Unaccustomed Earth

The story opens with Sudha, the older sister of Rahul. Sudha is 24 and Rahul is about 18. The narrator tells us that Sudha is the person who introduced Rahul to alcohol, while he was visiting her at Penn during his junior year in high school. When she came home the proceeding summer, he asked her to buy him some six-packs for a party, and she obliged. They hid the beers in their respective rooms in order to avoid detection. Later, they sipped on beers while listening to the Rolling Stones and the Doors and smoking cigarettes out the window. Rahul had gone through a growth spurt, quickly dwarfing Sudha. It was then that Sudha felt a new connection blossoming with her brother, whom she had mostly regarded as simply a child before this time. They made a habit of sharing alcohol in this manner.

Sudha had stayed within the expectations of her parents during her childhood, and waited until she went to college to rebel. There, she began attending parties, drinking, and having sex, while still studiously attending to her double-major in economics and math. Her parents were stridently opposed to alcohol, even frowning on the Bengali friends in their social circle who liked to indulge in whiskey during gatherings. These friends, incidentally, were all men. Sudha, while drinking to the point of illness in the beginning, quickly learned her limits. Excessiveness is not a part of her character: “competence: this was the trait that fundamentally defined her” (129).

During their childhood, Rahul and Sudha’s parents would incessantly compare their children’s achievements to those of other Bengali children. Their father had even written to Harvard Medical School when Sudha was only 14 in order to obtain an application for her. Rahul’s admittance to Cornell, which was more impressive than Sudha’s to Penn, was their parents’ crowning achievement. They threw a party and gifted Rahul with a new car.

Sudha’s successful transition into college had assuaged any fears that her parents had had about sending a child to college. Rahul was also much more relaxed about his transition than Sudha had been. When he came home for Christmas during his freshman year, he was terse about his coursework and aloof to holiday activities. After Christmas dinner, he asked Sudha where she was stashing the alcohol, presuming that she had brought some for the occasion. When she revealed herself to be empty-handed and reticent to run to the store that very moment for some, as he subsequently requested, he joked that she had become no fun at all. Stung by the joke, she agreed to make up a story to their parents and take him to the liquor store, where he did not offer her money to buy the beer and vodka he desired. He was not put off when she did not want to share in any of the alcohol upon their arrival back home.

Rahul was born when Sudha was 6, and his birth was her first fully-formed memory. Having always preferred the less-tidy, lived-in homes of her American friends to her own home’s staid tidiness, she welcomed the avalanche of accouterments and activity that Rahul’s birth ushered into their home. She had even taken it upon herself to arrange the myriad photographs that were taken of Rahul into a picture album. Corollary documentation of Sudha’s birth did not exist. When she was born in London, it was Mr. Pal, her parents’ landlord, who took the few baby photographs of her that existed. When Sudha’s mother had become pregnant with Sudha during the sixties, half of the London rental properties bore WHITES ONLY signs, and her parents’ landlady at the time did not allow children at her property. Her father had considered relocating his wife to India for the birth when Mr. Pal took them in. Sudha enjoyed this story, which to her was “like an episode out of a Greek myth or the Bible, rich with blessing and portent, marking her family as survivors in strange intolerant seas” (135).

Four years after her birth, the family moved to Wayland, Massachusetts for her father’s new job at Raytheon. They had taken no mementos of Sudha’s early childhood with them. Therefore, when Rahul was born, Sudha became “determined that her little brother should leave his mark as a child in America” (136). She pushed, persuasively, for her parents to secure for him all of the best toys, sometimes laboriously assembling playthings for Rahul, which he would joyously and summarily destroy. When their parents felt that buying Peter Rabbit and Frog and Toad books for an illiterate baby was silly, she checked out the books from the library and read them to Rahul herself.

Despite her doting, Sudha did become jealous of Rahul in small ways—his thinness and easily American-passing name, his good looks that set him apart from both herself and her parents. Because he was a boy, he also enjoyed the freedom to wear shorts during the summer and play sports. When Sudha thought about her childhood, she felt regret about “the ungainly things she’d worn, the insecurity she’d felt, all the innocent mistakes she’d made” (137)

Sudha was also grateful to have a fellow witness to her parents’ passionless marriage, which stymied her. The photographs of them in London depicted a young and stylish couple that contrasted with the way their appearances changed once the family moved to Wayland, where “they became passive, wary, the rituals of small-town New England more confounding than negotiating two of the world’s largest cities” (138). They had depended on Sudha for both translation and education in the ways of America—a duty Rahul never took on. While Sudha viewed her parents’ immigration as a cross they bore, Rahul, more forthright than Sudha, felt that they had come of their own will—his father out of greed and his mother because she had nothing better to do.

