Authors: Jhumpa Lahiri
The crows woke her. She got out of bed and stepped onto the balcony that was off the bedroom. The milky dawn was opaque, as if she were high in the mountains and not at the base of a sprawling delta, the world’s largest delta, at the level of the sea.
The balcony was small, just enough room for a plastic stool, a small tub in which to soak dirty clothes. Not a place to pass the time.
The road was empty. The shopkeepers had not yet arrived to open their padlocks and raise their grates.
Water was being poured from buckets, the pavement swept clean. A few people were entering the grounds of the lake for their morning walk, striding purposefully alone, or in pairs. She saw a stall across the avenue, selling newspapers and fruit, bottled water and tea.
The street sweeper moved on to the next block. There was no one there now. She heard the sound of traffic, intensifying. Soon it would be constant. Soon nothing else would be heard.
She pressed herself against the railing of the balcony. It was high enough. She felt desperation rising up inside her. Also a clarity. An urge.
This was the place. This was the reason she’d come. The purpose of her return was to take her leave.
She imagined swinging one leg over, then the other. The sensation of nothing supporting her, of no longer resisting. It would take only a few seconds. Her time would end, it was as simple as that.
Forty years ago she hadn’t had the courage. Bela had been inside her. It wasn’t the emptiness, the husk of existence she felt now.
She thought of Kanu Sanyal, and of the woman who’d found him. A woman like Abha who saw to his needs, who came and went each day.
Who, coming back from a morning’s walk around the lake, feeling invigorated, might happen to see her fall? Who, realizing it was too late to save her, would shield his face, turning away?
She closed her eyes. Her mind was blank. It held only the present moment, nothing else. The moment that, until now, she’d never been able to see. She thought it would be like looking directly at the sun. But it did not deflect her.
Then one by one she released the things that fettered her. Lightening herself, the way she’d removed her bangles after Udayan was killed. What she’d seen from the terrace in Tollygunge. What she’d done to Bela. The image of a policeman passing beneath a window, holding his son by the hand.
A final image: Udayan standing beside her on the balcony in North Calcutta. Looking down at the street with her, getting to know her. Leaning forward, just inches between them, the future spread before them. The moment her life had begun a second time.
She leaned forward. She saw the spot where she would fall. She recalled the thrill of meeting him, of being adored by him. The moment of losing him. The fury of learning how he’d implicated her. The ache of bringing Bela into the world, after he was gone.
She opened her eyes. He was not there.
The morning had begun, another day. Mothers taking uniformed children to school, men and women hurrying to their jobs. The group of men who would sit playing cards all day had arranged themselves on a cot at the corner. The man who repaired sarods spread a bedsheet on
the pavement, putting out the broken instruments he would restring and tune that day.
Directly below Gauri a little produce stand had set up, selling tomatoes and eggplants from shallow baskets. Carrots more red than orange, foot-long string beans. The owner sat cross-legged under the shade of a soiled tarp, tending to customers who’d already begun to approach.
He placed the weights on the scale. They were striking the plates. One of the customers stepped away.
It was Abha, coming to cook breakfast, to brew the tea. She looked up at Gauri, holding up a bunch of bananas, a small packet of detergent, a loaf of bread. In her other hand was the newspaper.
She called up. What else for today?
That’s all, nothing else.
At the end of the week she would leave Kolkata and return to her life. When Abha rang the bell, Gauri left the balcony, and let her in.
Several months later, in California, a second letter arrived from Rhode Island.
This time it was in English. Light blue ink, the address heedlessly scrawled—how had the mailman deciphered it? No longer the neat penmanship Bela had learned in school. But here it was, legible enough to reach her, the closest she’d ever come to visiting.
Gauri studied the envelope, the illustration of a sailboat on the stamp. She sat at the table on her patio, and unfolded the page. There was a second sheet folded within it, a drawing Meghna had made and signed: a solid strip of blue sky, another strip of green ground, a colorful cat floating in the white space between.
