Unaccustomed Earth - Jhumpa Lahiri [42]
“This place is nicer than where I went to college,” Megan said as they walked across the campus, taking in the pristine buildings, the sculptures.
“It’s a bit over the top,” he said. When they’d first met Megan had been impressed by his prep school education, but at the same time she’d teased him about it. She was not bitter toward the privileged, but she was sometimes judgmental; were he not Indian, Megan would have probably avoided someone like him. She was the youngest of five children, her father a policeman, her mother a kindergarten teacher. She’d gotten a job after graduating from high school, in a photocopy store during the days and as a telemarketer in the evenings, not beginning college until she was twenty, going part time because she’d had to continue working. In that sense, she worked harder than anyone he’d ever known, including his own father and his parents’ uniformly successful crowd of Bengali friends. Megan’s ordinary background had displeased his parents, as had the fact that she was five years older than he was. Her stark prettiness, her refusal to wear contact lenses, her height, had not charmed them. The fact that she was a doctor did not make up for it. If anything, it made their disappointment in Amit worse.
He noticed new wings tacked onto some of the buildings, modern elements of steel and glass alongside the brick and white cupolas. His parents had plucked him out of public school in Winchester, Massachusetts, where he’d been raised, and sent him here, for they’d decided when Amit was in the eighth grade to move back to India. He still remembered the night his parents told him their plans. They were sitting in a seafood restaurant on the Cape, in Cotuit, overlooking the water, the table heaped with the bright red claws and shells from which his father had effortlessly extracted the meat for all of them. His father began by saying he was growing restless on the faculty of Harvard Medical School, that there was a hospital in Delhi where he believed he was needed. Amit had been stunned by his parents’ decision—his parents, unlike most other Bengalis in Massachusetts, had always been dismissive, even critical, of India, never homesick or sentimental. His mother had short hair and wore trousers, putting on saris only for special occasions. His father kept a liquor cabinet and liked a gin and tonic before his meals. They both came from wealthy families, had both summered in hill stations and attended boarding schools in India themselves. The relative affluence of America never impressed them; in many ways they had lived more privileged lives in India, but they left the country and had not looked back.
At the restaurant his father pulled out the admissions packet for Langford, showing photographs of the campus, smiling students gathered around classroom tables, teachers standing in front of blackboards, caught midsentence by the camera’s lens. Academically it was far superior to the school he’d been attending, his father told him, mentioning the percentage of Langford graduates who went on to Ivy League colleges. Amit realized, as his father spoke, that the position in Delhi had been accepted, their house in Winchester already put up for sale. There was no question of his going to school in Delhi; it wasn’t worth the trouble to adjust to education in a different country, his father said, given that eventually Amit would be attending an American college.
From Langford, during Christmas after each academic year came to an end, Amit went to Delhi to be with his parents, staying in their flat full of servants in Chittaranjan Park, in a barren room set aside for his stays. He never enjoyed his visits to Delhi, his broken Bengali of no use in that city. It made him miss Calcutta, where all his relatives lived, where he was used to going. His parents had moved to Delhi the year of Indira Gandhi’s assassination, and the riots that subsequently raged there, the curfews and the constant vigilance with which his parents