Unaccustomed Earth Read Free Page B

he was fond of.
    “Hey, don’t walk on my bed with your shoes on,” her father said suddenly to Akash, who had gotten onto the bed and was walking with large, deliberate steps around the bedcover.
    “Peanut, get off the bed.”
    For a moment Akash continued exactly as he was doing, ignoring them. Then he stopped, looking suspiciously at his grandfather. “Why?”
    Before Ruma could explain, her father said, “Because I will have nightmares.”
    Akash dropped his head. Quickly, to Ruma’s surprise, he slithered onto the floor, briefly crawling as if he were a baby again.
    They went back upstairs, to the kitchen. It was the room Ruma was most proud of, with its soapstone counters and cherry cupboards. Showing it off to her father, she felt self-conscious of her successful life with Adam, and at the same time she felt a quiet slap of rejection, gathering, from his continued silence, that none of it impressed him.
    “Adam planted all this?” her father asked, taking in the garden that was visible through the kitchen window, mentioning Adam for the first time.
    “No. It was all here.”
    “Your delphiniums need watering.”
    “Which are they?” she asked, embarrassed that she did not know the names of the plants in her own backyard.
    He pointed. “The tall purple ones.”
    It occurred to her that her father missed gardening. For as long as she could remember it had been his passion, working outdoors in the summers as soon as he came home from the office, staying out until it grew dark, subjecting himself to bug bites and rashes. It was something he’d done alone; neither Romi nor Ruma had ever been interested in helping, and their father never offered to include them. Her mother would complain, having to keep dinner waiting until nine at night. “Go ahead and eat,” Ruma would say, but her mother, trained all her life to serve her husband first, would never consider such a thing. In addition to tomatoes and eggplant and zucchini, her father had grown expert over the years at cultivating the things her mother liked to cook with—bitter melon and chili peppers and delicate strains of spinach. Oblivious to her mother’s needs in other ways, he had toiled in unfriendly soil, coaxing such things from the ground.
    He glanced at the gleaming six-burner stove with its thick red knobs and then, without asking, began to open one of the cupboards.
    “What are you looking for?”
    “Do you have a kettle?”
    She opened the pantry. “I’ll make tea, Baba.”
    “Let me water your delphiniums. They won’t survive another day.” He took the kettle from her hands and filled it at the sink. Then he carried it, slowly and carefully, through the kitchen door outside, taking oddly small steps, and for the first time since his arrival she saw that in spite of his clear eyes and skin, her father had become an old man. She stood by the window and watched her father water the flowers, his head bent, his eyebrows raised. She listened to the sound of the water hitting the earth in a forceful, steady stream. It was a sound that vaguely embarrassed her, as if he were urinating in her presence. Even after the sound stopped, her father stood there for a moment, tipping the spout and pouring out the final drops that the kettle contained. Akash had followed her father outside, and now he stood a few feet away, looking up at his grandfather with curiosity.
    Akash had no memory of her mother. She had died when he was two, and now, when she pointed her mother out in a photograph, Akash would always say, “she died,” as if it were something extraordinary and impressive her mother had done. He would know nothing of the weeks her mother had come to stay with Ruma after his birth, holding him in the mornings in her kaftan as Ruma slept off her postpartum fatigue. Her mother had refused to put him into the bassinet, always cradling him, for hours at a time, in her arms. The new baby would know nothing of her mother at all, apart from the