Unaccustomed Earth - Unaccustomed Earth Part 24
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Unaccustomed Earth Part 24

He looked up at her. His eyes were reddish. "I'm on vacation."

"Your grades weren't good, Rahul. You need to work a little harder."

"I did work hard," he said.

"I know the first year can be tough."

"I did work hard," he repeated. "My professors hate me. Is that my fault?"

"I'm sure they don't hate you," she said. She considered crossing the room and sitting on the edge of the bed but remained where she was.

"What the fuck do you know?" he said, giving her a start.

"Look, I'm just trying to help."

"I'm not asking you to help. You don't need to fix anything. Has it ever occurred to you that my life might be fine the way it is?"

His words silenced her, cut to the bone. She'd always had a heavy hand in his life, it was true, striving not to control it but to improve it somehow. She had always considered this her responsibility to him. She had not known how to be a sister any other way.

"You don't even live here," he continued. "You think you can stroll in and make everything perfect before you disappear to London? Is that what you want to do?"

She looked at him, and then at the mug at the side of his bed, wondering how much he'd consumed in the course of the evening, where the bottle was hidden. She thought of her parents sleeping down the hall, unaware of what he was doing, and she felt indignant on their behalf. "You're smart, Rahul. You're a lot smarter than me. I don't get it."

He leaned over and picked up the cup from the floor. He took a sip and swallowed, then slid the cup under the bed, out of sight. "You don't have to get it, Didi. You don't have to get everything all the time."

On Sudha's last night before heading back to Philadelphia he surprised them, agreeing to go out to a restaurant to celebrate her impending departure for England. Their parents were in good moods, reminiscing about London, trying to remember the order of stops on the Piccadilly Line. Rahul was jovial, too, telling Sudha about all the writers' homes and graves she should visit while she was there. He spoke with an aggressive authority, as if he'd been to Marx's tomb himself, and for the first time it occurred to Sudha that perhaps Rahul was jealous of those years she and her parents had lived in England, those years when Rahul did not exist. He ordered a Singapore Sling and nursed it slowly through the meal. He mentioned nothing about having plans later on, but before the check came he looked at his watch and leapt up from the table, saying he was late for something, and left in his own car.

Sudha went home with her parents, was up watching Spellbound on the VCR when the phone rang. It was Rahul calling from the local police station. He'd been pulled over on a quiet road near Mill Pond for wavering in his lane. His blood alcohol content was not extreme, but because he was under twenty-one it was enough to get him arrested. He asked Sudha to come to the station alone, to bring three hundred dollars in cash. But it was past midnight, and besides, the keys to her parents' car were in the pocket of her father's pants, in their bedroom. She woke up her father, told him to get dressed. Together they went to post bail and release Rahul from the cell. Her father drove, his face creased with sleep, seeming disoriented in the town he'd lived in for years. They stopped at an ATM and withdrew money. "You go," her father said when they reached the station. "I prefer to wait in the car." His voice faltered as he spoke, as it had the day he'd called Sudha in college, to tell her his father died. And so she spared her father that humiliation, that pain, entering a place where handcuffed criminals were brought. When she saw Rahul he was sober, the pads of his fingers blackened from ink. It was a Sunday night, the arraignment scheduled for the following day. "Will you go with me?" he asked as they walked back to the car, and he was shaken enough for her to assure him that she would.

"It's ridiculous," her mother said the next morning as Rahul slept. She blamed the police for overreacting. "It's not like he had an accident. He was only going forty miles an hour. They probably stopped him just for being Indian." Her father said nothing. He sat sipping his tea and reading the Sunday Globe. He'd said nothing on the way home.

"That wasn't the problem," Sudha said slowly, forcing cold butter across the surface of her toast.

"What are you saying, Sudha?" her mother asked, sounding bothered. Her father did not put down his paper, but she:SPG: sensed that he had stopped reading. Sudha knew that what she was about to say was something they expected and also viscerally feared, like disobedient children who are about to be slapped. That it was up to her to deliver the blow.

"I think Rahul might have a drinking problem."

"Sudha, please," her mother said. After a pause she added, "I gather everyone at American colleges drinks." She spoke as if drinking were an undergraduate hobby, a phase one outgrew.

