Unaccustomed Earth Read Online Free PDF

beginning to prefer the solitude, without Adam hovering around, full of concern about her state of mind, her mood.
    Ten years ago her mother had done everything in her power to talk Ruma out of marrying Adam, saying that he would divorce her, that in the end he would want an American girl. Neither of these things had happened, but she sometimes thought back to that time, remembering how bold she’d had to be in order to withstand her mother’s outrage, and her father’s refusal to express even that, which had felt more cruel. “You are ashamed of yourself, of being Indian, that is the bottom line,” her mother had told Ruma again and again. She knew what a shock it was; she had kept her other involvements with American men a secret from her parents until the day she announced that she was engaged. Over the years her mother not only retracted her objections but vehemently denied them; she grew to love Adam as a son, a replacement for Romi, who had crushed them by moving abroad and maintaining only distant ties. Her mother would chat with Adam on the phone, even when Ruma was not at home, e-mailing him from time to time, carrying on a game of Scrabble with him over the Internet. When her parents visited, her mother would always bring a picnic cooler filled with homemade mishti, elaborate, syrupy, cream-filled concoctions which Ruma had never learned to make, and Adam loved.
    It was after she’d had a child that Ruma’s relationship with her mother became harmonious; being a grandmother transformed her mother, bringing a happiness and an energy Ruma had never witnessed. For the first time in her life Ruma felt forgiven for the many expectations she’d violated or shirked over the years. She came to look forward to their nightly conversations, reporting the events of her day, describing what new things Akash had learned to do. Her mother had even begun to exercise, getting up at five in the morning, wearing an old Colgate sweatshirt of Ruma’s. She wanted to live to see her grandchildren married, she’d said. There were times Ruma felt closer to her mother in death than she had in life, an intimacy born simply of thinking of her so often, of missing her. But she knew that this was an illusion, a mirage, and that the distance between them was now infinite, unyielding.
     
     
     
    After finishing with the dishes he dried them and then scrubbed and dried the inside of the sink, removing the food particles from the drainer. He put the leftovers away in the refrigerator, tied up the trash bag and put it into the large barrel he’d noticed in the driveway, made sure the doors were locked. He sat for a while at the kitchen table, fiddling with a saucepan whose handle—he’d noticed while washing it—was wobbly. He searched in the drawers for a screwdriver and, not finding one, accomplished the task with the tip of a steak knife. When he was finished he poked his head into Akash’s room and found both the boy and Ruma asleep. For several minutes he stood in the doorway. Something about his daughter’s appearance had changed; she now resembled his wife so strongly that he could not bear to look at her directly. That first glimpse of her earlier, standing on the lawn with Akash, had nearly taken his breath away. Her face was older now, as his wife’s had been, and the hair was beginning to turn gray at her temples in the same way, twisted with an elastic band into a loose knot. And the features, haunting now that his wife was gone—the identical shape and shade of the eyes, the dimple on the left side when they smiled.
    In spite of his jet lag he had trouble falling asleep, was distracted by the sound of a motorboat cutting now and then across the lake. He sat up in bed flipping absently through an issue of U.S. News & World Report, which he’d taken from the seat pocket on the plane, and then opened a guidebook to Seattle that had been placed on the bedside table, he guessed, for his benefit. He glanced at the