Authors: Jhumpa Lahiri
Somehow she and Lorna had remained on friendly terms, making time for a coffee if they happened to run into one another at a conference. Gauri saw how the relationship had shifted: how she had reverted from lover to colleague, nothing more.
It was not unlike the way her role had changed at so many other points in the past. From wife to widow, from sister-in-law to wife, from mother to childless woman. With the exception of losing Udayan, she had actively chosen to take these steps.
She had married Subhash, she had abandoned Bela. She had generated alternative versions of herself, she had insisted at brutal cost on these conversions. Layering her life only to strip it bare, only to be alone in the end.
Now even Lorna was over a decade ago, long enough to break away from the stem of her existence. Receding, fading, alongside the other disparate elements of her past.
Her life had been pared down to its solitary components, its self-reliant code. Her uniform of black slacks and tunics, the books and the laptop computer she needed to do her job. The car she used to get from one place to another.
Her hair was still cut short, a monkish style with a middle part. She wore oval glasses on a chain around her neck. There was a bluish tinge now to the skin below her eyes. Her voice raspy from years of lecturing. Her skin drier after absorbing this stronger, southern sun.
Her work habits were no longer nocturnal; on her own, she followed ancient patterns and cues, in bed by ten, upright at dawn. She allowed herself few frivolities. A group of plants she cultivated in pots on her patio. Jasmine that opened up in the evenings, flame-colored hibiscus, creamy gardenia with glossy leaves.
On the patio, with its wooden trellis overhead, terra-cotta tiles underfoot, she liked to sit after a long day in her study, to drink a cup of tea and sort through her bills, to feel the afternoon light on her face. To look over a sheaf of printed pages she was working on, and sometimes to eat dinner.
In her car, when she tired of public radio, she listened to a biography or some other commercially published book she’d meant but never made time to read. But even these she borrowed from the library.
Beyond these elements she did not tend to indulge herself. Her existence all these years, after Udayan, without Bela or Subhash, remained indulgence enough. Udayan’s life had been taken in an instant. But hers had gone on.
Her body, in spite of its years, was as stubbornly intact as the muddy green teapot, shaped vaguely like an Aladdin’s lamp, a wedge of cork in its lid, that she’d bought for a dollar at a yard sale in Rhode Island. It still kept her company during her hours of writing. It had survived her flight to California, wrapped up in a cardigan, and served her still.
One day, pausing to look through one of the catalogues that cluttered her mailbox, she came across a picture of a small round wooden table meant for outdoors. It wasn’t essential, and yet she picked up the phone and placed the order, having meant for too long to replace the dirty glass-topped wicker table that had been on the patio for years, covered by a series of printed cloths.
A week or so after she’d placed the order, a delivery truck stopped in front of her building. She expected a flat heavy box, a day spent poring over an instruction manual, with a bag of nuts and bolts that she would have to tighten herself. Instead the table was delivered to her fully assembled, carried off the truck and into her home by two men.
She told them where to put it, signed a sheet of paper to acknowledge
its arrival, tipped them, and sat down. She put her hands flat on the table and smelled the strong odor of the wood. Of teak.
She put her face to the table’s surface, inhaling deeply, her cheek against the slats. It was the smell of the bedroom furniture she’d left behind in Tollygunge, the wardrobe and dressing table, the bed with slim posts on which she and Udayan had created Bela. Ordered from an American catalogue, delivered off a truck, it had come to her again.
The aroma of the table wasn’t as powerful, as constant, as that of the other furniture had been. But now and then it rose up as she sat on the patio, enhanced perhaps by the sun’s warmth, or circulated by the Santa Ana winds. A concentrated peppery smell that reduced all distance, all time.
What had Subhash told Bela, to keep her away? Nothing, probably. It was the just punishment for her crime. She understood now what it meant to walk away from her child. It had been her own act of killing. A connection she had severed, resulting in a death that applied only to the two of them. It was a crime worse than anything Udayan had committed.