By the time Rahul finished his second semester, Sudha was accepted to the London School of Economics for her second master’s degree. While Sudha spent a lot of time with her parents in the house, Rahul would come and go as he pleased, busying himself with a restaurant job 30 miles away and a new crowd of his coworker friends. His remoteness bothered Sudha, and while he was never openly hostile to her, she sometimes got the feeling that he despised her. She anticipated another request for alcohol that never came and, once hearing the refrigerator machine dispensing ice into a cup late at night, inferred that he had devised his own ways to obtain liquor.

Sudha’s mother informed her that Rahul’s second-semester grades were largely C’s, and that he had switched his major to film and English literature. She asked Sudha to speak with him. While their father did not openly confront Rahul, he told Sudha that he believed Rahul was floundering, and that he did not believe in paying an exorbitant tuition for Rahul’s dalliances in the humanities. Rahul’s life choices were in stark contrast to his own and those of his wife, both of whose “grandmothers had given up the gold on their arms to put roofs over their families’ heads and food on their plates” (140). While Sudha often felt this mentality to be burdensome, it also gave her comfort: she saw it as the element that bound her parents to each other.

One night, Sudha goes to Rahul’s room in order to talk to him. She finds him listening to music in headphones and rifling through a Beckett book with reddened eyes and a glass full of ice and a clear liquid next to him. When she tries to commiserate with him about freshman year at college, he snaps, “What the fuck do you know?” and bitingly tells her that his life is fine the way it is, without her aid (141). This devastates and silences Sudha, who had always taken it upon himself to improve her brother’s life. She eyes the alcohol again, feeling indignant on behalf of her parents, who remain ignorant to this habit of Rahul’s. She tells Rahul that she simply doesn’t understand what is happening, as Rahul had always been smarter than she. Rahul ends the conversation by telling Sudha that she doesn’t “have to get everything all the time” (141).

When it comes time to have a celebratory farewell dinner for Sudha’s departure, Rahul surprises her by joining in. As her parents excitedly tried to recall London tube stops, Sudha realizes that Rahul may harbor jealousy for the family’s time in London, before he existed. Rahul also slowly drinks one cocktail throughout the meal. Then, without having informed anyone about his plans, he abruptly leaves in order to make it his next outing on time.

Near midnight, Sudha receives a call from the local police station. Rahul has been arrested for underage drinking after his car was observed drifting in and out of its lane. He asks Sudha to come post his $300 bail without their parents’ knowledge, but the car keys are in their father’s pocket, in the bedroom he shares with their mother. Sudha, noticing subtle signs of distress in her otherwise silent father, spares her father the pain and embarrassment of entering the police station to retrieve Rahul.

In the aftermath of Rahul’s arrest, their father remains silent, while their mother blames the incident on racial profiling. Sudha interjects, asserting that she feels that Rahul may have a drinking problem. And when she asserts further that it is more than just college drinking, her mother responds with “That’s the problem with this country…too many freedoms, too much having fun” (143). Sudha feels both pity and resentment for her mother, who is blind to the travails of her first-generation children in America and secure in the belief that nothing—neither culture nor mental illness—could touch her children, especially in comparison to the plight that she had left behind in India.

Sudha’s parents accompany her for 10 days while she transitions to London. They even arrange to see Mr. Pal. They speak of Rahul only when asked, papering over the truth of his deterioration with the flashy fact of his Cornell attendance.

Sudha quickly busies herself with her new life, although every time she drinks alcohol, she thinks of her brother: the $2000 fee his actions incurred, the alcohol education classes in which he’d been ordered to enroll, the fact that his arrest was documented in the local paper, which their parents subscribed to.

One day, Sudha meets a man named Roger Featherstone at that National Gallery. He engages her with an unassuming and spontaneously intimate mini-lecture about the famous Van Eyck painting that they stand in front of. After he is finished, she observes that he appears to be in his forties, has blue eyes, and wears a tweed blazer and corduroy pants. They continue to walk through the gallery together and then he asks her to join him for a cup of tea. He is an editor at an art magazine and an author with a PhD in art history. He was born in Bombay and had been married in his twenties. From that day on, he courts Sudha persistently and offers romantic flowers and fancy gifts, fully-planned vacations, and breakfast in bed. 

