The past few years have seen a number of fine writers springing from India--some living on the subcontinent and others, like the author of this collection of stories, who live elsewhere but whose work is still imbued with Indian culture and sensibilities. In varying degrees, Lahiri explores "Indianness" in all her stories, wherever they are set. Some, such as "A Real Durwan," take place in urban settings in or near Calcutta. Others deal with immigrants at different stages on the road to assimilation. In "A Temporary Matter," Lahiri's sensitive and subtle portrayal of a troubled marriage, the fact that the couple is Indian seems almost incidental. In the title story, Mr. and Mrs. Das, both born in America, are taking their children to visit India for the first time. One of Lahiri's gifts is the ability to use different eyes and voices. Readers who enjoy these stories should also appreciate the work of Bharati Mukherjee and G. S. Sharat Chandra's collection Sari of the Gods, which was published last year. Mary Ellen Quinn
From Kirkus Reviews
India is an inescapable presence in this strong first collection's nine polished and resonant tales, most of which have appeared in The New Yorker and other publications. Lahiri, who was born in London and grew up in Rhode Island, offers stories that stress the complex mechanics of adjustment to new circumstances, relationships, and cultures. Sometimes theyre narrated by outside observers like the flatmates of an excited (presumably epileptic) young woman cured by relations with men (in The Treatment of Bibi Haldar); the preadolescent American schoolboy cared for at Mrs. Sens, where the eponymous immigrant is tortured by the pressure of adapting to American ways; or, most compellingly, the Indian-American girl emotionally touched and subtly matured by the kindness her parents show to a Pakistani friend who fears for the safety of his family back home amid civil war (When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine). Richly detailed portrayals of young marriages dominate tales like that of an Indian emigrant's oddly fulfilling relationship with his landlady, a bellicose centenarian (The Third and Final Continent); This Blessed House, in which the wedge afflicting a young couple is widened when they discover Christian paraphernalia left behind by their home's former owners; and A Temporary Matter, which delicately traces how a pair of academics, continually mourning their stillborn baby, find in an exchange of confessions a renewal of their intimacy. Lahiri is equally skilled with more sophisticated plots, as in her title story's seriocomic disclosure of a middle-aged tour guide's self-delusive romance, or in the complexity of Sexy, about a young American woman whos fascinated not only by her married Bengali lover but by all other things Indianincluding the manner in which she is and isnt deflected from her passion by an afternoon with an Indian boy victimized by his own father's infidelity. Moving and authoritative pictures of culture shock and displaced identity. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
“A writer of uncommon sensitivity and restraint.”—Wall Street Journal
“Lahiri breathers unpredictable life into the page, and the reader finished each story reseduced, wishing he could spend a whole novel with its characters.”—The New York Times Book Review
“Lahiri's touch is delicate yet assured, leaving no room for flubbed notes or forced epiphanies.”—The Los Angeles Times
“A writer of uncommon elegance and poise.”—New York times
“Dazzling writing, an easy-to-carry paperback format and a budget-respecting price tag of $12: Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies possesses these three qualities, making it my book of choice this summer every time someone asks for a recommendation...Simply put, Lahiri displays a remarkable maturity and ability to imagine other lives...[E]ach story offers something special. Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies will reward readers.”—USA Today
“[S]torytelling of surpassing kindness and skill.”—The San Francisco Chronicle
“Jhumpa Lahiri is the kind of writer who makes you want to grab the next person you see and say, ‘Read this!’”—Amy Tan
About the Author
Jhumpa Lahiri is the author of four works of fiction: Interpreter of Maladies, The Namesake, Unaccustomed Earth, and The Lowland; and a work of nonfiction, In Other Words. She has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize; the PEN/Hemingway Award; the PEN/Malamud Award; the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award; the Premio Gregor von Rezzori; the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature; a 2014 National Humanities Medal, awarded by President Barack Obama; and the Premio Internazionale Viareggio-Versilia, for In altre parole.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One
A Temporary Matter
The notice informed them that it was a temporary matter: for five
days their electricity would be cut off for one hour, beginning at
eight P.M. A line had gone down in the last snowstorm, and the
repairmen were going to take advantage of the milder evenings to set
it right. The work would affect only the houses on the quiet tree-
lined street, within walking distance of a row of brick-faced stores
and a trolley stop, where Shoba and Shukumar had lived for three
years.
"It's good of them to warn us," Shoba conceded after reading the
notice aloud, more for her own benefit than Shukumar's. She let the
strap of her leather satchel, plump with files, slip from her
shoulders, and left it in the hallway as she walked into the kitchen.
She wore a navy blue poplin raincoat over gray sweatpants and white
sneakers, looking, at thirty-three, like the type of woman she'd once
claimed she would never resemble.
