| Biswo |
Posted
on 04-Sep-00 02:06 PM
story:
(Written long ago, this story is published
here just for fun.No copyright reserved, and
everybody is free to use this,interpret this
as they wish.. )
The princess who just left the story
--------------------------------------
Auburn,Alabama & that girl with her slit nose, and with rambunctious demenaour and a vital sense of beauty.Auburn is a small town,with gentle populace who
possess the adverbial courtesy, and who boast on the proverbial prim conducts.
She has inherited swarthy complexion,which poses flamboyance of aesthetics in
otherwise fair complexioned society.Like the stream of moonlights descending
from the remote celestial object to the flowing river in the earth,her beaming
smile would overflow my sensitivity and appoint it with envigorated enthusiasm
of the most tender feeling that I have ever experienced.This struggle with the
search of "experience reportory" caused somewhat irksome poking in my sentiment
time by time."Yes,Auburn""Yes,Auburn"I had often yelled in midnight while
programming one hardware description language and reflected at her physiognomy
that virtually would stand in the door of my office.She was suddenly featured as
fixture in my every successes,and her lips would abruptly preempt my sense of
aesthetics,her sound would typify my imagination of hope from a lady and tresses
of her hair would be the answer of what a good hair of a girl should be in my
conversation back in my home.A pining for her would become my quotidian reality
in the quaint land,with effusive beauty scenarios.The palpable feeling when
I saw her would overwhelm my attendant resolve several time and I would perforce
perform some trivial signals before advancing and fabricating some words for
her.She manufactures,her capability is transcendential in that regard.But that
affected demeanour,that manufactured smile and reassurance,all had some tints
of aesthetics that surpass the beauty of natural impulse.This incarnation of
beauty one day accompanied this writer to the local Chinese restaurant:
"Do you eat meat?" I ,clearly buoyed by her company,asked.
"No,but you can.I believe in Zenism."Her gentle reply.Oh,god,what I was doing
with her in that Chinese restaurant if she did disavow the nonvegetarian way!
I still had some moments to spend with her,though eating victuals alone.
When a comely girl crosses the way of a swine in the rural milieu,he is sure
to get influenced,and steadily this influence snowballs to the intensity of
riveting feelings.While eating Gongbaojiding,I felt the intensity of my spawning
emotions choking my speed of taking the cuisine so assiduosly prepared by the
local business savvy Chinese enterpreneur.People were coming in the restaurant
and one of the entry was a couple of customers who had no idea about Chinese
food.They signalled for mild curry,and then settled in the chairs reposed in
shipshape condition there inside the restaurant. I was fixating at her,while she
was curiously looking at the new comers and their arduous trial to get the
desired food.
"They should be great lover of that cuisine"She opined.
"Seems so."I replied inadvertently.As an inveterate vegetarian,she was
finding it unfathomable that people so much crave for meats.I looked at her
face,which was lowered and which was immaculately awash with evident sign
of enigmatic expressions.With the experience of my past life,I knew that
the best weapon to cope with somebody ignoramous and cute was to mold oneself
to that same degree of ignorance.
"You want to hear my experience in China?"I asked her.Her facial protracted
with delight,and the gleening teeth reflected at my eyes,causing me to wink
unwittingly.The flow of air from outside caused her ringlets of hair remain
awaft again and again,and she intermittently tried to align those wayward ring-
lets in her shapely physiognomy.
"Yes.Tell me some."
I pondered for a while.I had asked her in impulse.I didn't preponder,so had
to define my momentum within a short span of time:afterall,I have been to all
over China,from the developed coastal area to the underdeveloped hinterlands
of Sichuan and Qinghai.I decided to tell her about the undercretinized mobs that
I had seen in Golmud and Xining.
"They were really quixotic."I told her."And they were a far cry from the
sophisticated congregation of highhanded Chinese of coastal areas.But my problem
there was food."
"Food?"She seemed to be interested,since she intervened.I could see her face
petulant,her spindly legs vibrant and her face beaming.
