Unaccustomed Earth - Jhumpa Lahiri [105]
I did not know what to make of you. Because you’d lived in India, I associated you more with my parents than with me. And yet you were unlike my cousins in Calcutta, who seemed so innocent and obedient when I visited them, asking questions about my life in America as if it were the moon, astonished by every detail. You were not curious about me in the least. One day a friend at school invited me to see The Empire Strikes Back on a Saturday afternoon. My mother said that I could go, but only if you were invited as well. I protested, telling her that my friend did not know you. Despite my crush, I didn’t want to have to explain to my friend who you were and why you were living in our house.
“You know him,” my mother said.
“But he doesn’t even like me,” I complained.
“Of course he likes you,” my mother said, blind to the full implication of what I’d said. “He’s adjusting, Hema. It’s something you’ve never had to go through.”
The conversation ended there. As it turned out, you were uninterested in the movie, not having seen Star Wars in the first place.
One day I found you sitting at my piano, randomly striking the keys with your index finger. You stood up when you saw me and retreated to the couch.
“Do you hate it here?” I asked.
“I liked living in India,” you said. I did not betray my opinion, that I found trips to India dull, that I didn’t like the geckos that clung to the walls in the evenings, poking in and out of the fluorescent light fixtures, or the giant cockroaches that sometimes watched me as I bathed. I didn’t like the comments my relatives made freely in my presence—that I had not inherited my mother’s graceful hands, that my skin had darkened since I was a child.
“Bombay is nothing like Calcutta,” you added, as if reading my mind.
“Is it close to the Taj Mahal?”
“No.” You looked at me carefully, as if fully registering my presence for the first time. “Haven’t you ever looked at a map?”
On our trip to the mall you’d bought a record, something by the Rolling Stones. The jacket was white, with what seemed to be a cake on it. You had no interest in the few records I owned—Abba, Shaun Cassidy, a disco compilation I’d ordered from a TV commercial with my allowance money. Nor were you willing to play your album on the plastic record player in my room. You opened up the cabinet where my father kept his turntable and receiver. My father was extremely particular about his stereo components. They were off-limits to me, and even to my mother. The stereo had been the single extravagant purchase of his life. He cleaned everything himself, wiping the parts with a special cloth on Saturday mornings, before listening to his collection of Indian vocalists.
“You can’t touch that,” I said.
You turned around. The lid of the player was already lifted, the record revolving. You held the arm of the needle, resting its weight on your finger. “I know how to play a record,” you said, no longer making an effort to conceal your irritation. And then you let the needle drop.
How bored you must have been in my room full of a girl’s things. It must have driven you crazy, being stuck with our mothers all day long as they cooked and watched soap operas. Really, it was my mother who did the cooking now. Though your mother kept her company, occasionally peeling or slicing something, she was no longer interested in cooking, as she had been in the Cambridge days. She’d been spoiled by Zareen, the fabulous Parsi cook you had in Bombay, she said. From time to time she would promise to make us an English trifle, the one thing she said she always insisted on making herself, but this didn’t materialize. She continued