"Not like that."

"Didn't you drink in college?"

"Not like that," Sudha repeated. Not enough to get arrested, she was tempted to say.

"That's the problem with this country," her mother said.

"Too many freedoms, too much having fun. When we were young, life wasn't always about fun."

Sudha pitied her mother, pitied her refusal to accommodate such an unpleasant and alien fact, her need to blame America and its laws instead of her son. She sensed that her father understood, but he refused to engage in the conversation, refused to confront Rahul when he eventually came downstairs, showered and penitent, promising never to do such a thing again. Her parents had always been blind to the things that plagued their children: being teased at school for the color of their skin or for the funny things their mother occasionally put into their lunch boxes, potato curry sandwiches that tinted Wonderbread green. What could there possibly be to be unhappy about? her parents would have thought. "Depression" was a foreign word to them, an American thing. In their opinion their children were immune from the hardships and injustices they had left behind in India, as if the inoculations the pediatrician had given Sudha and Rahul when they were babies guaranteed them an existence free of suffering.

She was excited to be in London, curious to know the land of her birth. Before leaving she had applied for her British passport, a document her parents had not obtained for her when she was born, and when she presented it at Heathrow the immigration officer welcomed her home. Her parents went with her and stayed ten days, settling her into her hall of residence off Tottenham Court Road. They reminded her to look right before crossing the street, bought her cardigans from Marks and Spencer's to see her through the winter. They took her to Balham on the Tube to show her the house where she'd been an infant. Together they made a trip to Sheffield, three hours away through the countryside, where their old landlord Mr. Pal now lived with his family. They did not speak of Rahul unless forced to by friends, and when they did, it was always the same unobjectionably impressive facts about him-that he was at Cornell, a sophomore now. These facts gave her parents a feeble hope: as if college, where he'd begun to fall apart, would magically put him together again.

After her parents left she grew busy with her classes, and with the new friends she made who came from all over the world, joining them to study and sightsee and visit pubs. Perhaps because it was her birthplace, she felt an instinctive connection to London, a sense of belonging though she barely knew her way around. In spite of the ocean that now separated her from her parents, she felt closer to them, but she also felt free, for the first time in her life, of her family's weight. Still, she could not drink anymore without thinking of Rahul, always conscious that the second pint she drained, satisfied at the end of a night out, would not have been enough for him. At the arraignment she'd sat next to him in the crowded courtroom, waiting for his name to be called, listening as the charges were read. She was there to stand by him, to support him, but in that place of judgment she was not on his side. His license was suspended for six months and he was ordered to attend some alcohol education classes in Ithaca. In the end her father had had to pay nearly two thousand dollars in fines and fees. The arrest was mentioned in The Wayland Town Crier, a paper her parents received.

In November, wandering through the National Gallery, she met a man. She had been admiring The Arnolfini Marriage by van Eyck, lingering in front of it after a cluster of people had passed. It was an oil painting of a couple in a bedroom holding hands, with a small dog standing at their feet. The man wore a fur-trimmed purple cape and an overly large black straw hat. The woman wore an emerald-green gown that trailed like a heavy curtain onto the floor, some of the material gathered up in her left hand. She had a white veil on her head and looked possibly pregnant, Sudha wasn't sure. There was a window behind the man, with a piece of fruit, an apricot or a tangerine, on the sill. On the wall hung a convex mirror that reflected everything in the painting.

"Come closer," the man next to Sudha said, ushering her a few steps forward so that no one could cross their line of vision. "Otherwise you can't really see." He started talking about the mirror, how it was the focal point of the painting, capturing the floor and the ceiling, the room and the world outside, and then she saw that it reflected not only the couple but also a pair of men standing in the doorway, peering into the room just as she was. "One of them is van Eyck," the man said. "That's what the inscription above the mirror says. It's Latin for 'van Eyck was here.'" He spoke softly, as if for Sudha alone, with the singsong British cadence that was already influencing Sudha's speech. His dark hair was slightly long, and he kept raking it with his fingers away from his face. She could smell the slightly spiced soap on his skin. He wore a tweed blazer and corduroy pants, and carried a raincoat draped over one arm. He told her that the two men in the doorway of the painting were witnessing the couple's union, adding that the painting was intended to serve as a marriage certificate. "Of course, that's just one interpretation," the man said. "Some argue that it's a betrothal scene."