Abetted by the indication that I was not monotonous raconteur,I tried to make
the incident more intriguing and continued:"I was vegeterian those days.And
being Hindu Brahmin,couldn't even think of eating beef.Sadly,those people there
had excessive propensity for food,and especially beef.So I couldn't eat anything
while travelling from Xining to Qinghai.For the whole eight hundred kilometers."
Still,you can't rivet the attention of a young girl with the barren tale of
the Red kingdom.I tried to resuscitate my worn out capability of storytelling
which I used to practise lavishly when I was still a small boy,but conceded
that they were not going to be effective against her steely sneer for those
things.I rued at my awkward handling of the case.She was imbibing in only the
coke,the ubiquitious product that can be found everywhere in the world, and I
was picking up the Gongbaojiding with my pair of chopstick.She looked at me
in a moment and I just smiled.I tried to dereference my attention,I tried
to look at the gauzy road and sleek locomotives running in the road outside,
and I tried to look for any other analogically tepid happening,but all
unavailingly.It seemed to me that she was there tucked in nonplusness,and
her demeanour was demonstrating her perception of bewilderment.In my sluggish
picking of pieces of meat,her quizzical eyes penetrated my all shiverings and
they were spilled in the milieu with the thrust of emotional apathy.A silent
meeting is the most algid thing in the world.And if it is prearranged,then it
is still more deplorable.I looked at her vestures,the shirt was frayed at the
fringe,and I am sure it was the chic,her lips were smeared with mild hue of
lipstick and the color of shirt was matching her accrued labial color, her
pants was sticking snugly with her spindly legs,and its butter color was the
most suitable thing that could be there.Her immaculate face was the waiter of
phenomenon that were taking place,with all the pores of epidermis flared up
so that they could be almost enumerated,and her nose was unconceivably well
positioned above the river-like lips,with murmereal splendor and sculptory
juxtaposition.It was the moment I realised how arduous task it must have been
for the mighty god to arrange this recalcitrant olfactory organ in the
unsymmetrical contour of skin that conceals the skulls and protracted hideous
array of teeth.
I found one thing she was enraptured with:the Chinese zodiac signs.I asked
one for her,and the hotel owner was enthusiastically obliging.I tried to
expound the semantics of those pictorial representation,but became wary of
expatiating.I just explained her a part of what I knew.And I had to ask her
birth year there.
"When was you born?It is necessary to find out your zodiac sign?"
"Seventy nine."She was unwavering.(That was why I was riveted towards her
so deeply.)
"Then you are rat."I told her.
"What are you?"She asked.
"Dragon." (I want to omit here that her question was symbol of her curiosity
towards me).I paid the bill,and left ,as usual,fifteen percentage of the bill as
tips for the waitress.Then we came out of the hotel.
"Did you relish?"I asked her.
"Very much." She replied.
--------- **** -------------------- **** ---------------------------------
We were walking in the street.The streets in Auburn can't inspire
any story as their counterparts in Kathmandu or Calcutta do.The streets there
afar are not just the roads,they are also embodiment of human life-cycle,the
streets affines themselves to untold stories of people.Those downtrodden people
who spend whole life in the street,those mendicants who trudge miles to collect
meals,those small children who wait for days and days for charity collations.
The streets there are reclining testimony of intrahuman relation,the street
there are unprotesting alibi of crimes,and the street there are confluence where
millions of people passes.Streets in Auburn rarely teem themselves with crowd,
with quarrelling couples,with pouting svelte or with joyous kids.They are just
the mum viewers of vehicles passing above them.
