Unaccustomed Earth Read Online Free PDF Page A

alive. “I don’t remember it. She died.”
     
     
     
    She was reading stories to Akash before his bedtime when her father knocked softly on the door, handing her the receiver of the cordless phone. He was holding up his right hand awkwardly in front of his chest, and she saw that it was soapy from dishwater. “Adam is on the phone.”
    “Baba, I would have done those. Go to sleep.”
    “It is only a few things.” Her father had always done the dishes after the family had eaten; he claimed that standing upright for fifteen minutes after a meal helped him to digest. Unlike Ruma, unlike her mother, unlike anyone Ruma had ever known, her father never ran the water while he soaped everything. He waited until the plates and pans were ready to be rinsed, and until then it was only the quiet, persistent sound of the sponge that could be heard.
    She took the phone. “Rum,” she heard Adam say. That was what he’d begun to call her, soon after they met. The first time he wrote her a letter, he’d misspelled her name, beginning, “Dear Room—”
    She pictured him collapsed on the bed in a hotel room in Calgary, where he’d gone this time, his shoes off, his tie loosened, ankles crossed. At thirty-nine he was still boyishly handsome, with the generous, curling brown-blond hair that Akash had inherited, a whittled marathoner’s body, cheekbones she secretly coveted. Were it not for the powerful depth of his voice and the glasses he wore these days for distance he could still pass for one of the easy-going, athletic boys she went to college with.
    “My dad’s here.”
    “We spoke.”
    “What did he say?”
    “The usual questions: ‘How are you? How are your parents?’” It was true; this was all her father ever had to say to Adam.
    “Have you eaten?”
    There was a pause before he replied. She realized he must have been watching something on the television as they were speaking. “I’m about to head off to dinner with a client. How’s Akash?”
    “Right here.” She put the receiver to his ear. “Say hi to Daddy.”
    “Hi,” Akash said, without enthusiasm. Then silence. She could hear Adam saying, “What’s going on, buddy? Having fun with Dadu?” But Akash refused to engage any further, staring at the page of his book, and eventually she put the phone back to her own ear.
    “He’s tired,” she said. “He’s about to fall asleep.”
    “I wish I could fall asleep,” Adam said. “I’m wiped.”
    She knew he’d been traveling since early morning, that he’d been working all day, would have to work through his dinner. And yet she felt no sympathy. “I can’t imagine my father living here,” she said.
    “Then don’t ask him to.”
    “I think the visit is his way of suggesting it.”
    “Then ask.”
    “And if he says yes?”
    “Then he moves in with us.”
    “Should I ask?”
    She heard Adam breathing patiently through his nose. “We’ve been over this a million times, Rum. It’s your call. He’s your dad.”
    She turned a page of Akash’s book, saying nothing.
    “I need to get going,” Adam said. “I miss you guys.”
    “We miss you, too,” she said.
    She hung up the phone, putting it beside the framed photograph on the bedside table, of Ruma and Adam on their wedding day, slicing into the tiered white cake. She could not explain what had happened to her marriage after her mother’s death. For the first time since they’d met, at a dinner party in Boston when she was a law student and he was getting his MBA, she felt a wall between them, simply because he had not experienced what she had, because both his parents were still living in the house in Lincoln, Massachusetts, where Adam had been raised. It was wrong of her, she knew, and yet an awareness had set in, that she and Adam were separate people leading separate lives. Though his absences contributed to her isolation, sometimes it was worse, not better, when Adam was home. Even with Akash to care for, part of her was