Ashima sits at the kitchen table on Pemberton Road, addressing Christmas cards. A cup of Lipton tea grows slowly cold by her hand. Three different address books are open before her, along with some calligraphy pens she’s found in the desk drawer in Gogol’s room, and the stack of cards, and a bit of dampened sponge to seal the envelopes with. The oldest of the address books, bought twenty-eight years ago at a stationery store in Harvard Square, has a pebbly black cover and blue pages, bound together by a rubber band. The other two are larger, prettier, the alphabetical tabs still intact. One has a padded dark green cover and pages edged in gilt. Her favorite, a birthday gift from Gogol, features paintings that hang in the Museum of Modern Art. On the endpapers of all these books are phone numbers corresponding to no one, and the 800 numbers of all the airlines they’ve flown back and forth to Calcutta, and reservation numbers, and her ballpoint doodles as she was kept on hold.
Having three separate address books makes her current task a bit complicated. But Ashima does not believe in crossing out names, or consolidating them into a single book. She prides herself on each entry in each volume, for together they form a record of all the Bengalis she and Ashoke have known over the years, all the people she has had the fortune to share rice with in a foreign land. She remembers the day she bought the oldest book, soon after arriving in America, one of her first trips out of the apartment without Ashoke at her side, the five-dollar bill in her purse feeling like a fortune. She remembers selecting the smallest and cheapest style, saying “I would like to buy this one, please” as she placed the item on the counter, her heart pounding for fear that she would not be understood. The salesperson had not even glanced at her, had said nothing other than the price. She had come back to the apartment and written into the book’s blank blue pages her parents’ address in Calcutta, on Amherst Street, and then her in- laws’ in Alipore, and finally her own, the apartment in Central Square, so that she would remember it. She had written in Ashoke’s extension at MIT, conscious of writing his name for the first time in her life, writing his last name as well. That had been her world.
She has made her own Christmas cards this year, an idea she picked up from a book in the crafts section of the library. Normally she buys boxes of cards, marked fifty percent off at department stores in January, always forgetting, by the following winter, exactly where in the house she’s put them. She is careful to choose ones that say “Happy Holidays” or “Season’s
Greetings” as opposed to “Merry Christmas,” to avoid angels or nativity scenes in favor of what she considers firmly secular images—a sleigh being pulled through a snow-covered field, or skaters on a pond. This year’s card is a drawing she has done herself, of an elephant decked with red and green jewels, glued onto silver paper. The elephant is a replica of a drawing her father had done for Gogol over twenty-seven years ago, in the margins of an aerogramme. She has saved her dead parents’ letters on the top shelf of her closet, in a large white purse she used to carry in the seventies until the strap broke. Once a year she dumps the letters onto her bed and goes through them, devoting an entire day to her parents’ words, allowing herself a good cry. She revisits their affection and concern, conveyed weekly, faithfully, across continents—all the bits of news that had had nothing to do with her life in Cambridge but which had sustained her in those days nevertheless. Her ability to reproduce the elephant has surprised her. She has not drawn a thing since she was a child, has assumed she’d long forgotten what her father had once taught her, and what her son has inherited, about holding the pen with confidence and making bold, swift strokes. She spent a whole day redoing the drawing on different sheets of paper, coloring it in, trimming it to size, taking it to the university copy center. For an entire evening she had driven herself to different stationery stores in the town, looking for red envelopes that the cards would fit into.
She has time to do things like this now that she is alone. Now that there is no one to feed or entertain or talk to for weeks at a time. At forty-eight she has come to experience the solitude that her husband and son and daughter already know, and which they claim not to mind. “It’s not such a big deal,” her children tell her. “Everyone should live on their own at some point.” But Ashima feels too old to learn such a skill. She hates returning in the evenings to a dark, empty house, going to sleep on one side of the bed and waking up on another. At first she was wildly industrious, cleaning out closets and scrubbing the insides of kitchen cupboards and scraping the shelves of the refrigerator, rinsing out the vegetable bins. In spite of the security system she would sit up startled in the middle of the night by a sound somewhere in the house, or the rapid taps that traveled through the baseboards when heat flowed through the pipes. For nights on end, she would double-check all the window locks, making sure that they were fastened tightly. There was the night she’d been roused by a repetitive banging outside the front door and called Ashoke in Ohio. With the cordless phone pressed to her ear, she’d gone downstairs and looked through the peephole, and when she’d finally opened the door she saw that it was only the screen door, which she’d forgotten to latch, swinging wildly in the wind.
