Authors: Jhumpa Lahiri
Downstairs on the kitchen counter, among the bowls filled with fruit, the phone book was still open, turned to the page that listed the taxi company that served the town.
• • •
The facts of her paternity had changed. Two instead of one. Just as she was now in pregnancy, fused with a being she could not see or know.
This unknown person maturing inside her was the only being with whom Bela felt any connection as she traveled away from Rhode Island to calm herself, to take in what she’d been told. It was the only part of her that felt faithful, familiar. As she stared out the window of a Peter Pan bus at the scenery of her childhood, she recognized nothing.
She’d been lied to all her life. But the lie refused to accommodate the truth. Her father remained her father, even as he’d told her he wasn’t. As he’d told her that Udayan was.
She could not blame her father for not telling her until now. Her own child might blame her, someday, for a similar reason.
Here was an explanation for why her mother had gone. Why, when Bela looked back, she remembered spending time with either one parent or the other, but so seldom with both at the same time.
Here was the source of the compunction that had always been in her, of being unable to bring pleasure to her mother. Of feeling unique among children, being a child who was incapable of this.
Around Bela her mother had never pretended. She had transmitted an unhappiness that was steady, an ambient signal that was fixed. It was transmitted without words. And yet Bela was aware of it, as one is aware of a mountain. Immovable, insurmountable.
Now there was a third parent, pointed out to her like a new star her father would teach her to identify in the night sky. Something that had been there all along, contributing a unique point of light. That was dead but newly alive to her. That had both made her and made no difference.
She remembered vaguely the portrait in Tollygunge, on the wall above a stack of receipts. A smiling face, a dirty frame of pale wood. A young man her grandmother referred to as her father, until her father told her it was a portrait of Udayan. She no longer remembered the face in detail. After being told it was not her father, she’d stopped paying attention to it.
She understood now why her mother had not returned with them that summer to Calcutta. Why she’d never gone back at any other time, and why she’d never talked about her life there, when Bela had asked.
When her mother had left Rhode Island, she’d taken her unhappiness
with her, no longer sharing it, leaving Bela with a lack of access to that signal instead. What had seemed impossible had taken place. The mountain was gone.
In its place was a heavy stone, like certain stones embedded deep in the sand when she dug on the beach. Too large to unearth, its surface partly visible, but its contours unknown.
She taught herself to ignore it, to walk away. And yet the hole remained her hollow point of origin, the cold crosshairs of her existence.
She returned to it now. At last the sand gave way, and she was able to pry out what was buried, to raise it from its enclosure. For a moment she felt its dimensions, its heft in her hands. She felt the strain it sent through her body, before hurling it once and for all into the sea.
For a few days Subhash heard nothing. He tried her cell phone, not surprised when she didn’t answer. He had no idea where she’d gone. There was no one whom he might have asked. He wondered if she had gone to California, to track Gauri down, to hear her side of it. He began to convince himself that this must have been what she’d done.
The next time he spoke to Elise he said that Bela’s plans for visiting had changed. Many times he’d wanted to explain to Elise that he was not really Bela’s father—that this was part of the reason Gauri had left. He’d felt that she would have understood. But out of loyalty to Bela he’d said nothing. It was Bela who deserved to know first.
He slept and slept, waking only briefly, never refreshed. When he was no longer able to rest he remained in bed. He remembered the isolation of being at sea, the silence when the captain would cut the engine. Though he had unburdened himself, his head felt heavy, there was a discomfort that would not go away. For a few days he called in sick to the lab.
He wondered if he should retire. If he should sell the house and move far away. He wanted to call Gauri, to lash out at her, to tell her she had defeated him utterly. That he had surrendered the truth, that from now on Bela would always see him for what he was. But really he only wanted Bela somehow to forgive him.
At night, in spite of the sultry days, the wind gusted, the cool air
chilling him through the open windows, the season threatening to slip away though it had only just arrived.
