Unaccustomed Earth Read Free

Jersey, her father’s company, the schools Ruma and Romi had gone through, did not exist here. It was seven months since she’d last seen her father. In the process of selling and packing up their old apartment, moving and settling into the new house, and her father’s various trips, over half a year had gone by.
    Akash got up and trailed behind her, and together they watched as her father opened the trunk of the car, lifting out a small black suitcase with wheels. He was wearing a baseball cap that said POMPEII , brown cotton pants and a sky-blue polo shirt, and a pair of white leather sneakers. She was struck by the degree to which her father resembled an American in his old age. With his gray hair and fair skin he could have been practically from anywhere. It was her mother who would have stuck out in this wet Northern landscape, in her brightly colored saris, her dime-sized maroon bindi, her jewels.
    He began to pull the suitcase along the driveway, but because of the inconvenience of the gravel under the wheels, he picked it up by the handle and walked across the grass up to the house. She saw that it was a slight struggle for him, and she wished Adam were there to help.
    “Akash, is that you?” her father called out in mock bewilderment, in English. “So big you have become.” By now Akash had forgotten the little Bengali Ruma had taught him when he was little. After he started speaking in full sentences English had taken over, and she lacked the discipline to stick to Bengali. Besides, it was one thing to coo at him in Bengali, to point to this or that and tell him the corresponding words. But it was another to be authoritative; Bengali had never been a language in which she felt like an adult. Her own Bengali was slipping from her. Her mother had been strict, so much so that Ruma had never spoken to her in English. But her father didn’t mind. On the rare occasions Ruma used Bengali anymore, when an aunt or uncle called from Calcutta to wish her a Happy Bijoya or Akash a Happy Birthday, she tripped over words, mangled tenses. And yet it was the language she had spoken exclusively in the first years of her life.
    “How old now? Three? Or is it three hundred?” her father asked.
    Akash did not respond, behaving as if her father did not exist. “Mommy, I’m thirsty,” he said.
    “In a minute, Akash.”
    Her father seemed the same to her. For a man of seventy, the skin of his hands and face was firm and clear. He had not lost weight and the hair on his head was plentiful, more so, she feared, than her own after Akash’s birth, when it had fallen out in clumps on her pillow each night, the crushed strands the first thing she noticed every morning. Her doctor assured her it would grow back, but her bathtub was still filled with shampoos that promised to stimulate scalp growth, plump the shafts. Her father looked well rested, another quality Ruma did not possess these days. She’d taken to applying concealer below her eyes, even when she had no plans to leave the house. In addition she’d been putting on weight. With Akash she’d lost weight in her first trimester, but this time, at just twelve weeks, she was already ten pounds heavier. She decided that it must have been the food she found herself always finishing off of Akash’s plate and the fact that now she had to drive everywhere instead of walk. She’d already ordered pants and skirts with elastic waistbands from catalogues, and there was a solidity to her face that upset her each time she looked in the mirror.
    “Akash, please say hello to Dadu,” she said, giving him a gentle push behind the shoulder. She kissed her father on the cheek. “How long did it take you to get here? Was there traffic?”
    “Not so much. Your home is twenty-two miles from the airport.” Her father always made it his business to know the distances he traveled, large and small. Even before MapQuest existed, he knew the exact distance from their house to his office, and