Now she does the laundry once a month. She no longer dusts, or notices dust, for that matter. She eats on the sofa, in front of the television, simple meals of buttered toast and dal, a single pot lasting her a week and an omelette to go with it if she has energy to bother. Sometimes she eats the way Gogol and Sonia do when they visit, standing in front of the refrigerator, not bothering to heat up the food in the oven or to put it on a plate. Her hair is thinning, graying, still parted in the middle, worn in a bun instead of a braid. She’s been fitted for bifocals recently, and they hang against the folds of her sari on a chain around her neck. Three afternoons a week and two Saturdays a month, she works at the public library, just as Sonia had done when she was in high school. It is Ashima’s first job in America, the first since before she was married. She signs her small paychecks over to Ashoke, and he deposits them for her at the bank into their account. She works at the library to pass the time—she has been going regularly for years, taking her children to story hour when they were young and checking out magazines and books of knitting patterns for herself, and one day Mrs. Buxton, the head librarian, asked if she would be interested in a part-time position. At first her responsibilities were the same as those of the high school girls, shelving the books that people returned, making sure that sections of shelves were in precise alphabetical order, sometimes running a feather duster along the spines. She mended old books, put protective covers on new arrivals, organized monthly displays on subjects such as gardening, presidential biographies, poetry, African-American history. Lately she’s begun to work at the main desk, greeting the regular patrons by name as they walk through the doors, filling out forms for interlibrary loans. She is friendly with the other women who work at the library, most of them also with grown children. A number of them live alone, as Ashima does now, because they are divorced.
They are the first American friends she has made in her life. Over tea in the staff room, they gossip about the patrons, about the per ils of dating in middle age. On occasion she has her library friends over to the house for lunch, goes shopping with them on weekends to outlet stores in Maine.
Every three weekends her husband comes home. He arrives by taxi— though she is willing to drive herself around their town, she is not willing to get on the highway and drive to Logan. When her husband is in the house, she shops and cooks as she used to. If there is a dinner invitation at friends’, they go together, driving along the highway without the children, sadly aware that Gogol and Sonia, now both grown, will never sit with them in the back seat again. During his visits, Ashoke keeps his clothes in his suitcase, his shaving things in a bag by the sink. He does the things she still doesn’t know how to do. He pays all the bills, and rakes the leaves on the lawn, and puts gas from the self-service station into her car. His visits are too short to make a
difference, and, within hours it seems, Sunday comes, and she is on her own again. When they are apart, they speak by phone every night, at eight o’clock. Sometimes, not knowing what to do with herself after dinner, she is already in bed by then, in her nightgown, watching the small black-and-white television they’ve owned for decades that lives on her side of the bed, the picture gradually disappearing, a rim of black perpetually framing the screen. If there is nothing decent on television she leafs through books she takes out of the library, books that occupy the space Ashoke normally does on the bed.
Now it is three in the afternoon, the sun’s strength already draining from the sky. It is the sort of day that seems to end minutes after it begins, defeating Ashima’s intentions to spend it fruitfully, the inevitability of nightfall distracting her. The sort of day when Ashima craves her dinner by five. It’s one of the things she’s always hated about life here: these chilly, abbreviated days of early winter, darkness descending mere hours after noon. She expects nothing of days such as this, simply waits for them to end. She is resigned to warming dinner for herself in a little while, changing into her nightgown, switching on the electric blanket on her bed. She takes a sip of her tea, now stone cold. She gets up to refill the kettle, make another cup. The petunias in her window box, planted Memorial Day weekend, the last time Gogol and Sonia were home together, have withered to shuddering brown stalks that she’s been meaning, for weeks, to root from the soil. Ashoke will do it, she thinks to herself, and when the phone rings, and her husband says hello, this is the first thing she tells him. She hears noises in the background, people speaking. “Are you watching television?” she asks him.
