, German Idealism and the philosophy of the Frankfurt School.
She broke her larger classes into discussion groups, sometimes inviting small batches of students to her apartment, making tea for them on Sunday afternoons. During office hours she spoke to them in her book-lined office in the soft light of a lamp she’d brought from home. She listened to them confess that they were not able to hand in a paper because of a personal crisis that was overwhelming their lives. If needed, she handed them a tissue from the box she kept in her drawer, telling them not to worry, to file for an incomplete, telling them that she understood.
The obligation to be open to others, to forge these alliances, had initially been an unexpected strain. She had wanted California to swallow her; she had wanted to disappear. But over time these temporary relationships came to fill a certain space. Her colleagues welcomed her. Her students admired her, were loyal. For three or four months they depended on her, they accompanied her, they grew fond of her, and then they went away. She came to miss the measured contact, once the classes ended. She became an alternate guardian to a few.