Unaccustomed Earth

Kaushik narrates this story in the first/second person, occasionally addressing Hema as “you.” Kaushik begins by telling us that he did not attend his father’s second wedding: he did not even know that his father had remarried until his father called him on the phone on a Sunday morning during Kaushik’s senior year at Swarthmore.

Kaushik recalls that his father had always been one to wake early, and that he would often go for morning walks—first in Bombay, and then on the North Shore of Massachusetts. Kaushik muses, too, that while his father had also always enjoyed his solitude, the solitude that sprung up following Kaushik’s mother’s death had been imprisoning, rather than liberating, for him.

Kaushik recalls that his father informed him that he acquired a new wife during his most recent trip to Calcutta, which he made without Kaushik. Kaushik then recounts the visit to India that he and his father made in the wake of his mother’s death. He asserts that his maternal grandparents had asked after his mother, named Parul, when he and his father arrived, despite the large ceremonial photograph of his mother that adorned their wall. It was only when they were told that Kaushik’s mother was not with them that his grandparents succumbed to tears. Kaushik intimates that his mother was an only child, and describes the way that she occupied her parents’ lives during the latter part of her life:

Occasionally my mother would return to them, first from Boston and then Bombay, like Persephone in the myth, temporarily filling up and brightening the rooms, scattering her creams and powders on the dressing table, sipping tea from cups she’d known since she was a girl, sleeping in the room where she’d been small (253).

Dr. Chaudhuri’s new wife is named Chitra. Chitra’s husband had died of encephalitis two years prior to her second marriage. Chitra had two young daughters: Rupa, who was 10 and Piu, who was 7. Chitra had been a schoolteacher and was 35, nearly twenty years the junior of Dr. Chaudhuri. Kaushik remembers that his father recited the facts of Chitra’s existence to Kaushik as if he had prepared for Kaushik’s resistance and outrage, but Kaushik felt only “a diluted version of the nauseating sensation that had taken hold the day that [he] learned [his] mother was dying, a sensation that had dropped an anchor in [him] and never fully left” (254). Dr. Chaudhuri continued, informing Kaushik that he had only known Chitra for a few weeks, and that the marriage was arranged. When he told Kaushik about the arrangement in a way that suggested his own innocence to the entire affair, it upset Kaushik more than anything else in the conversation, as he knew that his father was not one to abide by the plans of others.

Dr. Chaudhuri also told his son that he was tired of returning to an empty home, and Kaushik feared that the prospect of his father remarrying simply for companionship may have been worse than the prospect of him doing so for love. Kaushik recalls that though his parents’ marriage was also arranged, there were romantic elements to it: the way his father had been attracted to his mother right away, and doted on her to the point of making Kaushik feel like an accessory during the last years of her life. During the conversation, Dr. Chaudhuri also informed Kaushik that he was thinking of moving Chitra’s daughters into Kaushik’s old room, and that Kaushik could stay in the guest room during his visits. Dr. Chaudhuri voiced this solicitously, and Kaushik quickly and tersely acquiesced.

After the phone call, Kaushik confided in Jessica, a girl who spent the night in his dorm the previous night. They’d met in Spanish class and had not been seeing each other for long. Before that morning, Kaushik had told her nothing of his mother’s death, which happened the summer before his freshman year at Swarthmore. But that morning, he did, and found comfort by crying, briefly, in her presence.

When Kaushik left for Swarthmore, Dr. Chaudhuri gave him the Audi that Dr. Chaudhuri had purchased when the family returned to America from Bombay. Although Dr. Chaudhuri tried to pass this gesture off as a way to ensure that Kaushik’s trips back home would go smoothly, Kaushik perceived that “it was really an excuse to get rid of yet another thing [his] mother had touched, known, or otherwise occupied” (256). The day that Dr. Chaudhuri and Kaushik returned from the hospital, alone, Dr. Chaudhuri had taken every single photograph of Parul, both those that were framed and those that were in albums, and put them in a shoebox. Kaushik also recounts that his father had not waited to scatter his wife’s belongings among friends, and that the probable last recollection that he has of Hema is from that period in his life: Hema and her mother had been one of the many families that came to pick through his mother’s things following her death. His mother also told him to be sure to keep her ruby choker and jewelry set with pearls and emeralds in it for his future wife, but Kaushik had found himself unable to go through her jewelry following her death.