At the end of the week, the phone rang. His stomach felt vacant, he had eaten almost nothing. Only tea now and again, and the softening fruit Bela had brought. The stubble was stiff against his face. He was in bed, thinking it might be Elise, checking in on him.
He thought of letting it ring, but picked up at the last minute, wanting to hear her voice, needing now to tell her what had happened, to seek her advice.
But it was Bela.
Why aren’t you at work? she asked him.
Quickly he sat up. It was as if she’d stepped into the room and found him that way, disheveled, desperate.
I am— I decided to take the day off.
I saw pilot whales. They were so close to the shore I could have swum out to touch them. Is that normal at this time of year?
He could not think straight enough to fully grasp what she was saying, never mind respond. As relieved as he was to hear from her, he was afraid that he would say the wrong thing, and that she would hang up.
Where are you? Where did you go?
She’d taken a taxi to Providence, a bus to Cape Cod. She knew a friend in Truro to stay with, a friend from high school, married now, who’d spent summers there, who’d moved there permanently some years ago. The beaches were beautiful, she said. She hadn’t been up that way since she was a teenager.
He remembered taking her to the Cape when she was little. Late spring, the first year that Gauri was gone. When they’d walked together along the bay, she’d run ahead of him, excited to look at something.
He caught up to her and saw that it was a beached dolphin, its eye sockets hollow, still seeming to grin. He’d taken out his camera to photograph it. Lowering the camera from his face, he realized Bela was crying. Silently at first, then audibly when he put his arms around her.
How long will you be there? he asked her now.
I’m getting a ride back to Hyannis. There’s a bus from there that gets in tonight at eight.
Gets in where?
Providence.
For a moment he was silent, as she was. She was calling from her cell phone; he couldn’t tell if she was still there, or if the line had gone dead.
Baba?
He had heard her. He’d heard her still calling him this. Can you pick me up, he heard her say, or should I get a cab?
In the days that followed she thanked him for telling her about Udayan—it was by name that she referred to him—saying that it helped to explain certain things. She’d heard what was necessary; she didn’t need him to tell her anything more.
In a way, she said, it helped her to feel closer to the child she was having. It was a detail, an element of life that, for different reasons, they would share.
In autumn her daughter was born. After she became a mother she told Subhash it made her love him more, knowing what he’d done.
On her patio in California, Gauri has her toast and fruit and tea. She turns on her laptop, raises her spectacles to her face. She reads the day’s headlines. But they might be from any day. A click can take her from breaking news to articles archived years ago. At every moment the past is there, appended to the present. It’s a version of Bela’s definition, in childhood, of yesterday.
Once in a while Gauri notices a piece in American papers mentioning Naxalite activity in various parts of India, or in Nepal. Short pieces about Maoist insurgents blowing up trucks and trains. Setting fire to police camps. Fighting corporations in India. Plotting to overthrow the government all over again.
She skims these articles only sometimes, not wanting to know too much. Some of them refer back to Naxalbari, providing context for those who have never heard of it. They offer links to time lines of the movement, which summarize the events of those half-dozen years as a doomed critique of postcolonial Bengal. And yet the failure remains an example, the embers managing to ignite another generation.
Who were they? Was this new movement sweeping up young men like Udayan and his friends? Would it be as rudderless, as harrowing? Would Calcutta ever experience that terror again? Something tells her no.
Too much is within her grasp now. First at the computers she would log on to at the library, replaced by the wireless connection she has at home. Glowing screens, increasingly foldable, portable, companionable, anticipating any possible question the human brain might generate. Containing more information than anyone has need for.
So much of it, she observes, is designed to eliminate mystery, to minimize surprise. There are maps to indicate where one is going, images of hotel rooms one might stay in. The delayed status of a plane one need not rush to board. Links to people, famous or anonymous—people one might reunite with, or fall in love with, or
hire for a job. A revolutionary concept, already taken for granted. Citizens of the Internet dwell free from hierarchy. There is room for everyone, given that there are no spatial constraints. Udayan might have appreciated this.
