Unaccustomed Earth - Jhumpa Lahiri [136]
On Sunday he set out in his Fiat for Edo and Paola’s, in a suburb south of the city. The thought of leaving the city, the streets he now navigated with ease, made him melancholy. For he was leaving; in the new year he would be gone. A position as a photo editor for an international newsmagazine had opened up in Hong Kong, and he had accepted. Apart from a few visits to Tokyo, he knew little of East Asia. It would be the first time in his life that a job would mean waking up and going to the same place each day, the first time he would have an office, a desk, an assistant to schedule his appointments and take his calls. The first time he would not wake up unprepared, until he was chasing after it, for what the day would bring. In that sense he would taste a version of the professional life his father had maintained for decades. He imagined he would hate it. Paola told him he was making a mistake, warning him that it was death to the photographer, that since becoming an editor she hadn’t taken a decent picture. The money would be better, but that wasn’t what had attracted Kaushik. It was his need for a different life that was taking him to Asia. The promise, for the next few years at least, that he would be still.
The magazine was paying for his move, but apart from the Fiat, which he’d already arranged to sell to a friend, he owned little. It was nothing like the times he moved with his parents, those two colossal upheavals he had experienced as a boy, first leaving America, then returning seven years later, the furniture and paintings and tea sets his mother thought she could not live without following them slowly, both times, on cargo ships. His mother had set up households again and again in her life. It didn’t matter where she was in the world, or whether or not she was dying; she had always given everything to make her homes beautiful, always drawn strength from her things, her walls. But Kaushik never fully trusted the places he’d lived, never turned to them for refuge. From childhood, he realized now, he was always happiest to be outside, away from the private detritus of life. That was the first thing he’d loved about taking pictures—it had gotten him out of the house. His earliest memories, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he’d been born, were all outdoors. A chain-link fence matted with forsythia. The herringbone pattern of bricks on a sidewalk. His mother’s voice calling his name as he ran across the Common.
He was reminded of his family’s moves every time he visited another refugee camp, every time he watched a family combing through rubble for their possessions. In the end, that was life: a few plates, a favorite comb, a pair of slippers, a child’s string of beads. He wanted to believe that he was different, that in ten minutes he could be on his way to anywhere in the world. But he knew that it was impossible, wherever he landed, not to form attachments. He would miss the short, tinted wine glasses in his Trastevere cupboards, the shrinking trapezoid of sunlight cast on his bed in the afternoons. And he knew that in his own way, with his camera, he was dependent on the material world, stealing from it, hoarding it, unwilling to let it go. The move to Asia was official now. His landlord, the owner of the gelateria on the corner, had found a new tenant. And just yesterday he had booked his ticket, arranging for a layover in Thailand, where he planned to spend the last week of December before continuing