At Christmas, Sudha and Roger take a trip to Seville and the Costa del Sol. She tells her parents the lie that she is too busy with schoolwork to come home for the holiday. When she returns, there is a message from her parents. She listens to it and learns that Rahul’s school adviser has expressed his concern to their parents, and that while he is staying in Wayland for the holiday, he has begun to refuse to speak to their parents after an explosive argument. She is grateful that Roger left before she listened to the message, as she had kept major details about her family—and especially about Rahul’s troubles—obscured, although Roger has already expressed excitement at meeting them. She has not told Roger that she and Rahul have not spoken in months.

Sudha’s parents ask her for help, which she resents. When she reaches Rahul over the phone, he initially acts as though their relationship is not strained, and tells her that he is writing a play and wants to drop out of school. When she encourages him to tough it out for two more years, he hangs up on her after derisively telling her that she sounds just like their parents.

In April, Sudha comes back to Boston, an engagement ring from Roger hidden on a chain necklace beneath her clothing. She has not spoken to her parents about Rahul, and is busy with her coursework and Roger, with whom she has moved in. When all three family members are there to greet her at the airport, she notices that they all look sad and worried. Rahul greets her without a smile and informs her that he now lives with his parents. He has been formally dismissed from Cornell following his refusal to attend classes.

Rahul, once animated by ill will, has become very withdrawn and listless. Initially, without a car because it had been sold, he stays at home all day doing nothing while his parents make up increasingly elaborate lies about him to their friends. He eventually gets a part-time job as a laundromat manager and purchases a cheap, pre-owned vehicle for work purposes. His parents grow ashamed of him; he has become “a blot, a failure, someone who was not contributing to the grand circle of accomplishments Bengali children were making across the country, as surgeons or attorneys or scientists, or writing articles for the front page of The New York Times” (151). It is instead Sudha who has taken up this torch, “her collection of higher degrees framed and filling up her parents’ upstairs hall” (151).

By summer, Sudha is working at an organization that arranges micro-loans in impoverished nations. She and Roger fly to Wayland so that he can formally ask for her hand in marriage. At his request, they stay at a hotel in Boston, rather than the family home: Sudha has accepted Roger’s early-stated and explicit attitude regarding her family and their soon-to-begin life together. He does not plan nor desire to be intimately integrated into her family. Her parents, deflated from contending with Rahul, accept all of the less-than-desirable details of her engagement: the ceremony will be in London with only a reception in Massachusetts, Roger is a divorcee and 14 years Sudha’s senior. However, they are also pleased with his wealth (which has allowed him to purchase a family home in Kilburn), his academic credentials, and his Indian origins.

Rahul, for his part, is more interrogative and penetrating with his attitude toward Roger than his parents are. When he and Sudha find a moment alone, he tells her that Roger is a good guy, and congratulates her. They share a brief conversation about their now wildly mismatched lives, as well as a hug, during which Sudha detects the unmistakable smell of alcohol on her brother. She realizes that he has been sneaking away from everyone in order to drink surreptitiously, and she can no longer mentally sweep his addiction under the rug.

Sudha and Roger marry. Sudha travels to Wayland ahead of Roger for the reception as planned. She discovers that Rahul has begun dating a woman named Elena, a single mom who, at 30, is seven years older than Rahul. A few days before the reception, the family hosts a dinner for Elena. Elena’s appearance seems immaturely youthful to Sudha, and Elena makes no attempt to pander to Rahul’s parents. During dinner, Rahul abruptly announces that he and Elena are engaged. His father, breaking the silence that pervades his relationship with Rahul, scornfully replies that Rahul, aimless, cannot possibly be getting married to a woman “practically old enough to be [his] mother” (155). Rahul replies by telling his father that he is a snob before leaving with Elena.

Immediately after Rahul’s departure, Sudha’s parents ask her to change the location of her reception to a place that does not have a bar, in order to curtail Rahul’s excessive drinking. Sudha, incensed, tells her parents that she cannot do that because it is both too late and unfair, before taking her turn to storm from the room.