However,we were walking.I didn't have driving license then,nor did I own
a vehicle.Furthermore,the city was in proximity to my department.So the distance
was not unbridgeable and she apparently had plenty of time.My walk with her
reminded constitutionals of my highschool era,when lots of my girl classmates
would invite me to join them and I would coyly refuse their request.People
used to tell me that I was very cute and handsome then.There were so many
billet-douxes left for me in my highschool satchel,that I used to approach them
with trepidity and open them with trembling hands.I was always afraid of my
sisters who used to keep close eyes on my activities,and would object to any
thing I wanted to do except study.I scored record breaking scores in school
leaving exam and then I never again ran across such appreciative girls.The
last time,when I went to my town,the scenario was completely unrecognizable
and almost nobody there were excited at meeting me,or nobody really wanted
to broach that subject.I wanted to tell them:"well,look,I am worldly-wise,
I spent so many years in foreign countries,I spent so many hours studying,
and now you see,I am no more teenage.I am adult,yes Adult."But no body was
there for me to heed my entreaty.The girls were not beautiful either,and
most of those were already married.Even the most educated girls there have
propensity to have child as soon as possible,and it was no surprise the
putatively most beautiful girl of our highschool was encountered in the square
of Tandi Bazaar with her son.I was so tickled to see her in red sari,with her
prominent chest and wide hip,a line of vermillion runnning from her forehead to
the peak of the head,that I approached her and asked:"So you are married?"
"Oh,Biswo.You scared me.When did you come?"She asked me.
"Nana,don't ask me.Just tell me when did you marry?And is it interesting
experience?"I asked.
"Which experience?"She retorted."I married five years ago."
"I mean,how can you live with a boy for whole day,sleep with him for whole
night,without complaining,even being pliant to his every desires.You were so
obstreperous then.I couldn't live with my any roommate for more than six
months eventhough I was never considered contrary."
She looked poignant,and she replied "I just capitulated."
Her reply was the grimmest reply I ever heard in any occasion.The reply
that represented the downtrodden populace that is distributed everywhere and
copes the male members with the same nonchalance for their right everywhere.I
looked at the girl companying me in the street of Auburn at the time.She looked
a happy girl,with promising future and uncomparable beauty that would allow her
to conquer much more that were inconceivable for my highschool's friend.But
I just couldn't imagine whether there would be something,locality specific
thing,that would emerge here also that would make girls subject to adrinine
authority.Alabama was still very new for me,and I had still to master lots
of things.We walked in the street and a Woodpecker flew above us.
We parted after we reached our department.Without any promise for further
meeting.It was eventuality,and I had conceded to this denoument.But she was
still not that churlish.I had still an unspent portion of the royaltee I earned
while transforming jeremiads of a pauper Chinese peasant I met into a story,
I really wanted to give her some good present,but I didn't know how she would
think about that.I didn't want her to think that I was desperately trying to
get her favor,with the extent of profferring economically valuable come-ons.
When she went,she observed:"I really enjoyed the Coke."
I replied,"Thank you."
Since I had never been to English speaking country before,my spoken English
was still somewhat peccable.I unwittingly compared my awkward tongue to her
manipulated tongue that emitted melliflous words in English and felt somewhat
inhibited and ,perhaps,inferior.After her departure,my office room became
spacious and despondent at once,with accrued sense of solitude flushing my
thoughts,and voids substituting my previous choking sense.
I came out of office few minutes later,and I sincerely tried my best not to confront
her even accidentally.The cumuluses in sky were streaking towards east,some
birds were flying as if they were cruising the space they had inherited for
inspection,I looked above and the light of sun cast a hideous glaring in my
already weak eyes,I moved forward towards the Jordan Hare stadium of Auburn
University,that fortlike structure was the emblem of human desire to see things
collectively,enjoy painfully gasping living creatures,and in the other side,
the structure also struck me as an arena of human competition for supremacy
and the vehemence and the ruthlessness associated with it,then I walked towards
the Caroline Draughon Village hoping that I would surely pass through each
vehement competitions that had been so tangibly associated with human life,and
that were bound to run across my life also.She stopped coming to my life as a
beautiful lady,she tantalized my brain but with the tincture of taunts and
sarcasm,and the adverse feelings represented an quintessence of what was coming
in future:struggle.My journey took me to Caroline Draughon Village and I
walked into one of the apartments where one of my friends was living.A sense
of culmination of journey tried to gratify me,but I knew that another part of
journey was still to commence,and that the intervals of life were really
immaterial as long as one doesn't get lost there.
|
| hari |
Posted
on 05-Sep-00 12:18 PM
Yeah, Its a cool book .I would like to recommend too.
Hari
Interpreter of Maladies
Stories
By JHUMPA LAHIRI
Houghton Mifflin Company
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 Shukum
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