She'd come from the gym. Her cranberry lipstick was visible only on
the outer reaches of her mouth, and her eyeliner had left charcoal
patches beneath her lower lashes. She used to look this way
sometimes, Shukumar thought, on mornings after a party or a night at
a bar, when she'd been too lazy to wash her face, too eager to
collapse into his arms. She dropped a sheaf of mail on the table
without a glance. Her eyes were still fixed on the notice in her
other hand. "But they should do this sort of thing during the day."
"When I'm here, you mean," Shukumar said. He put a glass lid on a pot
of lamb, adjusting it so only the slightest bit of steam could
escape. Since January he'd been working at home, trying to complete
the final chapters of his dissertation on agrarian revolts in
India. "When do the repairs start?"
"It says March nineteenth. Is today the nineteenth?" Shoba walked
over to the framed corkboard that hung on the wall by the fridge,
bare except for a calendar of William Morris wallpaper patterns. She
looked at it as if for the first time, studying the wallpaper pattern
carefully on the top half before allowing her eyes to fall to the
numbered grid on the bottom. A friend had sent the calendar in the
mail as a Christmas gift, even though Shoba and Shukumar hadn't
celebrated Christmas that year.
"Today then," Shoba announced. "You have a dentist appointment next
Friday, by the way."
He ran his tongue over the tops of his teeth; he'd forgotten to brush
them that morning. It wasn't the first time. He hadn't left the house
at all that day, or the day before. The more Shoba stayed out, the
more she began putting in extra hours at work and taking on
additional projects, the more he wanted to stay in, not even leaving
to get the mail, or to buy fruit or wine at the stores by the trolley
stop.
Six months ago, in September, Shukumar was at an academic conference
in Baltimore when Shoba went into labor, three weeks before her due
date. He hadn't wanted to go to the conference, but she had insisted;
it was important to make contacts, and he would be entering the job
market next year. She told him that she had his number at the hotel,
and a copy of his schedule and flight numbers, and she had arranged
with her friend Gillian for a ride to the hospital in the event of an
emergency. When the cab pulled away that morning for the airport,
Shoba stood waving good-bye in her robe, with one arm resting on the
mound of her belly as if it were a perfectly natural part of her
body.
Each time he thought of that moment, the last moment he saw Shoba
pregnant, it was the cab he remembered most, a station wagon, painted
red with blue lettering. It was cavernous compared to their own car.
Although Shukumar was six feet tall, with hands too big ever to rest
comfortably in the pockets of his jeans, he felt dwarfed in the back
seat. As the cab sped down Beacon Street, he imagined a day when he
and Shoba might need to buy a station wagon of their own, to cart
their children back and forth from music lessons and dentist
appointments. He imagined himself gripping the wheel, as Shoba turned
around to hand the children juice boxes. Once, these images of
parenthood had troubled Shukumar, adding to his anxiety that he was
still a student at thirty-five. But that early autumn morning, the
trees still heavy with bronze leaves, he welcomed the image for the
first time.
A member of the staff had found him somehow among the identical
convention rooms and handed him a stiff square of stationery. It was
only a telephone number, but Shukumar knew it was the hospital. When
he returned to Boston it was over. The baby had been born dead. Shoba
was lying on a bed, asleep, in a private room so small there was
barely enough space to stand beside her, in a wing of the hospital
they hadn't been to on the tour for expectant parents. Her placenta
had weakened and she'd had a cesarean, though not quickly enough. The
doctor explained that these things happen. He smiled in the kindest
way it was possible to smile at people known only professionally.
Shoba would be back on her feet in a few weeks. There was nothing to
indicate that she would not be able to have children in the future.
These days Shoba was always gone by the time Shukumar woke up. He
would open his eyes and see the long black hairs she shed on her
pillow and think of her, dressed, sipping her third cup of coffee
already, in her office downtown, where she searched for typographical
errors in textbooks and marked them, in a code she had once explained
to him, with an assortment of colored pencils. She would do the same
for his dissertation, she promised, when it was ready. He envied her
the specificity of her task, so unlike the elusive nature of his. He
was a mediocre student who had a facility for absorbing details
without curiosity. Until September he had been diligent if not
dedicated, summarizing chapters, outlining arguments on pads of
yellow lined paper. But now he would lie in their bed until he grew
bored, gazing at his side of the closet which Shoba always left
partly open, at the row of the tweed jackets and corduroy trousers he
would not have to choose from to teach his classes that semester.
After the baby died it was too late to withdraw from his teaching
duties. But his adviser had arranged things so that he had the spring
semester to himself. Shukumar was in his sixth year of graduate
school. "That and the summer should give you a good push," his
adviser had said. "You should be able to wrap things up by next
September."