She studied the details he spoke of, the glow of the paint, conscious of their shared gaze. "What about the shoes? Do they mean something?" Sudha heard herself asking, pointing to a pair of abandoned wooden clogs in the foreground, and then to some red slippers by the carpet.

The man turned to Sudha then. He was older than she expected, closer to forty judging from the eyes, clear blue eyes that settled calmly upon different points of her face. His expression was serious, placidly cast, but the sides of his mouth now rose up in a smile. "I suspect it means they're standing on holy ground. Either that or she just went shopping."

She had not known that day what a famous painting it was, but the man never made her feel ignorant. They walked to other paintings, the man bending his head down toward Sudha's and talking about them, and eventually he asked if she would like to join him for tea. His name was Roger Featherstone. He had a PhD in art history, was an editor at an art magazine and had also written a book about Renaissance portraiture. He wooed Sudha consistently, romantically: flowers every time he knocked on the door, gifts of gloves and earrings and perfume. He was an only child who had grown up in English boarding schools; his father had worked overseas for Singer sewing machines and now both his parents were dead. Roger was born in India, spent the first three years of his life in Bombay but remembered nothing. He had been married in his twenties to a girl he'd known at Cambridge; after two years she left him, renounced her possessions, and joined a Buddhist monastery in Tibet.

He took responsibility for things, booking theater tickets, making reservations at restaurants, packing picnics and dragging Sudha off to Hampstead Heath. He was the first man she'd dated who was never late, never forgot to call when he said he would, and Sudha quickly recognized in him the same strain of competence she possessed. He enjoyed food and cooking, inspired to get up early and walk to a favorite bakery for pastries, surprising Sudha, the first morning she woke up in his flat in Shepherd's Bush, with breakfast on a tray. He had lived alone for many years but quickly opened his life to her, giving her a key, lined drawers in his bureau, a glass shelf in his medicine cabinet. In his youth he had dreamed of being a painter, had enrolled at Chelsea Art School, but after a teacher told him he would not go far he never touched a canvas again. He was not bitter about this turn of events; like Sudha, he was a person who understood what his limits were. At the same time he could be exacting, writing withering reviews for his magazine, insisting on the best table at restaurants, sending back wine. Like Sudha he was moderate with alcohol, always ordering a bottle for the table but seldom consuming more than a glass or two.

As Christmas approached she told her parents she had too much work and did not come home, when in fact she and Roger went away together, to Seville and then to the Costa del Sol. When she returned from Spain there was a message at the switchboard of her dormitory from her parents, asking her to call. When she did, from one of the pay phones in the lobby of the dorm, they told her that Rahul's grades had not improved, that a letter had come from an adviser, expressing concern. He was in Wayland now for Christmas break; after one explosive fight, he'd stopped speaking to them. She was glad that Roger wasn't there to overhear the call, that he'd kissed her good-bye in the taxi and gone back to his flat. She'd painted a hazy image of her family that he absorbed as if it were an endnote in a book, something stemming from her but safely tucked out of sight. "I can't wait to meet them," he told her, words that, Sudha hoped, made his intentions clear. Beyond the basic details he did not probe. And so she did not tell Roger about Rahul's drinking, about his arrest, about the fact that she had not talked to her brother in months.

Her parents asked her to speak to Rahul, saying he'd gone out for a walk, to try in a little while. She waited a few days. She was surprised after all these months by how upset she felt. And she was upset at her parents, too, for still depending on her to help. She called from Roger's flat, putting the charges on a card while Roger was at work. Rahul had turned twenty in the first week of January, a thing she'd let pass without acknowledgment. He picked up the phone, and she wished him happy birthday now. It was noon in Massachusetts, early evening in London. The sky was dark through Roger's kitchen window; at the counter, Sudha was setting out cheese and crackers and olives for her and Roger to eat together when he got home.

"Things okay?" she asked.

"Everything's fine. Ma and Baba are getting totally hysterical over nothing." Rahul spoke as if no strain existed between them, asking her how London was.