“I’m in the hospital,” he tells her.
“What’s happened?” She turns off the whistling kettle, startled, her chest tightening, terrified that he’s been in some sort of accident.
“My stomach’s been bothering me since morning.” He tells Ashima it’s probably something he’s eaten, that he’d been invited the previous evening to the home of some Bengali students he’d met in Cleveland who are still teaching themselves to cook, where he was subjected to a suspicious-looking chicken biryani.
She exhales audibly, relieved that it’s nothing serious. “So take an Alka- Seltzer.”
“I did. It didn’t help. I just came to the emergency room because all the doctors’ offices are closed today.”
“You’re working too hard. You’re no longer a student, you know. I hope you’re not getting an ulcer,” she says.
“No. I hope not.”
“Who drove you there?”
“No one. I’m here on my own. Really, it’s not that bad.”
Nevertheless she feels a wave of sympathy for him, at the thought of him driving to the hospital alone. She misses him suddenly, remembering afternoons years ago when they’d first moved to this town, when he would surprise her and come home from the university in the middle of the day.
They would indulge in a proper Bengali lunch instead of the sandwiches they’d gotten used to by then, boiling rice and warming the previous night’s leftovers, filling their stomachs, sitting and talking at the table, sleepy and sated, as their palms turned yellow and dry.
“What does the doctor say?” she asks Ashoke now.
“I’m waiting to see him. It’s a rather long wait. Do me one thing.” “What?”
“Call Dr. Sandler tomorrow. I’m due for a physical anyway. Make an appointment for me next Saturday, if he has an opening.”
“All right.”
“Don’t worry. I’m feeling better already. I’ll call you when I get home.” “All right.” She hangs up the phone, prepares her tea, returns to the table.
She writes “Call Dr. Sandler” on one of the red envelopes, propping it up against the salt and pepper shakers. She takes a sip of tea and winces, detecting a faint film of dishwashing liquid on this section of the rim, chiding herself for being careless about rinsing. She wonders if she ought to call Gogol and Sonia, to tell them that their father is in the hospital. But quickly she reminds herself that he is not technically in the hospital, that if this were any other day but Sunday he’d be at a doctor’s office having an ordinary checkup. He had spoken to her normally, sounding a bit tired, perhaps, but not in great pain.
And so she returns to her project. At the bottom of the cards, over and
over, she signs their names: her husband’s name, which she has never once uttered in his presence, followed by her own, and then the names of her children, Gogol and Sonia. She refuses to write Nikhil, even though she knows that’s what he would prefer. No parent ever called a child by his good name. Good names had no place within a family. She writes the names one below the other, in order of age, Ashoke Ashima Gogol Sonia. She decides to send a card to each of them, shifting the respective name to the top of the card: to her husband’s apartment in Cleveland, to Gogol in New York, adding Maxine’s name, too. Though she’d been polite enough the one time Gogol had brought Maxine to the house, Ashima doesn’t want her for a daughter-in-law. She’d been startled that Maxine had addressed her as Ashima, and her husband as Ashoke. And yet Gogol has been dating her for over a year now.