Kaushik stopped for two hours at Jessica’s family’s farmhouse on his way back to his father’s home. When his father remarked about Kaushik’s lateness, Kaushik kept the fact of his detour from him. Kaushik remembers being unaccustomed to the heavy smell of food that greeted the entrance to the home. And while he found everything else mostly unchanged, Kaushik was suddenly struck by the largeness of the house, likening it to an institutional space. He also noticed an Indian tapestry draped on the dining table: something his mother would never have allowed. Although Kaushik’s palate was no longer accustomed to the generous and kingly Indian meals that Indian women such as Chitra are accustomed to preparing, and which she prepared that day, he gratefully ate luchis nonetheless.

Just as Kaushik asked about his new stepmother and stepsiblings, Chitra appeared in the kitchen. He noted, with renewed shock, the fact that Chitra was closer to his own age than she was to his father’s. She informed Kaushik that she wanted him to address her as “Mamoni,” and asked him, with genuine kindness, whether he had any objection to her request.

Chitra then brought her daughters in. Kaushik noted their overly warm and unfashionable clothes, which he expected to be expeditiously replaced by mall-bought clothes. He also noticed that the two girls were “darker and sweeter-looking” than their mother (262). When Chitra referred to Kaushik using the formal term for older brother, Dada, Kaushik specified that he wanted the girls to call him Kaushik. Dr. Chaudhuri quickly intervened and suggested that the girls call Kaushik “KD,” short for “Kaushik Dada.” Kaushik, preferring this to simply “Dada,” acquiesced. Kaushik recalls the girls’ heavy accents and practiced polite phrases, musing that he must have sounded just as foreign to Hema’s ears when he arrived at her house so many years ago. Dr. Chaudhuri also suggested that Kaushik could bring Rupa and Piu to the Aquarium and Science Museum during his visit, to which Kaushik did not reply.

Kaushik next remembers that he became suddenly sickened by Chitra’s presence in the kitchen that day: although his mother never cooked, it was the room that bore the most marks of former presence. Kaushik remembers ignoring Chitra’s urging that he eat more while looking for the bottle of Johnnie Walker that had always been kept in a cupboard above the kitchen sink while his mother was alive. When his father walked in, Kaushik asked him where the scotch was. Dr. Chaudhuri then conversed privately with Chitra, who left the room, before explaining that he had stopped drinking, in order to attend to Chitra’s delicate, traditional sensibilities.

That night, Dr. Chaudhuri suggested that Kaushik could bring Piu and Rupa to buy a Christmas tree the following day. Kaushik was puzzled by this request; since his mother’s death, he and his father had become accustomed to celebrating Christmas at friends’ houses. Kaushik also remembers the way that his mother would decorate their old Bombay apartment for Christmas, and then reminisce about her old Cambridge days, complete with snow and Hema’s family, during this time of the year. Even though Kaushik was aware that his stepsisters must have been hanging on his every word in the next room, he replied, “Those girls are barely half my age. Do you expect me to play with them?” (265). Kaushik found that his father seemed unbothered by this remark, musing that his father might have actually been relieved that the contention between the two of them had now announced itself.

Kaushik recalls that his father’s face had changed in the wake of his mother’s death: It had acquired:

an expression that permanently set his features in a different way. It was less an expression of sadness than of irritated resignation, the way he used to look if a glass slipped and broke from [his] hands when [he] was little, or if the day happened to be cloudy when we had planned a picnic (266).