"They said you failed two classes."

"They were lousy classes."

"Are you even going to your classes?"

"Lay off, Didi," he said, his mood turning.

"Are you?" she persisted.

There was a pause. She heard the flicking of a lighter, the first pent-up exhale of a cigarette. "I don't want to be doing this."

"What do you want to do?" she asked, not bothering to conceal her exasperation.

"I'm writing a play."

She was surprised by this information and found it promising that he was actually doing something. He had always been a good writer; once, when he was in high school, he'd written a response to one of the take-home essay questions she had on a philosophy exam at Penn, a question about Plato's Euthyphro that her professor had approved of with a lengthy comment.

She put an olive in her mouth, extracted the thin purple pit, and placed it on a painted dish she and Roger had bought together in Seville. "That's great, Rahul. But you have to study, too." "I want to drop out." "Ma and Baba aren't going to go for that. Finish college and then you can do whatever you want." "I'm sick of wasting time. And I want my car back. I hate not driving. I feel trapped." She controlled herself, not telling him that it was ludicrous to expect their parents to trust him on the road again. "It's just two more years of your life, Rahul. Try to stick it out. Otherwise you'll end up hating yourself." "Jesus, you sound just like them," he said and hung up on her.

She returned to Boston in April, during the break after the Lent term, a diamond ring from Roger concealed on a chain beneath her sweater, and this made her feel dipped in a protective coating from her family. After January her parents had not bothered her again about Rahul, telling her, the one time she asked, that he'd gone back to school. She felt guilty for distancing herself but not enough to counsel her parents, not enough to speak to Rahul. She had a ten-thousand-word dissertation to write on deregulation for her degree, and she had Roger, had moved in with him by then. She was surprised to see Rahul standing at the airport with her parents. All three of them looked sad, preoccupied, her parents perking up only when they caught sight of her behind her trolley piled with bags.

"Hey," she said, walking up to him, hugging him, though initially his long arms remained at his side. "It's good to see you."

"Welcome home," he said, and when he stepped back, she saw that he was not smiling.

"Is your semester finished already?"

He shook his head, still refusing to meet her gaze, and then a small, odd-sounding laugh escaped from him. "I live here now."

She had come home to tell her family about Roger, to tell them she planned to move permanently to London and marry him, but it was Rahul they had to talk about first. During the ride home from the airport she pieced together what had happened. It was her mother who did the talking; her father drove, muttering to himself now and then about the condition of the traffic, and Rahul spent most of the time staring out the window, as if he occupied the back of a cab. Though he returned to Ithaca after Christmas break, he'd stopped going to classes, and two weeks ago, after being formally dismissed from the university, he moved back to Wayland.

From what Sudha could tell, he was living in the house as if it were simply another vacation. He stayed in his room or watched television during the day. Their parents had sold his car, and so he never went out. Previously when he'd avoided them, there was something bristling in him, something about to explode. That energy was missing now. He no longer seemed upset with them, or with the fact that he was at home. For a while her parents told their friends that he was taking a leave of absence and then that he was in the process of transfer ring to BU. "Rahul needs a city in order to thrive," they said; but he never applied to other schools. They told people Rahul was looking for a job, and then the lie became more elaborate, and Rahul had a job, a consulting job from home, when in fact he stayed home all day doing nothing. Their mother, who had always hoped her children would live under her roof, was now ashamed that this was the case.

Eventually he got a job managing a Laundromat in Wayland three days a week. Her parents bought a cheap used car so that Rahul could drive into town. Sudha knew that the job embarrassed her parents. They had not minded him washing dishes in the past, but now they lived in fear of the day someone they knew would see their son weighing sacks of dirty clothes on a scale. Other Bengalis gossiped about him and prayed their own children would not ruin their lives in the same way. And so he became what all parents feared, a blot, a failure, someone who was not contributing to the grand circle of accomplishments Bengali children were making across the country, as surgeons or attorneys or scientists, or writing articles for the front page of The New York Times.

