Unaccustomed Earth - Jhumpa Lahiri [121]
Rupa sat behind Chitra, massaging her mother’s scalp and plucking out a few gray hairs while Chitra leaned back and closed her eyes. I gathered that this was a regular routine, something that took place without the need for instructions or comment. I sat up and watched, imagining the rest of Chitra’s hair turning gray one day, imagining her growing into an old woman alongside my father the way my mother was meant to. That thought made me conscious, formally, of my hatred of her. As if aware of what I was thinking, Chitra opened her eyes and looked at me, embarrassed, quickly gathering her hair around her hand. She got up and went to the kitchen, returning a few minutes later with a pot of tea and cups of Ovaltine on a tray. There were two types of chanachur in cereal bowls, and on a small plate, a donut cut into four pieces.
“Now will you take tea?” she asked me.
I accepted, lifting from the tray the cup she’d already prepared, with separately heated milk and too much sugar.
“This is from Haldiram,” she said, passing me one of the cereral bowls. “Best in all Calcutta.”
“No, thank you.”
“This room is cold,” she continued. “The wind comes straight through the glass. Why aren’t there curtains?”
“It would spoil the view,” I said.
“The steps are also slippery.” She pointed to the floating staircase leading to the second floor. “And there is no railing. I am afraid Rupa and Piu will fall.”
I turned to look at the thick pieces of wood arranged like empty shelves ascending the white walls. Even at her weakest, my mother had gone up and down them without protest.
“Why is there no railing?” Chitra repeated.
“Because we liked it that way,” I said, aware that I sounded pedantic. “Because that’s what makes it beautiful.”
We had nothing else to say to one another. We sat and watched one program and then the next as Chitra worked on something with a crochet hook, and I wondered how I was going to survive the next four weeks in her company. We were all waiting for my father, waiting for him to return and explain, if only by his presence, why we were sitting together drinking tea. When he did, he asked me to give him a hand outside; there was a Christmas tree tied to the roof of his car. “I would have gone tomorrow,” I said, helping him to untie the rope that held it in place. I was without gloves, a fact that made the task, in the frigid evening air, both easy and painful. We dragged the tree inside and propped it in one corner of the living room, next to the high stone fireplace. Chitra and the girls gathered around.
“But it’s just like all the other trees outside,” Chitra said, pointing through the glass wall.
“It’s different, actually.” I said. “On the property we have pine trees. This is a spruce.”
Somewhere in the basement there was a box, my father said, containing the stand, the lights, ornaments to hang from the branches. They were from our first winter in the house, the last Christmas my mother celebrated, and I was surprised my father hadn’t tossed them out. He asked me to go down and look for the box. Our basement lacked the sedimented clutter of most, given that we’d lived in the house only a handful of years and that for most of that time my mother had been dead and I had been away at college. There had been no period of haphazard accumulation, only events that had caused things to be taken away. Still, there were a number of boxes stacked up against the walls, empty ones that once contained the television and the stereo speakers,