Unaccustomed Earth - Jhumpa Lahiri [122]
I slit the tape with my car key and lifted the flaps of a few of the boxes. One contained old engineering books of my father’s. Another had a dinner set wrapped in pages of The Times of India, plates I had eaten off for years but forgotten until now, with a pattern of small orange diamonds around the rim. I found my enlarger, tongs, a set of trays, and old bottles of fixer for the darkroom I’d set up during my last year of high school. There were times my mother came down and kept me company, sitting quietly in the blackness as I struggled to load film onto the developing reel. Together we would breathe in the chemical smells, their corrosiveness, from which my hands were protected by rubber gloves, nothing compared to what was taking place inside her body. She would keep time for me with her watch, familiarizing herself with the process enough to be able to tell me when to pour the series of fluids in and out of the processing tank, both of us knowing that I’d have to buy a timer, eventually. “It must be something like this,” she said once in that perfectly dark, silent, sealed-up space, and I understood without her saying so that she was imagining what it might be like to be dead. “This is how I want to think of it.”
The box I was looking for was labeled “X-MAS” in my mother’s hand, not on the side so that it was easily identifiable, but in a corner on top. I had no sentimental attachment to the items inside, and yet I didn’t want to see them. The thought of Chitra going through the box, watching her sift through everything, upset me just as it had upset me, throughout the day, to watch her handle the cutlery, the teakettle, at one point to hold the telephone and speak with my father to learn that he was on his way home. When my father had tried to remove the signs of my mother from the house I blamed him for being excessive, but now I blamed him for not having done enough.
“I can’t find it,” I said, after returning upstairs. My father did not press the issue, did not insist on going down and looking for it himself. He behaved differently around Chitra, was more accepting of the minor defeats of life. I offered to go to a drugstore and buy what we needed, glad to have another reason to leave the house. When I came back my father and I trimmed the tree together, Chitra and the girls watching us from the sectional. We placed the tree in the stand and tightened the screws and draped lights over the branches. There was nothing personal or idiosyncratic to put on it, just a box of sapphire-blue balls, so that it looked less like a tree in someone’s home and more like one in the corner of a bank or an office lobby. But Rupa and Piu were delighted, exclaiming that they’d never seen anything more beautiful. My father went upstairs and returned with a shopping bag full of gifts. They’d all been wrapped at whatever store he bought them in, the same green-and-gold paper professionally taped and tied. He distributed them under the tree, eight boxes altogether. “Two for each of you,” he said to no one in particular. Rupa and Piu got up and went to look at them then, excited to find their names written on the tags.
“Can we open them?” Piu asked Chitra, Chitra who did not know the answer.
“Not until Christmas morning,” I said. “Until then you can just look. And maybe shake them a little.”
“So lovely,” Chitra said, impressed now that the tree had been trimmed.
“Kaushik, what about a picture?” my father suggested.
I shook my head. I had left my camera, my father’s old Yashica, at school.
“But you always have it with you.” That look of irritated disappointment, the one that had appeared the day my mother died and was missing now that he’d married Chitra, passed briefly across my father’s face.
“I forgot it,” I said. It was true, I did always have the camera with me. Even on quiet weekends when I came home and my father and I saw no one I would bring it, taking it with me on walks. This time I had left it behind,