But nothing was pushing Shukumar. Instead he thought of how he and
Shoba had become experts at avoiding each other in their three-
bedroom house, spending as much time on separate floors as possible.
He thought of how he no longer looked forward to weekends, when she
sat for hours on the sofa with her colored pencils and her files, so
that he feared that putting on a record in his own house might be
rude. He thought of how long it had been since she looked into his
eyes and smiled, or whispered his name on those rare occasions they
still reached for each other's bodies before sleeping.
In the beginning he had believed that it would pass, that he and
Shoba would get through it all somehow. She was only thirty-three.
She was strong, on her feet again. But it wasn't a consolation. It
was often nearly lunchtime when Shukumar would finally pull himself
out of bed and head downstairs to the coffeepot, pouring out the
extra bit Shoba left for him, along with an empty mug, on the
countertop.
Shukumar gathered onion skins in his hands and let them drop into the
garbage pail, on top of the ribbons of fat he'd trimmed from the
lamb. He ran the water in the sink, soaking the knife and the cutting
board, and rubbed a lemon half along his fingertips to get rid of the
garlic smell, a trick he'd learned from Shoba. It was seven-thirty.
Through the window he saw the sky, like soft black pitch. Uneven
banks of snow still lined the sidewalks, though it was warm enough
for people to walk about without hats or gloves. Nearly three feet
had fallen in the last storm, so that for a week people had to walk
single file, in narrow trenches. For a week that was Shukumar's
excuse for not leaving the house. But now the trenches were widening,
and water drained steadily into grates in the pavement.
"The lamb won't be done by eight," Shukumar said. "We may have to eat
in the dark."
"We can light candles," Shoba suggested. She unclipped her hair,
coiled neatly at her nape during the days, and pried the sneakers
from her feet without untying them. "I'm going to shower before the
lights go," she said, heading for the staircase. "I'll be down."
Shukumar moved her satchel and her sneakers to the side of the
fridge. She wasn't this way before. She used to put her coat on a
hanger, her sneakers in the closet, and she paid bills as soon as
they came. But now she treated the house as if it were a hotel. The
fact that the yellow chintz armchair in the living room clashed with
the blue-and-maroon Turkish carpet no longer bothered her. On the
enclosed porch at the back of the house, a crisp white bag still sat
on the wicker chaise, filled with lace she had once planned to turn
into curtains.
While Shoba showered, Shukumar went into the downstairs bathroom and
found a new toothbrush in its box beneath the sink. The cheap, stiff
bristles hurt his gums, and he spit some blood into the basin. The
spare brush was one of many stored in a metal basket. Shoba had
bought them once when they were on sale, in the event that a visitor
decided, at the last minute, to spend the night.
It was typical of her. She was the type to prepare for surprises,
good and bad. If she found a skirt or a purse she liked she bought
two. She kept the bonuses from her job in a separate bank account in
her name. It hadn't bothered him. His own mother had fallen to pieces
when his father died, abandoning the house he grew up in and moving
back to Calcutta, leaving Shukumar to settle it all. He liked that
Shoba was different. It astonished him, her capacity to think ahead.
When she used to do the shopping, the pantry was always stocked with
extra bottles of olive and corn oil, depending on whether they were
cooking Italian or Indian. There were endless boxes of pasta in all
shapes and colors, zippered sacks of basmati rice, whole sides of
lambs and goats from the Muslim butchers at Haymarket, chopped up and
frozen in endless plastic bags. Every other Saturday they wound
through the maze of stalls Shukumar eventually knew by heart. He
watched in disbelief as she bought more food, trailing behind her
with canvas bags as she pushed through the crowd, arguing under the
morning sun with boys too young to shave but already missing teeth,
who twisted up brown paper bags of artichokes, plums, gingerroot, and
yams, and dropped them on their scales, and tossed them to Shoba one
by one. She didn't mind being jostled, even when she was pregnant.
She was tall, and broad-shouldered, with hips that her obstetrician
assured her were made for childbearing. During the drive back home,
as the car curved along the Charles, they invariably marveled at how
much food they'd bought.
It never went to waste. When friends dropped by, Shoba would throw
together meals that appeared to have taken half a day to prepare,
from things she had frozen and bottled, not cheap things in tins but
peppers she had marinated herself with rosemary, and chutneys that
she cooked on Sundays, stirring boiling pots of tomatoes and prunes.