Rahul soon returns to the home, pitiful and without Elena. He surprises Sudha by showing up to her reception an hour early and performing his rightful brotherly duty of greeting guests. Sudha’s father tells her that he has paid the bartender to monitor Rahul’s drinking; Sudha does not have the heart to tell him that this will not staunch the flow of Rahul’s alcohol consumption, as he has become a person who carries alcohol on his body in the same way that other people carry their wallets.

When Rahul stands at the microphone to make his toast, he slurs his words as he begins an aimless story about a family trip and Sudha’s need to urinate while the family was on the road. His father tries to wrest the microphone from him as it screeches; the guests do not realize that this is not a comic bit until Rahul shoves his father and yells at him into the microphone.

When Sudha realizes that Rahul has left the reception in his car, she is the only one worried about him and braces for another call from the police. Her parents have become perversely calm in Rahul’s absence, while Roger, a bit too intoxicated himself, assures her that Rahul is simply young. Sudha finds herself wanting to scream at her husband “for believing in Rahul in a way she no longer could. She had never told Roger about the old game of hiding beer cans, a fact that now tortured her” (157). She now decides to continue withholding that information, fearing Roger’s blame and judgment.

The next morning, Roger and Sudha depart for their honeymoon. Sudha, tormented by the way Rahul ruined her reception, cannot enjoy it.

Rahul absconds. When his parents report his car missing, the police find it, abandoned, at a bus station in Framingham. A week later, a postcard from Columbus, Ohio arrives. On it is written: “Don’t bother looking for me here…I’m only spending the night. I don’t want to hear from any of you. Please leave me alone” (158). After another week, Sudha’s mother discovers that Rahul has stolen all of the gold jewelry she has acquired over her lifetime.

Two months after Rahul’s departure, Sudha learns that she is pregnant. This good news animates the whole family in Rahul’s absence. Sudha finds herself thinking of Rahul and the childhood they shared during her pregnancy—experiences that are an inextricable part of her, and that Roger will never understand. When she gives birth to her son, Neel, and Rahul isn’t there, she resigns herself to her brother’s absence.

Sudha’s parents now come to London at every available opportunity, “their tiny grandson plugging up the monstrous hole Rahul left in his wake” (159). Sudha also returns to work for a full five days a week, leaving her only two hours a day to spend with her son while the nanny tends to him for the remaining time. Sudha feels guilty about this, but assures herself that Rahul is too young to register her absence as neglect.

A letter arrives from Rahul. In it, he tells Sudha, whom he still addresses formally as “Didi,” that he is working as a line cook and enjoying it very much. He has relocated to a town near Ithaca, with Elena and her daughter, Crystal. Elena has pushed him to go to rehab. He also asks for her forgiveness for being a “jerk” at her wedding, and asks to come visit Sudha and Roger (161). Sudha replies immediately, telling him that she has become a mother and wants Rahul to meet her son.

When Rahul arrives, Sudha realizes, with astonishment, that she has not seen her brother since her wedding. However, she does not feel awkward in his presence, but rather that he completes “a part of her that had been missing, like the clothes she could wear again now that the weight of her pregnancy was gone” (162). She also notices that Rahul has lost his lean handsomeness and has acquired certain mannerisms of an old man. He looks frayed and needy. Sudha, not knowing exactly what preparations to make for Rahul’s alcoholism, has stashed the few bottles of scotch and vodka in the house into a chest at the foot of her bed, assuring herself that her husband will not notice.

Rahul treats Neel with affection and tenderness. Sudha watches Rahul and Roger interact like the strangers that they essentially are. Sudha puts Rahul up on the daybed in the study. Sudha’s home, despite its many stories, is not capacious. Her father, who has developed bursitis in his knee, cannot stay in her home during his visits due to the stairs.

When Rahul surveys the family photos put out in Sudha’s home, he observes that he is not in any of them. He notices a photograph of Neel’s annaprasan, his ceremonial first solid meal, for which Sudha and Rahul’s parents flew to London. Sudha downplays the occasion, but they both know that it is tradition for the maternal uncle to feed the child their first bites, a duty which fell to Sudha and Rahul’s father in Rahul’s absence. Also, when Sudha tells Rahul to be careful while playing with Neel, Rahul reminds her of Crystal, even flashing her a picture of the girl, and assures Sudha that he, too, is a parent.

