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By Root 581 0

to fill them with new hope. The phone was ringing when we returned to the house. It was Jessica, so I poured myself a drink and took the phone into the guestroom. When I told her about my father taking Chitra and the girls to Disney World, Jessica suggested coming up to visit me while they were away. I missed her, I thought about her and desired her at night in bed, and yet I did not want to see her in my parents’ house. I didn’t say this, but she sensed my reluctance and we began to quarrel for the first time. It was an awkward conversation, full of long pauses, draining, even though it never escalated into a real argument. I felt guilty about avoiding her, just as I felt guilty saying no to Disney World, but I knew that were I to agree to either proposition I would feel worse. I told Jessica the same lie that I told the girls, that I would think about it, and got off the phone.

When I opened the door to refresh my drink I saw that Rupa and Piu were no longer watching television, which was what I’d assumed they’d been doing all this time. I called for them, checking the kitchen, the bathroom, then went upstairs, to the door of my old room. I didn’t hear them talking and, seeing from my watch that it was already ten o’clock, thought maybe they were asleep. I opened the door, looking into the room for the first time since I’d come home. The lights were on, and I saw my old bed, and a folding cot placed beside it without any gap. The things I’d had on the walls, the poster of Jimi Hendrix and a copy of Paul Strand’s “Blind Woman” I’d ripped out of a magazine, had not been removed. The closet door was open, and there was a chair in front of it, as if positioned to pull something down from the shelf. I had thought the room would be transformed with Rupa and Piu’s things, but there was no sign of them apart from the extra bed and the small pile of toys they’d gotten for Christmas neatly stacked in one corner. Close to this pile sat Rupa and Piu in their party dresses. They had their backs to me, were hunched over something on the carpet that I couldn’t see. “She looks sad in this one,” I heard Piu whisper in Bengali, and then Rupa, saying, “She and KD smile the same way.”

“What are you doing?” I said.

They leapt apart, startled, realizing I was there. Spread out on the gray carpet, arranged like a game of Solitaire, were about a dozen photographs of my mother taken from the box my father had sealed up and hidden after her death. Even from a distance the banished images assaulted me: my mother wearing a swimsuit by the edge of the pool at our old club in Bombay. My mother sitting with me on her lap on the brown wooden steps of our house in Cambridge. My mother and my father standing before I was born in front of a snow-caked hedge.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I said now.

Rupa looked at me, her dark eyes flashing, and Piu began to cry. I walked into the room and picked up the pictures, putting them face down on my old dresser. Then I grabbed Rupa by the shoulders from where she sat crouched on the floor, shaking her forcefully. Her body had gone limp, her thin legs wobbling in their cabled black tights. I wanted to throw her against the wall, but instead I managed to direct her to the folding cot and forced her to sit, knowing that I was squeezing too hard. “Tell me, where did you find these?” I demanded, just inches from her face.

Now Rupa began to cry as well, but she pointed to the closet. I walked toward it, but Piu, still sobbing on the carpet and shaking her head, said “It is not there anymore.” She crawled toward the cot where her sister was sitting and pulled out a black shoebox, white at the edges, the masking tape that had once bound it shut lifted away. This time it was Piu that I grabbed, dragging her away from the shoebox as if her proximity would contaminate it, and thrusting her aside.

“You have no right to be looking at those,” I told them. “They don’t belong to you, do you understand?”

They nodded, Rupa trembling as if with cold, Piu’s lips pressed tightly together. Tears fell down their