Her labeled mason jars lined the shelves of the kitchen, in endless
sealed pyramids, enough, they'd agreed, to last for their
grandchildren to taste. They'd eaten it all by now. Shukumar had been
going through their supplies steadily, preparing meals for the two of
them, measuring out cupfuls of rice, defrosting bags of meat day
after day. He combed through her cookbooks every afternoon, following
her penciled instructions to use two teaspoons of ground coriander
seeds instead of one, or red lentils instead of yellow. Each of the
recipes was dated, telling the first time they had eaten the dish
together. April 2, cauliflower with fennel. January 14, chicken with
almonds and sultanas. He had no memory of eating those meals, and yet
there they were, recorded in her neat proofreader's hand. Shukumar
enjoyed cooking now. It was the one thing that made him feel
productive. If it weren't for him, he knew, Shoba would eat a bowl of
cereal for her dinner.
Tonight, with no lights, they would have to eat together. For months
now they'd served themselves from the stove, and he'd taken his plate
into his study, letting the meal grow cold on his desk before shoving
it into his mouth without pause, while Shoba took her plate to the
living room and watched game shows, or proofread files with her
arsenal of colored pencils at hand.
At some point in the evening she visited him. When he heard her
approach he would put away his novel and begin typing sentences. She
would rest her hands on his shoulders and stare with him into the
blue glow of the computer screen. "Don't work too hard," she would
say after a minute or two, and head off to bed. It was the one time
in the day she sought him out, and yet he'd come to dread it. He knew
it was something she forced herself to do. She would look around the
walls of the room, which they had decorated together last summer with
a border of marching ducks and rabbits playing trumpets and drums. By
the end of August there was a cherry crib under the window, a white
changing table with mint-green knobs, and a rocking chair with
checkered cushions. Shukumar had disassembled it all before bringing
Shoba back from the hospital, scraping off the rabbits and ducks with
a spatula. For some reason the room did not haunt him the way it
haunted Shoba. In January, when he stopped working at his carrel in
the library, he set up his desk there deliberately, partly because
the room soothed him, and partly because it was a place Shoba
avoided.
Shukumar returned to the kitchen and began to open drawers. He tried
to locate a candle among the scissors, the eggbeaters and whisks, the
mortar and pestle she'd bought in a bazaar in Calcutta, and used to
pound garlic cloves and cardamom pods, back when she used to cook. He
found a flashlight, but no batteries, and a half-empty box of
birthday candles. Shoba had thrown him a surprise birthday party last
May. One hundred and twenty people had crammed into the house — all
the friends and the friends of friends they now systematically
avoided. Bottles of vinho verde had nested in a bed of ice in the
bathtub. Shoba was in her fifth month, drinking ginger ale from a
martini glass. She had made a vanilla cream cake with custard and
spun sugar. All night she kept Shukumar's long fingers linked with
hers as they walked among the guests at the party.
Since September their only guest had been Shoba's mother. She came
from Arizona and stayed with them for two months after Shoba returned
from the hospital. She cooked dinner every night, drove herself to
the supermarket, washed their clothes, put them away. She was a
religious woman. She set up a small shrine, a framed picture of a
lavender-faced goddess and a plate of marigold petals, on the bedside
table in the guest room, and prayed twice a day for healthy
grandchildren in the future. She was polite to Shukumar without being
friendly. She folded his sweaters with an expertise she had learned
from her job in a department store. She replaced a missing button on
his winter coat and knit him a beige and brown scarf, presenting it
to him without the least bit of ceremony, as if he had only dropped
it and hadn't noticed. She never talked to him about Shoba; once,
when he mentioned the baby's death, she looked up from her knitting,
and said, "But you weren't even there."
It struck him as odd that there were no real candles in the house.
That Shoba hadn't prepared for such an ordinary emergency. He looked
now for something to put the birthday candles in and settled on the
soil of a potted ivy that normally sat on the windowsill over the
sink. Even though the plant was inches from the tap, the soil was so
dry that he had to water it first before the candles would stand
straight. He pushed aside the things on the kitchen table, the piles
of mail, the unread library books. He remembered their first meals
there, when they were so thrilled to be married, to be living
together in the same house at last, that they would just reach for
each other foolishly, more eager to make love than to eat. He put
down two embroidered place mats, a wedding gift from an uncle in
Lucknow, and set out the plates and wineglasses they usually saved
for guests. He put the ivy in the middle, the white-edged, star-
shaped leaves girded by ten little candles. He switched on the
digital clock radio and tuned it to a jazz station.
"What's all this?" Shoba said when she came downstairs. Her hair was
wrapped in a thick white towel. She undid the towel and draped it
over a chair, allowing her hair, damp and dark, to fall across her
back. As she walked absently toward the stove she took out a few
tangles with her fingers. She wore a clean pair of sweatpants, a T-
shirt, an old flannel robe. Her stomach was flat again, her waist
narrow before the flare of her hips, the belt of the robe tied in a
floppy knot.
