Unaccustomed Earth - Jhumpa Lahiri [17]
“She’s gone now. A woman who looked Indian.”
It was an opportunity to tell Ruma. It was more difficult than he’d thought, being in his daughter’s home, being around her all day. He felt pathetic deceiving her. But what would he say? That he had made a new friend? A girlfriend? The word was unknown to him, impossible to express; he had never had a girlfriend in his life. It would have been easier telling Romi. He would have absorbed the information casually, might even have found it a relief. Ruma was different. All his life he’d felt condemned by her, on his wife’s behalf. She and Ruma were allies. And he had endured his daughter’s resentment, never telling Ruma his side of things, never saying that his wife had been overly demanding, unwilling to appreciate the life he’d worked hard to provide.
Like his wife, Ruma was now alone in this new place, overwhelmed, without friends, caring for a young child, all of it reminding him, too much, of the early years of his marriage, the years for which his wife had never forgiven him. He had always assumed Ruma’s life would be different. She’d worked for as long as he could remember. Even in high school, in spite of his and his wife’s protests, she’d insisted, in the summers, on working as a busgirl at a local restaurant, the sort of work their relatives in India would have found disgraceful for a girl of her class and education. But his daughter was no longer his responsibility. Finally, he had reached that age.
“That is one thing I have observed on my travels,” he said as Siena’s sloping pink piazza flashed across the screen, Mrs. Bagchi concealed somewhere in the throng. “Indians are everywhere these days.”
Akash woke her the following morning, running into her room and tugging her arm. “Dadu went away.”
“What are you talking about?”
“He’s not here.”
She got up. It was quarter to eight. “He’s probably gone for a walk, Akash.” But when she looked out the window, she saw that the rental car wasn’t in the driveway.
“Is he coming back?”
“Hold on, Akash, let me think.” Her heart was pounding and she felt as she would sometimes on a playground, unable, for a few seconds, to spot Akash. In the kitchen she saw that her father had not had his breakfast; there was no bowl and spoon in the dish drainer, no dried-out tea bag on a plate beside the stove. She wondered if he’d been feeling ill, if he’d driven off in search of a pharmacy for aspirin or Alka-Seltzer. It would be like him, to do that and not wake her up. Once he’d had root canal surgery without telling anyone, coming home in the evening with his mouth swollen and full of gauze. Then she wondered if he’d discovered the boats moored to the dock they shared at the edge of the lake and taken one onto the water. There was no way to reach him; her father did not carry a cell phone. As for calling the police, she didn’t know the number of the rental car’s license plate. She picked up the phone anyway, deciding to call Adam, to ask him what to do. But just then she heard the sound of gravel crackling under tires.
“Where on earth did you go?” she demanded. There was nothing to indicate that her father was in any type of distress; he was carrying a flat box tied with string that looked like it had come from a bakery.
“I remembered, yesterday on the way to swimming, passing by a nursery. I thought I would drive by and see their hours.”
“But we’ve already decided on a nursery school for Akash.”
“Not a school. A place that sells plants. You get a fair amount of sun in the back, and the soil looks rich,” he said, looking out the window. “A rainy climate is good for the garden. I can plant a few shrubs, some ground covering if you like.”
“Oh,” she said.
“It is just six miles from your home. Next to it is a place that sells pastries. Here,” he said, opening the box and showing it to Akash. “Which would you like?”
“You don’t have to work on