By now Ashima knows that Gogol spends his nights with Maxine, sleeping under the same roof as her parents, a thing Ashima refuses to admit to her Bengali friends. She even has his number there; she’d called it once, listening to the voice of the woman who must be Maxine’s mother, not leaving any message. She knows the relationship is something she must be willing to accept. Sonia has told her this, and so have her American friends at the library. She addresses a card to Sonia and the two girlfriends she lives with in San Francisco. Ashima looks forward to Christmas, the four of them being together. It still bothers her that neither Gogol nor Sonia had come home for Thanksgiving this year. Sonia, who is working for an environmental agency and studying for her LSAT, had said it was too far to travel. Gogol, who had to work the following day because of a project at his firm, had spent the holiday with Maxine’s family in New York. Having been deprived of the company of her own parents upon moving to America, her children’s independence, their need to keep their distance from her, is something she will never understand. Still, she had not argued with them. This, too, she is beginning to learn. She had complained to her friends at the library, and they had told her it was inevitable, that eventually parents had to stop assuming that their children would return faithfully for the holidays. And so she and Ashoke had spent Thanksgiving together, not bothering, for the first time in years, to buy a turkey. “Love, Ma,” she writes now at the bottom of the cards to her children. And at the bottom of the one for Ashoke, simply, “Ashima.”
She passes over two pages filled only with the addresses of her daughter, and then her son. She has given birth to vagabonds. She is the keeper of all these names and numbers now, numbers she once knew by heart, numbers and addresses her children no longer remember. She thinks of all the dark, hot apartments Gogol has inhabited over the years, beginning with his first dorm room in New Haven, and now the apartment in Manhattan with the peeling radiator and cracks in the walls. Sonia has done the same as her brother, a
new room every year ever since she was eighteen, new roommates Ashima must keep track of when she calls. She thinks of her husband’s apartment in Cleveland, which she had helped him settle into one weekend when she visited. She’d bought him inexpensive pots and plates, the kind she used back in Cambridge, as opposed to the gleaming ones from Williams-Sonoma her children buy for her these days as gifts. Sheets and towels, some sheer curtains for the windows, a big sack of rice. In her own life Ashima has lived in only five houses: her parents’ flat in Calcutta, her in-laws’ house for one month, the house they rented in Cambridge, living below the Montgomerys, the faculty apartment on campus, and, lastly, the one they own now. One hand, five homes. A lifetime in a fist.
From time to time, she looks out the window, at the lilac sky of early evening, vividly tinged with two parallel stripes of pink. She looks up at the phone on the wall, wishing it would ring. She will buy her husband a cell phone for Christmas, she decides. She continues to work in the silent house, in the waning light, not bothering to rest, though her wrist has begun to ache, not bothering to get up and turn on the lamp over the table, or the lights on the lawn or in any of the other rooms, until the telephone rings. She answers after half a ring, but it’s only a telemarketer, some poor soul on weekend duty, asking reluctantly if a Mrs., um—
“Ganguli,” Ashima replies tartly before hanging up.
At twilight the sky turns a pale but intense blue, and the trees on the lawn and the shapes of the neighboring houses become silhouettes, solidly black.
At five o’clock her husband still hasn’t called. She calls his apartment and gets no answer. She calls ten minutes later, then ten minutes after that. It is her own voice on the answering machine, reciting the number and asking the caller to leave a message. Each time she calls she listens to the tone, but she doesn’t leave a message. She considers the places he may have stopped on his way home—the pharmacy to pick up a prescription, the supermarket for food. By six o’clock she can no longer distract herself by sealing and stamping the envelopes she’s spent all day addressing. She calls directory assistance, asking for an operator in Cleveland, then calls the number of the hospital he told her he’d gone to. She asks for the emergency room, is connected to one part of the hospital after another. “He’s just there for an examination,” she tells the people who answer and tell her to hold. She spells the last name as she has hundreds of thousands of times by now, “G like green,” “N like napkin.” She holds the line until she is tempted to hang up, wondering all the while if her husband is trying to reach her from home, regretting not having call waiting. She is disconnected, calls again. “Ganguli,” she says. Again she is told to
hold. Then a person comes on the line, a young woman’s voice, no older than Sonia probably. “Yes. I do apologize for the wait. To whom am I speaking?”
“Ashima Ganguli,” Ashima says. “Ashoke Ganguli’s wife. To whom am I speaking, please?”