Sudha was among those successful children now, her collection of higher degrees framed and filling up her parents' upstairs hall. She was working as a project manager for an organization in London that promoted micro loans in poor countries. And she was spoken for. In the summer, she and Roger flew to Massachusetts so that he could meet Sudha's family and ask formally for her hand. At Roger's request they stayed not in Wayland but in a hotel in Boston; by now she knew him well enough to accept that he would maintain a limited exposure to her family, just as he guarded his body, on the beach, from the rays of the sun. "Better to be up front about these things at the start," Roger had told Sudha in his kind but firm way, and she took this as another sign of his responsible nature, his vigilance toward their life together. The hotel arrangement was accepted by her parents without protest; Rahul had stripped them of their capacity to fight back. They accepted that she and Roger planned to have a registry wedding in London, that they were willing to have only a reception in Massachusetts, that Roger had been previously married, that he and Sudha had a fourteen-year gap. They approved of his academic qualifications, his ability, thanks to his wisely invested inheritance, to buy a house for himself and Sudha in Kilburn. It helped that he'd been born in India, that he was English and not American, drinking tea, not coffee, and saying "zed" not "zee," superficial things that allowed her parents to relate to him. Sudha felt that they were not so much making room for Roger in the family as allowing him to take her away. But Rahul had not loosened his grip; he asked Roger questions, combing through the current issue of Roger's art magazine that her parents had admired and set aside, doing his part to inspect his sister's future husband for flaws.

"Roger's a good guy," Rahul told her when the two of them were alone in the kitchen clearing plates. "Congratulations."

"Thanks. Thanks for being here," she said. She meant it; she'd never brought a man to the house, hadn't realized how nervous she'd be.

"Got nowhere else to go."

"So, how are things?" she asked. "It's not driving you crazy, living at home this way?"

"It's not so bad."

She was grateful that he was talking to her, afraid to pressure him. She was aware of a horrible imbalance between them. She felt accused, simply because her life wasn't broken in the same way.

"How's the Laundromat?"

He shrugged.

"Are you still writing your play?"

"It was stupid."

Not knowing what else to do she stepped forward to hug him, and it was then that she smelled the liquor, sweet, strong, unmistakable. During lunch he'd gotten up from the table once; now she realized he'd gone wherever the bottle was hidden. He was not drunk, there was nothing about his behavior to indicate that he'd had more than a single drink. But the fact that he'd consumed the alcohol in stealth, that he could not endure her family's company without it, made her realize that Rahul was not simply fond of drinking, or a social drinker, or a binge drinker, which were all the ways she'd rationalized it until now.

"You're welcome to visit us in London any time," she offered, saddened by the fact that she did not mean it.

"I don't have any money."

"I'm sure Baba would buy you a ticket."

"I don't want his money," Rahul said.

You live in his house, she wanted to point out. You eat the food Ma puts on the table. You let them put gas in your car. But she said none of this, knowing that if she did, the door he tentatively held open for her benefit would slam once more in her face.

In the months before Sudha's wedding reception, planned for the fall, Rahul began dating a woman named Elena. Elena was an aspiring actress, and she was a waitress at a diner in Waltham. He had conveyed these facts to Sudha when she came back to Wayland ten days before the reception, without Roger, who would be flying in for the party alone. "I've never felt this way before, Didi," he told her. A few days before the reception he brought Elena home. Sudha was a married woman now, but being without Roger made her anxious, that protective coating he provided suddenly thinning. Elena was thirty, eight years older than Rahul. But she could have passed for a high school student, wearing tight jeans and a tank top, her long brown hair fastened at one side with a barrette, dark liner rimming her eyes. She was quiet, speaking only when spoken to, not working to charm Sudha's parents as Roger had. She told them she'd grown up in Mattapoisett and had gone to Emerson. She did not eat the rice Sudha's mother served with lunch, saying it caused her bloating. Rahul kept his arm around her thin shoulders, kissing her dreamily in front of everyone. He spoke on Elena's behalf, saying she had once made a commercial for an allergy medicine. He kept mentioning someone named Crystal; it turned out that Crystal was Elena's daughter from a previous boyfriend.

Sudha's parents said nothing as this information was divulged. They had welcomed Elena, filled their table in her honor as they had done for Roger, making chitchat about the Big Dig and the menu for Sudha and Roger's reception. But then, as Sudha and her mother were bringing out tea and a bowl of pantuas in their syrupy bath, Rahul announced that he and Elena were engaged.

