Interpreter of Maladies - Jhumpa Lahiri [56]
This Blessed House
THEY DISCOVERED the first one in a cupboard above the stove, beside an unopened bottle of malt vinegar. "Guess what I found." Twinkle walked into the living room, lined from end to end with taped up picking boxes, waving the vinegar in one hand and a white porcelain effigy of Christ, roughly the same size as the vinegar bottle, in the other.
Sanjeev looked up. He was kneeling on the floor, marking, with ripped bits of a Post-it, patches on the baseboard that needed to be retouched with paint. "Throw it away."
"Which?"
"Both."
"But I can cook something with the vinegar. It's brand-new."
"You've never cooked anything with vinegar." "I'll look something up. In one of those books we got for our wedding."
Sanjeev turned back to the baseboard, to replace a Post-it scrap that had fallen to the floor, "Check the expiration. And at the very least get rid of that idiotic statue."
"But it could be worth something. Who knows?" She turned it upside down, then stroked, with her index
finger, the minuscule frozen folds of its robes. "It's pretty."
"We're not Christian," Sanjeev said. Lately he had begun noticing the need to state the obvious to Twinkle. The day before he had to tell her that if she dragged her end of the bureau instead of lifting it, the parquet floor would scratch.
She shrugged. "No, we're not Christian. We're good little Hindus." She planted a kiss on top of Christ's head, then placed the statue on top of the fireplace mantel, which needed, Sanjeev observed, to be dusted. By the end of the week the mantel had still not been dusted; it had, however, come to serve as the display shelf for a sizable collection of Christian paraphernalia. There was a 3-D postcard of Saint Francis done in four colors, which Twinkle had found taped to the back of the medicine cabinet, and a wooden cross key chain, which Sanjeev had stepped on with bare feet as he was installing extra shelving in Twinkle's study. There was a framed paint-by-number of the three wise men, against a black velvet background, tucked in the linen closet. There was also a tile trivet depicting a blond, unbearded Jesus, delivering a sermon on a mountaintop, left in one of the drawers of the built in china cabinet in the dining room.
"Do you think the previous owners were born gains?" asked Twinkle, making room the next day for a small plastic snow-filled dome containing a miniature Nativity scene, found behind the pipes of the kitchen sink.
Sanjeev was organizing his engineering texts from MIT in alphabetical order on a bookshelf, though it had been several years since he had needed to consult any of them. After graduating, he moved from Boston to Connecticut, to work for a firm near Hartford, and he had recently learned that he was being considered for the position of vice president. At thirty-three he had a secretary of his own and a dozen people working under his supervision who gladly supplied him with any information he needed. Still, the presence of his college books in the room reminded him of a time in his life he recalled with fondness, when he would walk each evening across the Mass. Avenue bridge to order Mughlai chicken with spinach from his favorite Indian restaurant on the other side of the Charles, and return to his dorm to write out clean copies of his problem sets. "Or perhaps it's an attempt to convert people," Twinkle mused.
"Clearly the scheme has succeeded in your case." She disregarded him, shaking the little plastic dome so that the snow swirled over the manger. He studied the items on the mantel. It puzzled him that each was in its own way so silly. Clearly they lacked a sense of sacredness.