“I see. I’m sorry, ma’am. I’m the intern who first examined your husband.” “I’ve been holding on for nearly half an hour. Is my husband still there or
has he gone?”
“I’m very sorry, ma’am,” the young woman repeats. “We’ve been trying to reach you.”
And then the young woman tells her that the patient, Ashoke Ganguli, her husband, has expired.
Expired. A word used for library cards, for magazine sub scriptions. A word which, for several seconds, has no effect whatsoever on Ashima.
“No, no, it must be a mistake,” Ashima says calmly, shaking her head, a small laugh escaping from her throat. “My husband is not there for an emergency. Only for a stomachache.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs Ganguli, is it?”
She listens to something about a heart attack, that it had been massive, that all attempts to revive him had failed. Did she wish to have any of her husband’s organs donated? she is asked. And then, is there anyone in the Cleveland area to identify and claim the body? Instead of answering, Ashima hangs up the phone as the woman is still speaking, pressing down the receiver as hard as she can into the cradle, keeping her hand there for a full minute, as if to smother the words she’s just heard. She stares at her empty teacup, and then at the kettle on the stove, which she’d had to turn off in order to hear her husband’s voice just a few hours ago. She begins to shiver violently, the house instantly feeling twenty degrees colder. She pulls her sari tightly around her shoulders, like a shawl. She gets up and walks systematically through the rooms of the house, turning on all the light switches, turning on the lamppost on the lawn and the floodlight over the garage, as if she and Ashoke are expecting company. She returns to the kitchen and stares at the pile of cards on the table, in the red envelopes it had pleased her so much to buy, most of them ready to be dropped in the mailbox. Her husband’s name is on all of them. She opens her address book, suddenly unable to remember her son’s
phone number, a thing she can normally dial in her sleep. There is no answer at his office or at his apartment and so she tries the number she has written down for Maxine. It’s listed, along with the other numbers, under G, both for Ganguli and for Gogol.
Sonia flies back from San Francisco to be with Ashima. Gogol flies from LaGuardia to Cleveland alone. He leaves early the next morning, boarding the first flight he can get. On the plane he stares through the window at the land below, at the snow-covered patches of the Midwest and at curving rivers that seem covered with tinfoil glinting under the sun. The plane’s shape darkens a shifting length of ground. The flight is more than half empty, men and a few women in business suits, people used to such flights and to traveling at such hours, typing on laptops or reading the news of the day. He is unaccustomed to the banality of domestic flights, the narrow cabin, the single bag he’s packed, small enough to stow overhead. Maxine has offered to go with him, but he has told her no. He doesn’t want to be with someone who barely knew his father, who’s met him only once. She walked him to Ninth Avenue, stood with him at dawn, her hair uncombed, her face still thick with sleep, her coat and a pair of boots slipped on over her pajamas. He withdrew cash from an ATM, hailed a cab. Most of the city, including Gerald and Lydia, were still asleep in their beds.
He and Maxine had been at a book party for one of Maxine’s writer friends the night before. Afterward they’d gone out to dinner with a small group. At about ten o’clock they returned to her parents’ house as usual, tired as if it were much later, pausing on their way upstairs to say good night to Gerald and Lydia, who were sitting under a blanket on the sofa, watching a French film on video, sipping glasses of after-dinner wine. The lights had been turned off, but from the glow of the television screen Gogol could see that Lydia was resting her head on Gerald’s shoulder, that they both had their feet propped against the edge of the coffee table. “Oh, Nick. Your mother called,” Gerald had said, glancing up from the screen. “Twice,” Lydia added. He felt a sting of embarrassment. No, she hadn’t left any message, they said. His mother called him more often these days, now that she was living on her own. Every day, it seemed, she needed to hear the voices of her children. But she had never called him at Maxine’s parents’. She called him at work, or left messages at his apartment that he would receive days later. He decided that whatever it was could wait until morning. “Thanks, Gerald,” he’d said, his arm around Maxine’s waist, turning to leave the room. But then the phone had
rung again. “Hello,” Gerald had said, and then to Gogol, “It’s your sister this time.”