He noticed, however, that that expression was no longer on his father’s face that night.

Kaushik remembers only one person who occupied the guest room before he did: the nurse, named Mrs. Gharibian, that the family had employed before Parul decided that she wanted to die in the hospital. Kaushik remembers that Mrs. Gharibian once told Kaushik that witnessing the process of dying was the worst part, and, while Kaushik had recoiled from her words at the time, he had found them to be accurate. He also remembers the way that his mother religiously used the house’s swimming pool until she became too weakened by chemotherapy to do so.

Remembering the way that Chitra had waited on him, and then eaten in a different room like a servant, the night before, Kaushik awoke the next morning anticipating an elaborate breakfast. However, no such thing greeted him. Instead, he remembers finding Piu and Rupa watching Family Feud, and Chitra, who appeared even younger in the absence of makeup, sipping a cup of tea with Kaushik’s mother’s tin of biscuits open beside her.

Kaushik then drove Piu and Rupa to Dunkin’ Donuts, as he was accustomed to morning coffee and there was none in the house. Before they left, Chitra asked him if she’d be safe in the house alone. Kaushik, astonished, said yes. Piu and Rupa then told him that Chitra normally did not allow them to venture outside without her, and that she was afraid in the house because of her inability to see the neighbors, and also afraid that they would fall into the swimming pool and drown.

Kaushik ultimately ordered each of the girls a Boston Cream donut, which they wanted because he said that flavor was his favorite. The two girls ate the donuts happily while conversing privately amongst themselves and sitting across from Kaushik in a booth. Kaushik remembers wondering how much of their father they remembered. Even as he keenly felt the desertion of so many memories of his own mother in the wake of her death, he felt himself more fortunate than his stepsisters in that he had had more time with his mother than they had with their father. He sensed, too, that the girls carried in themselves “something that had broken too soon and had not mended, marking them in spite of their lightheartedness” (272).

Rupa had suddenly asked Kaushik what his mother was like. Kaushik was disarmed by the feeling of vulnerability that this question stirred in him, and when Rupa asked if he had a photograph of her, he lied and said no, rather than retrieving the photograph of his mother that he carried in his wallet. The photograph showed Parul at a party in Bombay, before her illness, and wasn’t a particularly clear image. Kaushik clipped it and put it in his wallet after his mother’s death, but hadn’t looked at it since. Piu then told him that Chitra had been searching the house for photographs of Parul, but had come up empty.

Kaushik remembers that Chitra was visibly anxious when Kaushik and her daughters returned to the house, but that she did not ask what had kept them for so long. Finding it impossible to be truly alone in the house’s open spaces, Kaushik retreated to his room and declined the invitation to eat dinner with Chitra and his stepsisters. He also called Jessica that evening, who invited him to leave and spend the holiday with her, but Kaushik could not yet bring himself to simply flee. Later, when he saw Chitra’s hair freed from its braid and falling down her back, he could not help but recall his mother’s hair, and the way it fell out of her head during her chemotherapy treatment. Furthermore, when he imagined Chitra’s black hair turning grey in the way that his mother was denied, he becomes fully cognizant of his hatred for Chitra. He also remembers Chitra leveling a volley of complaints about the home, asking him about the absence of curtains and a railing on the stairs. Kaushik replied to these questions with terse assertions that the home was the way that it was because that was how Parul and the family preferred it, and then the two found that there was nothing left to say to each other.

When Dr. Chaudhuri asked Kaushik to retrieve the Christmas decorations, Kaushik became surprised that the box containing all of the Christmas accouterments, which was last used during Parul’s first Christmas in the house and last Christmas ever, was still around. In the basement, Kaushik found sundry boxes full of items from his parents’ old life in Bombay, as well as a box containing some of his old photography equipment. He recalled the way that his mother would sometimes keep him company in the makeshift darkroom that he’d constructed in the basement during his senior year of high school. He remembers that, once, sitting in the darkness with Kaushik, she talked about her own death in the cryptic way she sometimes did, saying that she wanted to think of death as similar to the “perfectly dark, silent, sealed-up” space of the darkroom (278).