It was nearly eight. Shukumar put the rice on the table and the
lentils from the night before into the microwave oven, punching the
numbers on the timer.
"You made rogan josh," Shoba observed, looking through the glass lid
at the bright paprika stew.
Shukumar took out a piece of lamb, pinching it quickly between his
fingers so as not to scald himself. He prodded a larger piece with a
serving spoon to make sure the meat slipped easily from the
bone. "It's ready," he announced.
The microwave had just beeped when the lights went out, and the music
disappeared.
"Perfect timing," Shoba said.
"All I could find were birthday candles." He lit up the ivy, keeping
the rest of the candles and a book of matches by his plate.
"It doesn't matter," she said, running a finger along the stem of her
wineglass. "It looks lovely."
In the dimness, he knew how she sat, a bit forward in her chair,
ankles crossed against the lowest rung, left elbow on the table.
During his search for the candles, Shukumar had found a bottle of
wine in a crate he had thought was empty. He clamped the bottle
between his knees while he turned in the corkscrew. He worried about
spilling, and so he picked up the glasses and held them close to his
lap while he filled them. They served themselves, stirring the rice
with their forks, squinting as they extracted bay leaves and cloves
from the stew. Every few minutes Shukumar lit a few more birthday
candles and drove them into the soil of the pot.
"It's like India," Shoba said, watching him tend his makeshift
candelabra. "Sometimes the current disappears for hours at a stretch.
I once had to attend an entire rice ceremony in the dark. The baby
just cried and cried. It must have been so hot."
Their baby had never cried, Shukumar considered. Their baby would
never have a rice ceremony, even though Shoba had already made the
guest list, and decided on which of her three brothers she was going
to ask to feed the child its first taste of solid food, at six months
if it was a boy, seven if it was a girl.
"Are you hot?" he asked her. He pushed the blazing ivy pot to the
other end of the table, closer to the piles of books and mail, making
it even more difficult for them to see each other. He was suddenly
irritated that he couldn't go upstairs and sit in front of the
computer.
"No. It's delicious," she said, tapping her plate with her fork. "It
really is."
He refilled the wine in her glass. She thanked him.
They weren't like this before. Now he had to struggle to say
something that interested her, something that made her look up from
her plate, or from her proofreading files. Eventually he gave up
trying to amuse her. He learned not to mind the silences.
"I remember during power failures at my grandmother's house, we all
had to say something," Shoba continued. He could barely see her face,
but from her tone he knew her eyes were narrowed, as if trying to
focus on a distant object. It was a habit of hers.
"Like what?"
"I don't know. A little poem. A joke. A fact about the world. For
some reason my relatives always wanted me to tell them the names of
my friends in America. I don't know why the information was so
interesting to them. The last time I saw my aunt she asked after four
girls I went to elementary school with in Tucson. I barely remember
them now."
Shukumar hadn't spent as much time in India as Shoba had. His
parents, who settled in New Hampshire, used to go back without him.
The first time he'd gone as an infant he'd nearly died of amoebic
dysentery. His father, a nervous type, was afraid to take him again,
in case something were to happen, and left him with his aunt and
uncle in Concord. As a teenager he preferred sailing camp or scooping
ice cream during the summers to going to Calcutta. It wasn't until
after his father died, in his last year of college, that the country
began to interest him, and he studied its history from course books
as if it were any other subject. He wished now that he had his own
childhood story of India.
"Let's do that," she said suddenly.
"Do what?"
"Say something to each other in the dark."
"Like what? I don't know any jokes."
"No, no jokes." She thought for a minute. "How about telling each
other something we've never told before."
"I used to play this game in high school," Shukumar recalled. "When I
got drunk."
"You're thinking of truth or dare. This is different. Okay, I'll
start." She took a sip of wine. "The first time I was alone in your
apartment, I looked in your address book to see if you'd written me
in. I think we'd known each other two weeks."
"Where was I?"
"You went to answer the telephone in the other room. It was your
mother, and I figured it would be a long call. I wanted to know if
you'd promoted me from the margins of your newspaper."
"Had I?"
"No. But I didn't give up on you. Now it's your turn."
He couldn't think of anything, but Shoba was waiting for him to
speak. She hadn't appeared so determined in months. What was there
left to say to her? He thought back to their first meeting, four
years earlier at a lecture hall in Cambridge, where a group of
Bengali poets were giving a recital. They'd ended up side by side, on
folding wooden chairs. Shukumar was soon bored; he was unable to
decipher the literary diction, and couldn't join the rest of the
audience as they sighed and nodded solemnly after certain phrases.