He takes a cab from the airport to the hospital, shocked by how much colder it is in Ohio than in New York, by the thick layer of snow that cakes the ground. The hospital is a compound of beige stone buildings situated on the crest of a softly sloping hill. He enters the same emergency room his father had entered the day before. After giving his name, he is told to take the elevator to the sixth floor, and then to wait in an empty room, the walls painted a rich dark blue. He watches the clock on the wall, donated, along with the rest of the furnishings in the room, by the loving family of someone named Eugene Arthur. There are no magazines in the waiting room, no television, only a collection of matching wing chairs lined up against the walls and a water fountain at one end. Through the glass door he sees a white hallway, a few empty hospital beds. There is little commotion, no doctors or nurses scurrying down the halls. He keeps his eyes on the elevator, half expecting his father to walk out and fetch him, to indicate, with a slight tilt of the head, that it is time to go. When the elevator doors eventually open, he sees a cart stacked with breakfast trays, most of their contents hidden under domes, and tiny cartons of milk. He feels hungry all of a sudden, wishes he’d thought to save the bagel the stewardess had handed him on the plane. His last meal had been at the restaurant the night before, a bright, bustling place in Chinatown. They had waited nearly an hour on the sidewalk for their table and then feasted on flowering chives and salted squid and the clams in black bean sauce that Maxine loved best. They were already drunk from the book party, lazily sipping their beers, their cold cups of jasmine tea. All that time, his father was in the hospital, already dead.
The door opens and a short, pleasant-looking, middle-aged man with a salt-and-pepper beard steps into the room. He wears a white knee-length coat over his clothing and carries a clipboard. “Hello,” he says, smiling kindly at Gogol.
“Are you—were you my father’s doctor?”
“No. I’m Mr. Davenport. I’ll be taking you downstairs.”
Mr. Davenport escorts Gogol in an elevator reserved for patients and doctors, to the subbasement of the hospital. He stands with Gogol in the morgue as a sheet is pulled back to show his father’s face. The face is yellow and waxy, a thickened, oddly bloated image. The lips, nearly colorless, are set in an expression of uncharacteristic haughtiness. Below the sheet, Gogol
realizes, his father is unclothed. The fact shames him, causes him to turn briefly away. When he looks again he studies the face more closely, still thinking that perhaps it’s a mistake, that a tap on his father’s shoulder will wake him. The only thing that feels familiar is the mustache, the excess hair on his cheeks and chin shaved less than twenty-four hours ago.
“His glasses are missing,” Gogol says, looking up at Mr. Davenport.
Mr. Davenport does not reply. After a few minutes he says, “Mr. Ganguli, are you able to positively identify the body? Is this your father?”
“Yes, that’s him,” Gogol hears himself saying. After a few moments he realizes that a chair has been brought for him to sit in, that Mr. Davenport has stepped aside. Gogol sits down. He wonders if he should touch his father’s face, lay a hand on his forehead as his father used to do to Gogol when he was unwell, to see if he had a fever. And yet he feels terrified to do so, unable to move. Eventually, with his index finger, he grazes his father’s mustache, an eyebrow, a bit of the hair on his head, those parts of him, he knows, that are still quietly living.
Mr. Davenport asks Gogol if he’s ready, and then the sheet is replaced, and he is led from the room. A resident arrives, explaining exactly how and when the heart attack happened, why there was nothing the doctors could do. Gogol is given the clothes his father had been wearing, navy slacks, a white shirt with brown stripes, a gray L. L. Bean sweater vest that Gogol and Sonia had gotten him for Christmas one year. Dark brown socks, light brown shoes. His glasses. A trench coat and a scarf. The items brim to the top of a large paper shopping bag. There is a book in the pocket of the trench coat, a copy of The Comedians by Graham Greene, with yellow pages and tiny print.
