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.
Excerpted from Interpreter of Maladies: Stories © Copyright 2009 by Jhumpa Lahiri. Reprinted with permission by Houghton Mifflin. All rights reserved.
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