Some of her students no longer go to the library. They don’t turn to a dog-eared dictionary to look up a word. In a way they don’t have to attend her class. Her laptop contains a lifetime of learning, along with what she will not live to learn. Summaries of philosophical arguments in online encyclopedias, explanations of modes of thinking that took her years to comprehend. Links to chapters in books she’d once had to hunt down and photocopy, or request from other libraries. Lengthy articles, reviews, assertions, refutations, it’s all there.
She remembers standing on a balcony in North Calcutta, talking to Udayan. The library at Presidency where he would come to find her sometimes, sitting at a table barricaded with books, a giant fan rustling the papers. He’d stand behind her, saying nothing, waiting for her to turn around, to sense that he was there.
She remembers reading smuggled books in Calcutta, the particular stall to the left of the Sanskrit College that carried what Udayan liked, that went out of its way for him. Ordering foreign volumes from publishers. She remembers the incremental path of her education, hours sifting through card catalogues, at Presidency, then in Rhode Island, even early on in California. Writing down call numbers with short pencils, searching up and down aisles that would turn dark when the timers on the lights expired. She recalls, visually, certain passages in the books she’d read. Which side of the book, where on the page. She remembers the strap of the tote bag, digging into her shoulder as she walked home.
She cannot avoid it; she is a member of the virtual world, an aspect of her visible on the new sea that has come to dominate the earth’s surface. There is a profile of her on the college website, a relatively recent photograph. A list of the courses she teaches, a trail marking her accomplishments. Degrees, publications, conferences, fellowships. Her e-mail, and her mailing address at the department, should anyone want to send her something or get in touch.
A little more digging would yield footage with a small group of other academics, historians and sociologists, participating in a recent
panel discussion at Berkeley. There she is walking into the room, taking her place at the table, behind a placard bearing her name. Patiently listening, reviewing her index cards, as each member of the panel clears his throat, leans forward, and slowly comes to his point.
Too much information, and yet, in her case, not enough. In a world of diminishing mystery, the unknown persists.
She’s found Subhash, still working at the same lab in Rhode Island. She discovers PDF files of articles he coauthors, his name mentioned in connection to an oceanography symposium he attends.
Only once, unable to help herself, she’d searched for Udayan. But as she might have predicted, in spite of all the information and opinion, there was no trace of his participation, no mention of the things he’d done. There had been hundreds like him in Calcutta at that time, foot soldiers who’d been anonymously dedicated, anonymously executed. His contribution had not been noted, his punishment was standard for the time.
Like Udayan, Bela is nowhere. Her name in the search engine leads to nothing. No university, no company, no social media site yields any information. Gauri finds no image, no trace of her.
It doesn’t mean anything, necessarily. Only that Bela doesn’t exist in the dimension where Gauri might learn something about her. Only that she refuses Gauri that access. Gauri wonders if the refusal is intentional. If it is a conscious choice on Bela’s part, to ensure that no contact is made.
Only her brother, Manash, has sought her out, reconnecting to her via e-mail. Asking after her, asking if she would ever return to Calcutta to visit him. She’s told him she’s separated from Subhash. But she’s invented a vague and predictable destiny for Bela, saying she’d grown up, that she’d gotten married.
Every so often Gauri continues to search for her, continues to fail. She knows that it’s up to her, that Bela won’t come to her otherwise. And she doesn’t dare ask Subhash. The effort flops like a just-caught fish inside her. A brief burst of possibility as the name is typed onto the screen, as she clicks to activate the search. Hope thrashing in the process of turning cold.
• • •
Dipankar Biswas was a name new to her in-box, but stored in memory. A Bengali student of hers from many years ago. He was born the same year as Bela, raised in a suburb of Houston. She’d felt generous toward him. They’d exchanged a few words in Bengali. She’d regarded him, for the years he was her student, as a gauge for how Bela might be.