She had never written to Bela. Never dared reach out, to reassure her. What reassurance was hers to give? What she’d done could never be undone. Her silence, her absence, seemed decent in comparison.
As for Subhash, he had done nothing wrong. He had let her go, never bothering her, never blaming her, at least to her face. She hoped he’d found some happiness. He deserved it, not she.
Though their marriage had not been a solution, it had taken her away from Tollygunge. He had brought her to America and then, like an animal briefly observed, briefly caged, released her. He had protected her, he had attempted to love her. Every time she had to open a new jar of jam, she resorted to the trick he’d taught her, of banging the edge of the lid three or four times with a spoon, to break the seal.
In the new millennium a path was completed, an easement of a rail spur that had once taken passengers from Kingston station to Narragansett Pier.
The course was moderate, through forest cover, skirting a river, some smaller creeks. There were benches here and there to rest on if one was tired, and at longer intervals a sign, indicating his position on the trail, perhaps also indicating a native species of tree.
On Sunday mornings, after breakfast, he drove to the wooden train station where he had first arrived as a student, where he went on occasion to greet Bela on the platform, when she visited. Many years ago there had been a fire, but in time the station was restored and a high-speed rail put in. He parked the car and began walking, alone, through the sheltered innards of the town. At times, even now, Subhash could not fathom the extremes of his life: coming from a city with so little space for humans, arriving in a place where there was still so much of it to spare.
He kept moving for at least an hour, sometimes a little more, for it was possible to travel six miles and back. It was the town he had lived in for more than half his life, to which he had been quietly faithful, and yet the new path altered his relationship to it, turning it foreign again. He walked past the backs of certain neighborhoods, alongside fields where schoolchildren played sports, over a wooden footbridge. Past a bog filled with cattails, past a former textile mill.
He preferred shade these days to the coastline. He’d been born and bred in Calcutta, and yet the sun in Rhode Island, bearing down through the depleted ozone, now felt stronger than the sun of his upbringing. Merciless against his skin, striking him, especially in summer, in a way he could no longer endure. His tawny skin never burned, but the sensation of sunlight overwhelmed him. He sometimes took it personally, the enduring blaze of that distant star.
He passed a swamp at the start of his walks, where birds and animals came to nest, where red maple and cedar grew from mossy mounds. It
was the largest forested wetland in southern New England. It had once been a glacial depression, and was still bordered by a moraine.
According to signs he stopped to read, it had also once been the site of a battle. Growing curious, he turned on his computer one day at home, and began learning, on the Internet, details of an atrocity.
On a small island in the middle of the swamp the local Narragansett tribe had built a fort. In a camp of wigwams, behind a palisade of sticks, they had housed themselves, believing their refuge was impregnable. But in the winter of 1675, when the marsh ground was frozen, and the trees were bare, the fort was attacked by a colonial militia. Three hundred people were burned alive. Many who’d escaped died of disease and starvation.
Somewhere, he read, there was a marker and a granite shaft that commemorated the battle. But Subhash got lost the day he set out through the swamp to find it. When he was younger he had loved nothing more than to wander like this, with Bela. He’d been compelled, back then, to follow crude directions, unmarked trails through woods, isolated with her, discovering blueberry bushes, secluded ponds in which to swim. But he had lost that confidence, that intrepid sense of direction. He felt only aware now that he was alone, that he was over sixty years old, and that he did not know where he stood.
One Sunday, lost in his thoughts, he was surprised to see a helmeted man with a familiar face approaching on his bike, on the other side of the path, coasting to a stop.
Jesus, Subhash. Didn’t I teach you to always keep your eyes on the road?
Sitting astride a thin-framed ten-speed was Richard, his apartment mate from decades ago, shaking his head, smiling at him. What the hell are you still doing here?
I never left.
I thought you’d gone back to India after you finished. I didn’t even think to look you up.