Sudha froze behind a chair, gripping the spoons she was in the process of distributing. The room seemed to tilt; she pressed down on the tablecloth as if a forceful wind were about to come and blow everything away. She looked down at the diamond on her finger, imagining the same thing on Elena's hand, wondering where in the world her brother would get the money to buy a ring. The Darjeeling brought out for special occasions grew too strong in the pot, the reddish-brown pantuas still crowded together in their serving bowl.

"That's not possible," their father said finally, breaking the silence that he had been maintaining, it seemed to Sudha, for over a year.

"What's not possible about it?" Rahul asked. He still had an arm around Elena, his index finger stroking the side of her neck.

"You are only a boy. You have no career, no goal, no path in life. You are in no position to be getting married. And this woman," their father said, registering Elena's presence only for an instant before turning away, "is practically old enough to be your mother."

They were even, equilibrium, if it could be called that, restored to the room. But Sudha knew that it was the furthest thing from equilibrium, that in fact it was war.

"You're a snob," Rahul said. "You're nothing but a pathetic old snob." There was no rage in his voice, none of the violence Sudha had expected. He stood up in a fluid motion, seeming to lift Elena to her feet as well, as if his arm were a magnet for her form, and then the two of them left the house. Sudha and her parents waited until they heard the sound of Elena's car backing out of the driveway, and then her mother began to pour the tea.

"I have been thinking," her father said, turning to Sudha, breaking the silence for the second time. "The restaurant where we will have the wedding reception. There is a bar?"

"All restaurants have bars, Baba."

"I am concerned about Rahul. He has no control when it comes to-" He paused, searching for the word he wished to use. "When it comes to that."

Sudha shut her eyes, thinking she might cry. All this time she had been waiting for her parents to acknowledge Rahul's drinking, but hearing her father say it now, after what had just happened, was too much.

"Maybe we should hold it somewhere else," her mother suggested. "Somewhere without drinks."

"It's too late for that. And it's not fair," Sudha said. Sudha and Roger expected to be able to drink at their own wedding reception, she maintained. Why should everyone be punished because of Rahul?

"Can't you ask him not to drink too much that day?" her mother asked.

"No," Sudha said, pushing back her chair and standing up. She had been fiddling all this time with her teaspoon, and she flung it now, ineffectually, on the carpeted floor of the dining room, where it fell without sound. "I can't talk to him anymore. I can't fix him. I can't keep fixing what's wrong with this family," she said, and like her brother only a little while earlier, she stormed out of the room.

During the reception Rahul made a toast. It was a tribute to Sudha and Roger, but Sudha held her breath as he spoke, wanting him only to sit down. He was without Elena. The day after walking out with her he'd returned abject, alone. Sudha wondered if Elena had broken up with him, but she didn't ask. She wondered if Rahul would not attend the reception, but he was at the restaurant an hour early, maintaining his rightful place in the family, greeting people as they arrived, showing them to the sign-in book. They were almost all friends of Sudha's parents, almost all Bengali. No one from Roger's side had come.

The toast went on, the words becoming slurred. Before the reception, her father had spoken with the bartender, paying him extra to monitor Rahul's drinks; Sudha did not have the heart to tell her father that Rahul was beyond such measures, that alcohol dwelled in his pockets where most men's wallets were, that the two glasses of champagne he'd had openly were just for show. Rahul began telling a story about Sudha's childhood, dredging up an anecdote about going on a vacation long ago in Bar Harbor, Sudha needing to use the bathroom and there not being a gas station for miles. Then their father got up, stood next to Rahul, and whispered something in his ear, motioning for him to sit down.

"Excuse me, I'm not finished." People laughed, not realizing Rahul had not meant to be funny, that it wasn't some sort of comic routine. The microphone made a screeching sound.

Their father took him by the elbow then, and Rahul flinched, giving a shove. "You-don't-touch me," Rahul hissed, the words amplified by the microphone.

