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By Root 547 0

sickness and grief. There was a bedroom with a skylight; underneath it, your mother told us, she planned to position her bed. It was all to give her two years of pleasure. When my parents finally learned the news and went to the hospital where your mother was dying, I revealed nothing about what you’d told me. In that sense I remained loyal. Our parents were only acquaintances by then, having gone their separate ways after the weeks of forced intimacy. Your mother had promised to have us over in the summer to swim in the pool, but as her health declined, more quickly than the doctors had predicted, your parents shut down, still silent about her illness, seldom entertaining. For a time my mother and father continued to complain, feeling snubbed. “After all we did for them,” they said before drifting off to sleep. But I was back in my own room by then, on the other side of the wall, in the bed where you had slept, no longer hearing them.

Year’s End

I did not attend my father’s wedding. I did not even know there had been a wedding until my father called early one Sunday during my final year at Swarthmore. I was roused from sleep by a fist pounding on my door, followed by the voice of one of my hallmates saying my last name. I knew before answering that it was my father; there was no one else who would have called me before nine. My father had always been an early riser, believing that the hours between five and seven were the most profitable part of the day. He would use that time to read the newspaper and then go for a walk, along Marine Drive when we lived in Bombay and on the quiet roads of our town on the North Shore, and as much as he used to encourage my mother and me to join him I knew he preferred being alone. Things were different now, of course; those solitary hours he’d once savored had become a prison for him, a commonplace. I knew that he no longer bothered to go for walks and that since my mother’s death he hardly slept at all. I had not spoken to my father in several weeks. He had been in Calcutta, visiting my grandparents, all four of whom were still alive, and when I picked up the phone, left for me hanging upside down by its cord, I expected him to say only that he had returned safely to Massachusetts, not that I now had a stepmother and two stepsisters.

“I must tell you something that will upset you,” he began, and I wondered if perhaps one of my grandparents had fallen ill, if my mother’s parents, in particular, could no longer endure the loss of their only daughter at the age of forty-two. It had been the hardest thing, in those first months after she was gone: having to go to Calcutta with my father and enter the home where my mother had been a girl, having to see the man and woman who had raised her, who had known her and loved her long before my father and I did. My grandparents had already lived in a state of mild mourning since 1962, when my parents were married. Occasionally my mother would return to them, first from Boston and then Bombay, like Persephone in the myth, temporarily filling up and brightening the rooms, scattering her creams and powders on the dressing table, sipping tea from cups she’d known since she was a girl, sleeping in the room where she’d been small. After we called my grandparents from Massachusetts to tell them my mother was dead, they had held on to the hope that it was only a matter of time, and that she would board a plane and walk through the door once again. Even after my father and I entered the house, my grandmother asked if my mother was still in the taxi that had already driven away, this in spite of the fact that a photograph of my mother, larger than life and draped with a tuberose garland, hung on their living-room wall. “She’s not with us, Didun,” I said, and it was only then both my grandparents broke down, grieving freshly for my mother as neither my father nor I had done. Being with her through her illness day after day had denied us that privilege.

But my grandparents were fine, my father reported now. They missed me and sent their love, he said,