Unaccustomed Earth - Jhumpa Lahiri [66]
As Christmas approached she told her parents she had too much work and did not come home, when in fact she and Roger went away together, to Seville and then to the Costa del Sol. When she returned from Spain there was a message at the switchboard of her dormitory from her parents, asking her to call. When she did, from one of the pay phones in the lobby of the dorm, they told her that Rahul’s grades had not improved, that a letter had come from an adviser, expressing concern. He was in Wayland now for Christmas break; after one explosive fight, he’d stopped speaking to them. She was glad that Roger wasn’t there to overhear the call, that he’d kissed her good-bye in the taxi and gone back to his flat. She’d painted a hazy image of her family that he absorbed as if it were an endnote in a book, something stemming from her but safely tucked out of sight. “I can’t wait to meet them,” he told her, words that, Sudha hoped, made his intentions clear. Beyond the basic details he did not probe. And so she did not tell Roger about Rahul’s drinking, about his arrest, about the fact that she had not talked to her brother in months.
Her parents asked her to speak to Rahul, saying he’d gone out for a walk, to try in a little while. She waited a few days. She was surprised after all these months by how upset she felt. And she was upset at her parents, too, for still depending on her to help. She called from Roger’s flat, putting the charges on a card while Roger was at work. Rahul had turned twenty in the first week of January, a thing she’d let pass without acknowledgment. He picked up the phone, and she wished him happy birthday now. It was noon in Massachusetts, early evening in London. The sky was dark through Roger’s kitchen window; at the counter, Sudha was setting out cheese and crackers and olives for her and Roger to eat together when he got home.
“Things okay?” she asked.
“Everything’s fine. Ma and Baba are getting totally hysterical over nothing.” Rahul spoke as if no strain existed between them, asking her how London was.
“They said you failed two classes.”
“They were lousy classes.”
“Are you even going to your classes?”
“Lay off, Didi,” he said, his mood turning.
“Are you?” she persisted.
There was a pause. She heard the flicking of a lighter, the first pent-up exhale of a cigarette. “I don’t want to be doing this.”
“What do you want to do?” she asked, not bothering to conceal her exasperation.
“I’m writing a play.”
She was surprised by this information and found it promising that he was actually doing something. He had always been a good writer; once, when he was in high school, he’d written a response to one of the take-home essay questions she had on a philosophy exam at Penn, a question about Plato’s Euthyphro that her professor had approved of with a lengthy comment.
She put an olive in her mouth, extracted the thin purple pit, and placed it on a painted dish she and Roger had bought together in Seville. “That’s great, Rahul. But you have to study, too.”
“I want to drop out.”
“Ma and Baba aren’t going to go for that. Finish college and then you can do whatever you want.”
“I’m sick of wasting time. And I want my car back. I hate not driving. I feel trapped.”
She controlled herself, not telling him that it was ludicrous to expect their parents to trust him on the road again. “It’s just two more years of your life, Rahul. Try to stick it out. Otherwise you’ll end up hating yourself.”
“Jesus, you sound just like them,” he said and hung up on her.
She returned to Boston in April, during the break after the Lent term, a diamond ring from Roger concealed on a chain beneath her sweater, and this made her feel dipped in a protective coating from her family. After January her parents had not bothered her again about Rahul, telling her, the one time she asked, that he’d gone back to school. She felt guilty for distancing herself but not enough to counsel her parents, not enough