There was a bench nearby, and here they sat and talked. The hair under Richard’s helmet was no longer dark, a patch of it gone at the back, but what he had he still wore in a ponytail. He’d put on some
weight, but Subhash recalled the handsome, wiry graduate student he’d first met, who’d reminded him in some ways of Udayan. A time before either of them had married, when they had lived with one another, and driven together to buy groceries, and shared their meals.
Richard was married, a grandfather. After leaving Rhode Island he’d missed it, always intending someday to retire here. A year ago he and his wife, Claire, had sold their house in East Lansing and bought a cottage in Saunderstown, not far from Subhash.
He’d founded a center for nonviolent studies at a university in the Midwest and still served as a member of its board, though he’d managed never to wear a tie a day in his life. He was full of sundry plans—another book he was in the middle of writing, a kitchen he was trying to remodel himself, a political blog he maintained. A trip to Southeast Asia, to Phnom Penh and Ho Chi Minh City, he was planning with Claire.
Can you believe it? he said. After all that, I’m finally going to Vietnam.
Sitting beside him, Subhash delivered the sparse details of his own life. A wife from whom he was estranged, a daughter who had grown up and moved away. A job at the same coastal research lab he’d been with nearly thirty years. Some consulting work on oil spills from time to time, or for the town’s Department of Public Works. He was without a family, just as he’d been when he’d known Richard. But he was alone in a different way.
Still working full-time?
For as long as they let me.
Still driving my car?
Not since Nixon resigned and the transmission died.
I always tell Claire about that curry you used to make. How you’d put onions in the blender.
Richard had traveled to India, to New Delhi and to visit Gandhi’s birthplace in Gujarat. He’d wanted to include Calcutta, but hadn’t made it there. Maybe on the way back from Vietnam, he said.
The next question came innocently. That brother of yours, the Naxalite. What ever happened to him?
• • •
He and Richard exchanged phone numbers and e-mails. They met up for a walk along the paths, or in town for a beer. Twice they’d gone fishing, casting their rods off the rocks at Point Judith, hooking sea robins, throwing back what they caught.
Subhash would promise, whenever they parted, that the next time they’d meet would be at Subhash’s home, that Claire would come, and that Subhash would prepare a curry. He thought of planning it for one of Bela’s visits, so that Richard could meet her. But this hadn’t yet happened. The friendship remained a loose but easy bond between them, just as it had always been.
By now he was used to Richard’s mass e-mails, announcing lectures and rallies, quoting statistics about the cost of the Iraq War, directing him to a link to Richard’s blog. He was used to the number and Richard’s last name, Grifalconi, saluting him from time to time in the little window of his telephone.
He saw it one weekend morning as he watched a program on CNN. He turned down the volume with the remote. He did not expect the voice to belong to Richard’s wife, Claire, a woman he had not yet spoken to or met, telling him Richard had died a few days ago. A blood clot in his leg had traveled to his lungs the day after a bike ride Richard and Claire had taken together, out to Rome Point.
Subhash put down the phone. He shut off the television. His eyes were distracted by a movement he saw through the window of his living room. It was the restlessness of birds, rearranging themselves.
He walked to the window to have a better look. At the top of a tree in his yard, a group of them, small and loud and dark, were frantically coming and going. Taking, in winter, what nourishment the tree still had to give. There was a determined fury to their movements. An act of survival that now offended him.
For the first time in his life Subhash entered a funeral home, kneeled down and regarded a body laid out in a coffin, neatly dressed. He observed the lack of life in Richard’s face, the facile betrayal of it, as if an expert had carved an effigy out of wax. He remembered his last glimpse of his mother, covered by a shroud.
After the service he drove to the reception at Richard’s home, not
so different from other American receptions he’d attended in his life. There was a long table with food laid out, platters of cheese and salads. People dressed in dark colors were drinking glasses of wine, carving slices from a ham.
Claire stood at one end of the room, flanked by their children, their grandchildren, thanking people for coming, shaking their hands. Saying there had been no sign of distress until Richard complained that he felt short of breath. The next morning, he’d shaken Claire awake, pointing at the telephone, unable to speak. He’d died in the ambulance, Claire following in their car behind.