The letter bore no salutation.
Meghna asks about you. Maybe she senses something, I don’t know. It’s too soon to tell her the story now. But one day I’ll explain to her who you are, and what you did. My daughter will know the truth about you. Nothing more, nothing less. If, then, she still wants to know you, and to have a relationship
with you, I’m willing to facilitate that. This is about her, not about me. You’ve already taught me not to need you, and I don’t need to know more about Udayan. But maybe, when Meghna is older, when she and I are both ready, we can try to meet again
.
On the western coast of Ireland, on the peninsula of Beara, a couple come for a week’s stay. They drive from Cork through the drowsy countryside, arriving late in the afternoon to a terrain that is mountainous, stark. The region’s valleys conceal evidence of prehistoric agriculture. Field patterns, stone-wall systems, buried under deposits of peat.
They have rented a house in one of the few towns. White stucco, the door and shutters painted blue. The entire town feels hardly larger than the enclave of homes in which, long ago, the man was raised.
The street is narrow and sloping, lined with blossoming fuchsia, parked cars. They are two doors from a pub, an arm’s reach from a yellow church that serves the residents of the village. From the post office, which is also a general store, they buy their provisions: milk and eggs, baked beans and sardines, a jar of blackberry jam. It is possible to sit outside the post office, at a table for two on the sidewalk, and order a pot of tea, fresh cream and butter, a plate of scones.
At night, after the long journey, a pint of beer at the pub, the man’s sleep is shallow. He wakes up in the bed where he lies with his new wife. She sleeps peacefully beside him, her head turned away, hands crossed below her chin.
He goes downstairs and opens the door at the back of the house. He steps barefoot onto the wooden porch that overlooks the garden, the pastures beyond, running down to the Kenmare Bay. His hair is thick, snowy white. His wife likes to run her fingers through it. He sees the wide beam of the moon’s light over the water, pouring down. He is overwhelmed by the sky’s clarity, the number of stars.
A strong wind courses over the land, mimicking the sound of the waves. He looks up, forgetting the names of the constellations he’d once taught his daughter. Burning gases, perceived on earth as cool points of light.
He returns to bed, still looking out the window at the sky, the stars. He is startled anew by the fact that their beauty, even in daytime, is
there. He is awash with the gratitude of his advancing years, for the timeless splendors of the earth, for the opportunity to behold them.
The following morning after breakfast they set out for their first day’s walk, on paths that edge the sea. They cross rough pastures where sheep and cows graze in silence against the horizon, fields of foxglove and ferns. The day is overcast but luminous, the clouds holding. The ocean washes up into stony inlets, lies calm beyond steep cliffs.
The man and woman take in the immensity of their surroundings. The stillness of the place. On this outcrop of land, after walking for hours, climbing up and down little ladders that separate one property from the next, they are less than halfway to where they thought they might end up on the map of the region they pause to study.
The trip is a honeymoon, the man’s first, though he was married once before. A few days ago, across the same ocean, in America, the couple stood to exchange their vows on the grounds of a small red-and-white church in Rhode Island that the man has admired for many years, its spire rising over Narragansett Bay.
The couple’s union was witnessed by a group of friends and family. The man has gained two sons, a second daughter in addition to his own. There are seven grandchildren. Flung far apart, occasionally thrust together, they will know each other in a limited way. Still, it is a point of origin, a looking forward late in life.
The years the couple have together are a shared conclusion to lives separately built, separately lived. There is no use wondering what might have happened if the man had met her in his forties, or in his twenties. He would not have married her then.
The next day when they step out of the house they encounter a group bidding an unknown villager farewell, mourners in dark clothing spreading down the sloping street. For a moment it is as if they, too, are part of the funeral. There is no sense of its boundaries, where it begins or ends, whom it grieves. Then they pass, respectfully, out of its shadow.