Peering at the newspaper folded in his lap, he studied the
temperatures of cities around the world. Ninety-one degrees in
Singapore yesterday, fifty-one in Stockholm. When he turned his head
to the left, he saw a woman next to him making a grocery list on the
back of a folder, and was startled to find that she was beautiful.
"Okay" he said, remembering. "The first time we went out to dinner,
to the Portuguese place, I forgot to tip the waiter. I went back the
next morning, found out his name, left money with the manager."
"You went all the way back to Somerville just to tip a waiter?"
"I took a cab."
"Why did you forget to tip the waiter?"
The birthday candles had burned out, but he pictured her face clearly
in the dark, the wide tilting eyes, the full grape-toned lips, the
fall at age two from her high chair still visible as a comma on her
chin. Each day, Shukumar noticed, her beauty, which had once
overwhelmed him, seemed to fade. The cosmetics that had seemed
superfluous were necessary now, not to improve her but to define her
somehow.
"By the end of the meal I had a funny feeling that I might marry
you," he said, admitting it to himself as well as to her for the
first time. "It must have distracted me."
The next night Shoba came home earlier than usual. There was lamb
left over from the evening before, and Shukumar heated it up so that
they were able to eat by seven. He'd gone out that day, through the
melting snow, and bought a packet of taper candles from the corner
store, and batteries to fit the flashlight. He had the candles ready
on the countertop, standing in brass holders shaped like lotuses, but
they ate under the glow of the copper-shaded ceiling lamp that hung
over the table.
When they had finished eating, Shukumar was surprised to see that
Shoba was stacking her plate on top of his, and then carrying them
over to the sink. He had assumed she would retreat to the living
room, behind her barricade of files.
"Don't worry about the dishes," he said, taking them from her hands.
"It seems silly not to," she replied, pouring a drop of detergent
onto a sponge. "It's nearly eight o'clock."
His heart quickened. All day Shukumar had looked forward to the
lights going out. He thought about what Shoba had said the night
before, about looking in his address book. It felt good to remember
her as she was then, how bold yet nervous she'd been when they first
met, how hopeful. They stood side by side at the sink, their
reflections fitting together in the frame of the window. It made him
shy, the way he felt the first time they stood together in a mirror.
He couldn't recall the last time they'd been photographed. They had
stopped attending parties, went nowhere together. The film in his
camera still contained pictures of Shoba, in the yard, when she was
pregnant.
After finishing the dishes, they leaned against the counter, drying
their hands on either end of a towel. At eight o'clock the house went
black. Shukumar lit the wicks of the candles, impressed by their
long, steady flames.
"Let's sit outside," Shoba said. "I think it's warm still."
They each took a candle and sat down on the steps. It seemed strange
to be sitting outside with patches of snow still on the ground. But
everyone was out of their houses tonight, the air fresh enough to
make people restless. Screen doors opened and closed. A small parade
of neighbors passed by with flashlights.
"We're going to the bookstore to browse," a silver-haired man called
out. He was walking with his wife, a thin woman in a windbreaker, and
holding a dog on a leash. They were the Bradfords, and they had
tucked a sympathy card into Shoba and Shukumar's mailbox back in
September. "I hear they've got their power."
"They'd better," Shukumar said. "Or you'll be browsing in the dark."
The woman laughed, slipping her arm through the crook of her
husband's elbow. "Want to join us?"
"No thanks," Shoba and Shukumar called out together. It surprised
Shukumar that his words matched hers.
He wondered what Shoba would tell him in the dark. The worst
possibilities had already run through his head. That she'd had an
affair. That she didn't respect him for being thirty-five and still a
student. That she blamed him for being in Baltimore the way her
mother did. But he knew those things weren't true. She'd been
faithful, as had he. She believed in him. It was she who had insisted
he go to Baltimore. What didn't they know about each other? He knew
she curled her fingers tightly when she slept, that her body twitched
during bad dreams. He knew it was honeydew she favored over
cantaloupe. He knew that when they returned from the hospital the
first thing she did when she walked into the house was pick out
objects of theirs and toss them into a pile in the hallway: books
from the shelves, plants from the windowsills, paintings from walls,
photos from tables, pots and pans that hung from the hooks over the
stove. Shukumar had stepped out of her way, watching as she moved
methodically from room to room. When she was satisfied, she stood
there staring at the pile she'd made, her lips drawn back in such
distaste that Shukumar had thought she would spit. Then she'd started
to cry.
He began to feel cold as he sat there on the steps. He felt that he
needed her to talk first, in order to reciprocate.
"That time when your mother came to visit us," she said
finally. "When I said one night that I had to stay late at work, I
went out with Gillian and had a martini."