Kaushik also remembers finding the thought of Chitra rifling through the box of Christmas decorations unbearable, although he also has no desire to go through the box himself. He remembers being upset by watching Chitra touch many of the things around the house that his mother once touched. He writes, “When my father had tried to remove the signs of my mother from the house I blamed him for being excessive, but now I blamed him for not having done enough” (279).

Kaushik then lied, saying that he could not find the box. He noticed that his father received this information with resignation, and Kaushik attributed his father’s new, easy acceptance of “the minor defeats of life” to Chitra’s presence (279). Kaushik and his father ended up trimming the tree together and decorating it with simple blue ornaments that to Kaushik’s eyes made it look like a bland corporate creation, rather than something inside of a family home. Also, when Dr. Chaudhuri asked Kaushik to take a photograph of that year’s Christmas celebrations, Kaushik informed him that he forgot his camera at school. For a moment, Kaushik then saw the old “look of irritated disappointment, the one that had appeared the day [his] mother died and was missing now that he’d married Chitra,” flash across his father’s face (280). When Dr. Chaudhuri contended that he did not understand why Kaushik had not wanted any pictures of anything for years, Kaushik calmly countered that his father’s perception was wrong. In those moments, Kaushik understood that he and his father were “stating facts and at the same time arguing, an argument whose depths only he and [Kaushik] could fully comprehend” (280).

Kaushik also recalls that the five of them took a trip to Boston that year. When Chitra asked Kaushik why he chose a college that was so far away, Kaushik ignored her: he had become accustomed to treating many of Chitra’s questions with silence. Kaushik was also reminded of his mother’s last days, spent at Mass General, while on that trip. He remembers, too, that the way that Chitra smiled at his father that day made it clear that she was falling in love with him.

That year, Dr. Chaudhuri planned a trip to Disney World for Chitra and the girls, and he invited Kaushik along. Kaushik made up an excuse about a winter session at Swarthmore, which his father received without contention, but Piu and Rupa were devastated when they learned that Kaushik would not be joining them. Kaushik attributed their devastation to the belief that his stepsisters saw him as a kind of buffer: his existence proved that Dr. Chaudhuri had an entire life before them, and so took the sting out of “the growing, incontrovertible fact that Chitra and [Dr. Chaudhuri] now formed a couple” (282). 

Kaushik remembers feeling lightened by the knowledge of the upcoming trip, which motivated him to take Piu and Rupa on outings to both the Science Museum and the Aquarium. He remembers that they were well-mannered and grateful during those trips, and also the way that taking care of them made him consider what it might be like to be a father himself.

A few days shy of New Year’s Eve, Dr. Chaudhuri and Chitra attended a party, and left Piu and Rupa home with Kaushik, who volunteered to order a pizza for the girls and make it a party, of sorts. However, he also remembers feeling irritated at the fear that Chitra had created within her daughters when they became terrified at the prospect of staying alone in the home for 10 minutes while he went to pick up the pizza, and he ended up simply taking his stepsisters to the restaurant with him, where they ate their meal.

Jessica also called Kaushik that night, and renewed her suggestion that he come stay in her family home while his father, Chitra, and the girls went to Disney World. While Kaushik felt a growing affection for Jessica, he did not yet wish to witness her within her parents’ home, and while he did not state this outright, Jessica sensed his reticence and began to quarrel with him for the first time.

When Kaushik finished his phone call with Jessica, he could not find Piu and Rupa. Being that it was already ten o’clock at night, he thought that the girls might be asleep, and poked into their room to make sure. It was the first time he had looked at his old room during this visit, and he found that his old posters had not been taken down. He noted, too, that the closet door was ajar, and a chair had been used as a stepstool within it. Rupa and Piu were presiding over something hidden from his view: “‘She looks sad in this one’ [he] heard Piu whisper in Bengali, and then Rupa, saying, ‘She and KD smile the same way’” (285).