One of Sudha's parents' friends got up to make another toast, but Sudha didn't hear it. She was aware of guests talking among themselves in front of their plates of pink tandoori and her brother heading toward the bar. When she got up to look for him, he was no longer there, his car missing from the parking lot. She alerted her parents, prepared herself for another call from the police. But no one was in the position to search for him in the middle of the reception, and without him there, perversely, her parents began to relax. Only Sudha couldn't relax. Roger, who had had a little too much champagne himself, told her not to worry. "He's been going through a rough time," he observed dispassionately as he led her on the dance floor. "He's young."

She stared at her husband, wanting to scream at him for believing in Rahul in a way she no longer could. She had never told Roger about the old game of hiding beer cans, a fact that now tortured her. But once again she chose not to tell Roger, fearing that he would blame her, that he would judge Rahul. It was like the painting they'd first looked at together in London, the small mirror at the back revealing more than the room at first appeared to contain. And what was the point of making Roger lean in close, to see what she was already forced to.

It turned out Rahul hadn't gone far, only back to their parents' house, where they found him, at the end of the night, in his bedroom asleep. The following morning Roger and Sudha flew off for their honeymoon. She felt neutralized in the air, sealed off in the cabin, the unnaturally strong sunlight bleaching out the events of the night before, but as soon as they touched down in St. Thomas she felt tainted all over again, hearing Rahul hissing into the microphone, insulting her father and pushing him in front of all their friends. Life went on. Sudha and Roger returned to London, settling into their new house, writing cards to thank their guests for helping to make it such a special day. But Sudha could not forgive Rahul for what had happened, those dreadful minutes he stood at the microphone the only thing she remembered when she looked at the photographs of her reception, all the posed portraits on the grass in which they were smiling, leading up to that.

And then he disappeared for good. There was no note, no explanation. He simply left one night, her parents said, and had not returned. By then his comings and goings were so erratic that their parents had not fully absorbed the fact of his absence until a few days had passed. Then they realized that his toothbrush was not in the bathroom, and that one of the big suitcases normally used for trips to India was not in the basement. He must have decided to visit a friend, her parents said, but they knew none of Rahul's new friends and were unable to make calls. They reported that the car was missing, and it was located the next day, abandoned at the bus station in Framingham. Roger, trying to be helpful, suggested they contact Elena, but they had never known Elena's last name.

After a week a letter came, with a postmark from Columbus, Ohio. It was not addressed to anyone; he had not even put their family surname on the envelope. "Don't bother looking for me here," he'd written, "I'm only spending the night. I don't want to hear from any of you. Please leave me alone." They wondered how he got to Ohio, since he had no money, wondered if he'd hitched rides. A week passed before her mother noticed that the small zippered pouches she kept hidden at the backs of her drawers, behind her jumble of British brassieres, containing all the gold jewels she'd acquired over her lifetime, all the pieces representative of her husband's success in America, much of which was intended to go to whatever woman Rahul eventually married, were missing.

He had been gone two months when Sudha discovered that she was pregnant; one night during her miserable honeymoon, her body had begun to make a life. Suddenly alongside the terrible there was now the wonderful, the good news reviving her parents. Sudha thought of Rahul often during her pregnancy, invaded by memories and dreams of their childhood, recalling the existence that had produced them both, an experience that was both within her and behind her and that Roger would never understand. In her first trimester her emotions dipped and soared without warning. On good days she believed that Rahul needed to get away in order to put his life back together. On bad days she feared that the police would call her parents saying his body had been found in a ditch. He was absent the following Christmas, which Sudha and Roger spent in Wayland, absent at the hospital in London the night she gave birth to Neel. And she got used to it, used to having a brother she never saw.

Wrapped up with Neel, her parents got used to it, too, coming to London now at every opportunity, their tiny grandson plugging up the monstrous hole Rahul left in his wake. For hours they stared into the bassinet, at the stern downy creature with Roger's pale skin and Sudha's dark hair and a destiny all his own. After a few months Sudha returned to work, first three days a week, then five, leaving the house at eight thirty and returning at six, taking Neel from the nanny and spending just two hours with him, first in the bath and then nursing him to sleep in the rocker. She felt awful, always, that it was for such a brief piece of her day that she actually cared for Neel, but she reminded herself that he was too young to resent her for it, his face lighting up at the sight of her, leaping into her arms as if she were the most wonderful being on earth.