He looked at her profile, the slender nose, the slightly masculine
set of her jaw. He remembered that night well; eating with his
mother, tired from teaching two classes back to back, wishing Shoba
were there to say more of the right things because he came up with
only the wrong ones. It had been twelve years since his father had
died, and his mother had come to spend two weeks with him and Shoba,
so they could honor his father's memory together. Each night his
mother cooked something his father had liked, but she was too upset
to eat the dishes herself, and her eyes would well up as Shoba
stroked her hand. "It's so touching," Shoba had said to him at the
time. Now he pictured Shoba with Gillian, in a bar with striped
velvet sofas, the one they used to go to after the movies, making
sure she got her extra olive, asking Gillian for a cigarette. He
imagined her complaining, and Gillian sympathizing about visits from
in-laws. It was Gillian who had driven Shoba to the hospital.
"Your turn," she said, stopping his thoughts.
At the end of their street Shukumar heard sounds of a drill and the
electricians shouting over it. He looked at the darkened facades of
the houses lining the street. Candles glowed in the windows of one.
In spite of the warmth, smoke rose from the chimney.
"I cheated on my Oriental Civilization exam in college," he said. "It
was my last semester, my last set of exams. My father had died a few
months before. I could see the blue book of the guy next to me. He
was an American guy, a maniac. He knew Urdu and Sanskrit. I couldn't
remember if the verse we had to identify was an example of a ghazal
or not. I looked at his answer and copied it down."
It had happened over fifteen years ago. He felt relief now, having
told her.
She turned to him, looking not at his face, but at his shoes — old
moccasins he wore as if they were slippers, the leather at the back
permanently flattened. He wondered if it bothered her, what he'd
said. She took his hand and pressed it. "You didn't have to tell me
why you did it," she said, moving closer to him.
They sat together until nine o'clock, when the lights came on. They
heard some people across the street clapping from their porch, and
televisions being turned on. The Bradfords walked back down the
street, eating ice-cream cones and waving. Shoba and Shukumar waved
back. Then they stood up, his hand still in hers, and went inside.
Somehow, without saying anything, it had turned into this. Into an
exchange of confessions — the little ways they'd hurt or disappointed
each other, and themselves. The following day Shukumar thought for
hours about what to say to her. He was torn between admitting that he
once ripped out a photo of a woman in one of the fashion magazines
she used to subscribe to and carried it in his books for a week, or
saying that he really hadn't lost the sweater-vest she bought him for
their third wedding anniversary but had exchanged it for cash at
Filene's, and that he had gotten drunk alone in the middle of the day
at a hotel bar. For their first anniversary, Shoba had cooked a ten-
course dinner just for him. The vest depressed him. "My wife gave me
a sweater-vest for our anniversary," he complained to the bartender,
his head heavy with cognac. "What do you expect?" the bartender had
replied. "You're married."
As for the picture of the woman, he didn't know why he'd ripped it
out. She wasn't as pretty as Shoba. She wore a white sequined dress,
and had a sullen face and lean, mannish legs. Her bare arms were
raised, her fists around her head, as if she were about to punch
herself in the ears. It was an advertisement for stockings. Shoba had
been pregnant at the time, her stomach suddenly immense, to the point
where Shukumar no longer wanted to touch her. The first time he saw
the picture he was lying in bed next to her, watching her as she
read. When he noticed the magazine in the recycling pile he found the
woman and tore out the page as carefully as he could. For about a
week he allowed himself a glimpse each day. He felt an intense desire
for the woman, but it was a desire that turned to disgust after a
minute or two. It was the closest he'd come to infidelity.
He told Shoba about the sweater on the third night, the picture on
the fourth. She said nothing as he spoke, expressed no protest or
reproach. She simply listened, and then she took his hand, pressing
it as she had before. On the third night, she told him that once
after a lecture they'd attended, she let him speak to the chairman of
his department without telling him that he had a dab of pâté on his
chin. She'd been irritated with him for some reason, and so she'd let
him go on and on, about securing his fellowship for the following
semester, without putting a finger to her own chin as a signal. The
fourth night, she said that she never liked the one poem he'd ever
published in his life, in a literary magazine in Utah. He'd written
the poem after meeting Shoba. She added that she found the poem
sentimental.
Something happened when the house was dark. They were able to talk to
each other again. The third night after supper they'd sat together on
the sofa, and once it was dark he began kissing her awkwardly on her
forehead and her face, and though it was dark he closed his eyes, and
knew that she did, too. The fourth night they walked carefully
upstairs, to bed, feeling together for the final step with their feet
before the landing, and making love with a desperation they had
forgotten. She wept without sound, and whispered his name, and traced
his eyebrows with her finger in the dark. As he made love to her he
wondered what he would say to her the next night, and what she would
say, the thought of it exciting him. "Hold me," he said, "hold me in
your arms," By the time the lights came back on downstairs, they'd
fallen asleep.