If their grandchildren were along, they would take them by cable car to see the dolphins and whales that swim off Dursey Island. Instead they devote their days to walking. Hand in hand, wearing bulky sweaters they’ve bought to ward off the slight autumn chill.
They stop when they tire, to admire the views, to sit and eat biscuits, pieces of cheese. In tide pools with rocks that form chambers and grottoes, they discover heaps of flat gray pebbles, perforated shells that have worn away to hard white rings. The man gathers a handful, thinking they will make a nice necklace for his granddaughter in Rhode Island, strung through a bit of yarn. He imagines placing it on her head, so that it adorns her like a crown.
They come across certain stones that are of interest, that they follow signs to see. Crude pillars tucked away off minor roads. An Ogham stone, inscribed with names, in a farmer’s field. A solitary boulder, said to be the incarnation of a woman with powers of enchantment, aslant on a bluff.
Late one day they trek through a soggy field to reach a group of stones set into a valley, appearing random but deliberately arrayed, facing one another on windswept land. Some are shorter than the couple’s heights, others taller. Wider at the bottom, appearing whittled at the top. Lacking grace but sacred, worn white in spots with age. One cannot imagine moving them, but their positions have been carefully considered, each stone laboriously transported, grouped by human hands.
His wife explains that they date to the Bronze Age, that their purpose was religious, perhaps funerary or commemorative. How some of them may have been positioned in relation to the earth’s motion around the sun. For centuries people have traveled long distances to touch them, to stand before them and receive their blessing. Some leave a trace of themselves behind.
He sees hair bands, frail chains, lockets, heaped at the base of certain stones. Twigs tied together, bits of thread. Personal offerings, neglected trinkets of faith. He knows nothing of this ancient archeology, these enduring beliefs. So much of the world he is still ignorant of.
He notices clumps of taller growth sprouting throughout the green field, like marsh grass at low tide. He sees the rocky brown faces of the surrounding hills, the bay’s calm surface below.
The man thinks of another stone in a distant country clear in his mind. A simple tablet, like a road marker, bearing his brother’s name. Its surroundings slowly sullied, the watery place where it once stood now indifferent to the seasons, converted to more practical means. For
years his mother had been a faithful pilgrim to that shrine, offering flowers to her son, until she was unable to visit, until even that form of tribute was denied.
On ancient ground that is new to him, in a secluded ruin’s open embrace, his shoes are caked with mud. He looks up and sees the brooding gray sky stretching over the earth. The ceaseless movement of the atmosphere, low clouds drifting for miles.
Amid the gray, an incongruous band of daytime blue. To the west, a pink sun already begins its descent. The effect is of three isolated aspects, distinct phases of the day. All of it, strewn across the horizon, is contained in his vision.
Udayan is beside him. They are walking together in Tollygunge, across the lowland, over the hyacinth leaves. They carry a putting iron, some golf balls in their hands.
In Ireland, too, the ground is drenched, uneven. He takes it in a final time, knowing he will never visit this place again. He walks toward another stone and stumbles, reaching out to it, steadying himself. A marker, toward the end of his journey, of what is given, what is taken away.
He didn’t hear the van entering the enclave. He only saw it approach. He happened to be on the roof. The house was tall enough now. As long as he kept to the back no one else could see him.
It was just as well to stay away from the parapet. Since the explosion the exterior world was no longer stable. The soles of his feet no longer anchored him. The ground below now beckoned, now menaced, if he happened to look down.
He saw that there were too many of them; that there were three paramilitary in the courtyard alone. He glanced at the neighboring rooftops. In sections of North Calcutta it might have been possible to leap, to span the gap between buildings. But the vertigo made it impossible; he could no longer gauge simple distances. In any case, in Tollygunge, the homes were built too far apart.
Before his father went to unlock the gate, to let them in, he ran back down the stairwell. Hunching over as he made the turns, careful not to be spotted through the terrace grille. Through the new part of the house and into the old. There was a door at the back of the room he and Subhash had once shared, narrow double doors leading to the garden.