In the ensuing days, Rahul is an attentive and engaged uncle, striking up a warm rapport with Neel. Each night, he sits next to the bathtub during Neel’s playtime and engagingly plays with him. He even makes Sudha and Roger briefly expendable during a trip to the zoo, as he and Neel spend the day engrossed with one another, a green balloon purchased by Rahul bobbing over their heads. Sudha and Roger also begin to leave Rahul alone with Neel, though only for short intervals of no longer than 10 minutes. Sudha is worried Rahul will be tempted by one of London’s numerous pubs, but she sees no sign of relapse, and Rahul does not drink during any of the meals they share. He also divulges that running and coffee are his new “addictions.”

Sudha decides to deliver the news to Rahul that their parents are planning to move back to Calcutta. In fact, they are in Calcutta presently (which had made it easier for Sudha to host Rahul undetected), looking for a place to live. She also tells her brother that their father will need to have surgery on his knee soon, privately anticipating the day when her father’s health worsens and she will have to be a good daughter to him without Rahul’s help. When she tells Rahul about the family plans to reunite in London for Christmas, she invites him, although she feels that his presence is an impossibility. Surprisingly, he replies that he will consider it.

The Saturday prior to Rahul’s planned Sunday departure, Rahul convinces Sudha and Roger to go to a movie together while he watches Neel. She rationalizes that she and Roger can catch an early show and make it home in time for Neel’s bath.

During the movie, Sudha keeps her phone’s volume on. An hour into the movie, she calls Rahul from the lobby. He assures her that everything is fine, and that he is currently feeding Rahul.

When Sudha and Roger arrive back home, Rahul and Neel are initially nowhere to be found. They find the television, playing a children’s program, on, and the highchair with the green balloon from the zoo tied to its side, still soiled. As Sudha charges up the stairs, she hears water splashing and calls out that it is OK—Rahul is simply giving Neel a bath. However, she arrives in the bathroom to find Neel alone, and not sitting inside of the plastic ring that keeps him from toppling. He is shivering in water that reaches to his chest, but otherwise content: “The mere sight of him sitting there, unattended, [causes] Sudha to emit a series of spontaneous cries and a volt of fear to seize her haunches” (170). Roger, arriving in the bathroom, demands that Neel tell him where his uncle is, although the child cannot yet talk. Then, he yanks Neel out of the tub, causing Neel to begin crying.

They find Rahul in the study, asleep, with a cup resting beneath the daybed. Roger begins to angrily stuff Rahul’s belongings into his bag. Sudha, asking her husband what he is doing, tells him that Rahul will pack when he awakens. Roger replies, “I’m making it easier for him. I don’t want your brother to set foot in our home or come near our child ever again” (170). Then, the two of them begin to argue. Sudha, weeping, finally confesses to Roger that she is the one who introduced Rahul to alcohol and initiated Rahul’s habit of stashing it in hiding places. She admits that it was wrong of her to keep this information from him; Roger looks at her with open disgust. He tells her that he would never have lied to her like she has. He then takes Neel from her arms and leaves her alone with her passed-out brother.

Sudha does not sleep all night, and Rahul does not stir. Sudha knows that Roger is completely justified in his anger and feelings of betrayal. She reflects on the fact that despite all of the destruction and grief that Rahul brought to their family, they could never find it in themselves to banish or disown him. She finds, however, that she is capable of doing so.

The next morning, Rahul is contrite, but completely oblivious to the consequences of his actions. Sudha asks him if she has caused his relapse, if her presence as his gateway to alcohol has triggered his addiction. She demands that Rahul tell him what happened the previous night. Then, she tells Rahul that he must leave. When he asserts that his flight will not depart until the evening, Sudha repeats that Rahul must leave immediately, and informs him that he left Neel in the bathtub the night before: “You passed out and left our baby alone in a tub. You could have killed him, do you understand?” (172). Rahul tries to rationalize, asserting that Neel is fine. Sudha continues to insist that Rahul must leave, even as Rahul tries to cover for himself by saying that he only had the smallest bit of alcohol. Sudha cuts him off, and Rahul resigns himself. He packs his things, takes the money that Sudha gives to him for cab fare, and departs.

Sudha hears Neel beginning to awaken. She knows that he will soon begin crying for her, and also knows that Neel is “young enough so that Sudha [is] still only goodness to him, nothing else” (173). She makes her way to the kitchen and finds the green balloon, now deflated, on the floor. She stuffs it into the trash. She is “surprised at how easily it fits, thinking of the husband who no longer trusted her, of the son whose cry now interrupted her, of the fledgling family that had cracked open that morning, as typical and as terrifying as any other” (173).