The morning of the fifth night Shukumar found another notice from the
electric company in the mailbox. The line had been repaired ahead of
schedule, it said. He was disappointed. He had planned on making
shrimp malai for Shoba, but when he arrived at the store he didn't
feel like cooking anymore. It wasn't the same, he thought, knowing
that the lights wouldn't go out. In the store the shrimp looked gray
and thin. The coconut milk tin was dusty and overpriced. Still, he
bought them, along with a beeswax candle and two bottles of wine.
She came home at seven-thirty. "I suppose this is the end of our
game," he said when he saw her reading the notice.
She looked at him. "You can still light candles if you want." She
hadn't been to the gym tonight. She wore a suit beneath the raincoat.
Her makeup had been retouched recently.
When she went upstairs to change, Shukumar poured himself some wine
and put on a record, a Thelonius Monk album he knew she liked.
When she came downstairs they ate together. She didn't thank him or
compliment him. They simply ate in a darkened room, in the glow of a
beeswax candle. They had survived a difficult time. They finished off
the shrimp. They finished off the first bottle of wine and moved on
to the second. They sat together until the candle had nearly burned
away. She shifted in her chair, and Shukumar thought that she was
about to say something. But instead she blew out the candle, stood
up, turned on the light switch, and sat down again.
"Shouldn't we keep the lights off?" Shukumar asked. She set her plate
aside and clasped her hands on the table. "I want you to see my face
when I tell you this," she said gently.
His heart began to pound. The day she told him she was pregnant, she
had used the very same words, saying them in the same gentle way,
turning off the basketball game he'd been watching on television. He
hadn't been prepared then. Now he was.
Only he didn't want her to be pregnant again. He didn't want to have
to pretend to be happy.
"I've been looking for an apartment and I've found one," she said,
narrowing her eyes on something, it seemed, behind his left shoulder.
It was nobody's fault, she continued. They'd been through enough. She
needed some time alone. She had money saved up for a security
deposit. The apartment was on Beacon Hill, so she could walk to work.
She had signed the lease that night before coming home.
She wouldn't look at him, but he stared at her. It was obvious that
she'd rehearsed the lines. All this time she'd been looking for an
apartment, testing the water pressure, asking a Realtor if heat and
hot water were included in the rent. It sickened Shukumar, knowing
that she had spent these past evenings preparing for a life without
him. He was relieved and yet he was sickened. This was what she'd
been trying to tell him for the past four evenings. This was the
point of her game.
Now it was his turn to speak. There was something he'd sworn he would
never tell her, and for six months he had done his best to block it
from his mind. Before the ultrasound she had asked the doctor not to
tell her the sex of their child, and Shukumar had agreed. She had
wanted it to be a surprise.
Later, those few times they talked about what had happened, she said
at least they'd been spared that knowledge. In a way she almost took
pride in her decision, for it enabled her to seek refuge in a
mystery. He knew that she assumed it was a mystery for him, too. He'd
arrived too late from Baltimore — when it was all over and she was
lying on the hospital bed. But he hadn't. He'd arrived early enough
to see their baby, and to hold him before they cremated him. At first
he had recoiled at the suggestion, but the doctor said holding the
baby might help him with the process of grieving. Shoba was asleep.
The baby had been cleaned off, his bulbous lids shut tight to the
world.
"Our baby was a boy," he said. "His skin was more red than brown. He
had black hair on his head. He weighed almost five pounds. His
fingers were curled shut, just like yours in the night."
Shoba looked at him now, her face contorted with sorrow. He had
cheated on a college exam, ripped a picture of a woman out of a
magazine. He had returned a sweater and got drunk in the middle of
the day instead. These were the things he had told her. He had held
his son, who had known life only within her, against his chest in a
darkened room in an unknown wing of the hospital. He had held him
until a nurse knocked and took him away, and he promised himself that
day that he would never tell Shoba, because he still loved her then,
and it was the one thing in her life that she had wanted to be a
surprise.
Shukumar stood up and stacked his plate on top of hers. He carried
the plates to the sink, but instead of running the tap he looked out
the window. Outside the evening was still warm, and the Bradfords
were walking arm in arm. As he watched the couple the room went dark,
and he spun around. Shoba had turned the lights off. She came back to
the table and sat down, and after a moment Shukumar joined her. They
wept together, for the things they now knew.
-- From Interpreter of Maladies : Stories, by Jhumpa Lahiri. © June
1999 , Jhumpa Lahiri used by permission by Houghton Mifflin Company.
All rights reserved.
Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.Highlighted by 2,101 Kindle readers
