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By Root 494 0

irritated he’d felt in the waiting room over how long it was taking, that feeling vivid in a way the surgeon’s news still was not. That information, and the chronology of events that followed, remained hazy to him: listening to the surgeon say his wife was dead, that she had reacted adversely to the Rocuronium used to relax her muscles for the procedure, he and Ruma taking turns with Akash as they went in to see the body. It was the same hospital where Ruma had been a candy striper, where he had once rushed to the emergency room after Romi broke his arm on a soccer field. A few weeks after the funeral one of his colleagues at work suggested that he take a vacation, and it was then that he’d remembered the trip Ruma and his wife had planned. He’d asked Ruma if she still intended to go, and when she said no, he asked if it would be all right for him to reserve the tour in his own name.

“Did you like Italy?” Ruma asked him now. She sat with the Pinocchio on her lap, clumsily untwisting the strings. He wanted to tell her that she was going about it wrong, there was a knot in the center that needed to be undone first. Instead, he replied to her questions, saying that he had liked Italy very much, commenting on the pleasant climate, the many piazzas, and the fact that the people, unlike most Americans, were slim. He held up his index finger, waving it back and forth. “And everyone still smokes. I was nearly tempted to have a cigarette myself,” he said. He had smoked when she was little, a habit he’d acquired in India but abandoned in his forties. He remembered Ruma, never Romi or his wife, pestering him about quitting, hiding his packs of Winstons, or removing the cigarettes when he wasn’t aware of it and replacing them with balled-up tissue paper. There was the time she’d cried all night, convinced, after her teacher at school had talked about the dangers of smoking, that he would die within a handful of years. He had done nothing, back then, to comfort her; he’d maintained his addiction in spite of his daughter’s fear. He’d been attached to a small brass ashtray in the house, shaped like a nagrai slipper with a curling, pointed toe. After he quit he threw out all the other ashtrays in the house, but Ruma, to his puzzlement, appropriated his favorite, rinsing it out and keeping it among her toys. He recalled that she and her friends would pretend it was the glass slipper in Cinderella, trying to get it to fit over the unyielding plastic feet of her various dolls.

“Did you?” she asked him now.

“What?”

“Have a cigarette in Italy.”

“Oh no. I am too old for such things,” he said, his eyes drifting over to the lake.

“What did you eat there?” she asked.

He remembered one of the first meals the group had had, lunch at a restaurant close to the Medici Palace. He’d been shocked by the amount of food, the numerous courses. The marinated vegetables were enough for him, but then the waiters brought out plates of ravioli, followed by roasted meat. That afternoon a number of people in the group, including him, went back to the hotel to recover, forgoing the rest of the sightseeing. The next day their guide told them that the restaurant lunches were optional, as long as everyone met back at the next designated place and time. And so he and Mrs. Bagchi began to wander off together, picking up something small, commenting with amazement that there had once been a time when they, too, were capable of eating elaborate lunches, as was the custom in India.

“I tried one or two pasta dishes,” he said, sipping his tea. “But mainly I ate pizza.”

“You spent three weeks in Italy and all you ate was pizza?”

“It was quite tasty pizza.”

She shook her head. “But the food there is so amazing.”

“I have videos,” he said, changing the subject. “I can show them later if you like.”

They ate dinner early, Ruma saying her father must be hungry from the journey and her father admitting that he was eager to turn in, that it was after all three hours later on the East Coast. She’d spent the past two days cooking, the items accumulating one by one on the