When Kaushik demanded that the girls tell him what they were doing, they leapt apart, having been unaware of his presence. He found approximately a dozen photographs of his mother, taken from “the box [his] father had sealed up and hidden after her death,” arranged on the floor in front of them (285).

Piu immediately began to cry as Kaushik repeated his demand for the girls to tell them what they were doing. He asked her where she found the photographs, and then Rupa joined her sister in crying. Piu retrieved the formerly-sealed shoebox from beneath the bed. Kaushik told his stepsisters that they had no right to look at the photographs inside the shoebox, as they did not belong to them.

Kaushik, suddenly fully cognizant of the desire to flee, a feeling that had percolated inside him for several days, hurriedly returned to the guest room, packed his things, and left. His stepsisters did not come out from their room to beg him to stay.

Without any idea of where to go, Kaushik began driving north on the highway, and rapidly crossed out of Massachusetts. In Penobscot Bay, he found a motel to stay in, and was awoken the following morning by the cries of seabirds. He remembers feeling “sick to [his] stomach about what had happened the night before, afraid of [himself] and ashamed” (288). He imagined that his stepsisters must have grown very afraid in the house alone, which he feels worse about than the concern he must have caused his father.

When Kaushik reached his father later that afternoon via pay phone, Dr. Chaudhuri told him that while he knew that things were difficult for Kaushik, he could have at least had the decency to wait until the morning to depart. Kaushik also learned that his stepsisters were asleep when Dr. Chaudhuri and Chitra returned to the house, and that Kaushik’s behavior had alarmed Chitra. Kaushik also realized that Piu and Rupa said nothing about the altercation that occurred, nor the things that Kaushik had said to them.  

Kaushik resumed driving the coast after that, being informed that he would eventually arrive at the border with Canada, which he did in five days, and then spent four days returning. He used the $1000 his father had given him for Christmas for this traveling. He became convinced that if his mother had survived, she would have gotten his father to buy her one of the many seaside homes that he saw during his travels.

Kaushik also addresses Hema here, musing that she must have been in college at the time, although his persistent memory of her at the time was of her as a girl close to Rupa’s age. He remembers that he once caused Hema to cry because of something he said to her while he lived with her family. He also remembers that although he and his family did not belong in Hema’s home, “it was the last place that had felt like a home” to him (291). He intimates that far more than the house they eventually moved into, Hema’s home was the last place where he and his family could live in denial of his mother’s illness and eventual demise.

Kaushik also recounts a day that he went walking along some cliffs situated close to the US-Canada border. On a spot that had a vantage point of crashing waves, he opened the shoebox, which he had taken with him when he’d left. He began looking at every single photograph, but found himself unable to look beyond a few of them. Being also unable to scatter the photographs into the sea, he dug a hole, which took him hours, and buried the box there.

A few weeks prior to Kaushik’s college graduation, his father called him to inform him that he, Chitra, and the girls would be moving from the house in favor of a more populous Boston suburb with an existing Bengali community. Kaushik had already made plans to travel in South America after his graduation and was not anticipating a return to any kind of family home. The events that transpired during the previous Christmas were never addressed again.

Kaushik recalls that when Piu and Rupa attended his graduation, they were perfectly polite, but also remote. Kaushik understood that they had never told his father nor their mother the full truth of what he had said to them that night, and that they never would; they retained a silence that both protected and punished him, “the memory of that night was now the only tie between [them], eclipsing everything else” (293). At his graduation, Kaushik’s father remarked that both he and Kaushik were moving forward. Kaushik understood that both he and his father were grateful to Chitra “for chafing under whatever lingered of [his] mother’s spirit in the place she had last called home and for forcing [them] to shut its doors” (293).