Opening the cover, he sees that the book had been bought used, a stranger’s name, Roy Goodwin, is written inside. In a separate envelope he is given his father’s wallet, his car keys. He tells the hospital that no religious services are necessary, is told that the ashes would be ready in a few days. He could pick them up personally, at the funeral home the hospital suggests, or have them sent, along with the death certificate, directly to Pemberton Road. Before leaving he asks to see the exact place in the emergency room his father was last alive. The bed number is looked up on a chart; a young man with his arm in a sling lies in it now, otherwise in good spirits, talking on the telephone.
Gogol glimpses the curtains that had partly girded his father when life left him, green and gray flowers with a section of white mesh at the top; metal hooks hang from the ceiling, traveling on a white U-shaped rail.
His father’s leased car, described to him by his mother on the telephone last night, is still parked in the visitors’ parking lot. AM news fills his ears as soon as he turns on the ignition, startling him; his father had always been particular about turning off the radio at the end of a drive. In fact, there is no sign of his father in the car. No maps or scraps of paper, no empty cups or loose change or receipts. All he finds in the glove compartment is the registration and the owner’s manual. He spends a few minutes reading through the manual, comparing the features of the dashboard to the illustration in the book. He turns the wipers on and off and tests the headlights even though it’s still daylight. He shuts off the radio, drives in silence through the cold, bleak afternoon, through the flat, charmless town he will never visit again. He follows directions a nurse at the hospital gave him to the apartment where his father had lived, wondering if this route is the same one his father had taken when he drove himself to the hospital. Each time he passes a restaurant he considers turning off the road, but then he finds himself in a residential section, blocks of Victorian mansions on snow-covered lawns, sidewalks covered with lacy patches of ice.
His father’s apartment is part of a complex called Baron’s Court. Beyond the gate, oversized silver mailboxes, spacious enough to hold a month’s worth of mail, stand in a row. A man outside the first of the buildings, marked RENTAL OFFICE, nods to him as he drives past, seeming to recognize the car.
Has he mistaken him for his father? Gogol wonders, the thought comforting. The only thing to distinguish each building is a number and a name; to either side of it are more units, absolutely identical, each three stories tall, arranged around a vast looping road. Tudor facades, tiny metal balconies, wood chips under the stairs. The relentless uniformity of it upsets him profoundly, more so than even the hospital, and the sight of his father’s face. Thinking of his father living here alone these past three months, he feels the first threat of tears, but he knows that his father did not mind, that he was not offended by such things. He parks in front of his father’s building, remaining long enough in the car to see an elderly, sprightly couple emerge with tennis rackets. He remembers his father telling him that the residents are mostly retired, or divorced. There are paths for walking, a small exercise complex, a man-made pond surrounded by benches and willow trees.
His father’s apartment is on the second floor. He unlocks the door, takes off his shoes, puts them on the plastic runner that his father must have placed there to protect the plush off-white wall-to-wall carpeting. He sees a pair of
his father’s sneakers, and a pair of lip-lops for wearing around the house. The door opens onto a spacious living room, with a sliding glass door to the right, a kitchen to the left. Nothing hangs on the freshly painted ivory walls. The kitchen is separated on one side by a half wall, one of the things his mother always wanted in their own house, so that it would be possible to cook and still see and speak to people in another room. Against the refrigerator is a picture of himself and his mother and Sonia, behind a magnet from a local bank. They are standing at Fatehpur Sikri with cloths tied over their feet to protect them from the hot stone surface. He was a freshman in high school, thin and glum, Sonia just a girl, his mother in a salwar kameeze, something she was too shy to wear in front of their relatives in Calcutta, who always expected her to be in a sari. He opens the cupboards, first the ones above the countertop, then the ones below. Most of them are empty. He finds four plates, two mugs, four glasses. In a drawer he finds one knife and two forks, a pattern recognizable from home. In another cupboard are a box of tea bags, Peek Freans shortbread biscuits, a five-pound bag of sugar that has not been poured into a bowl, a tin of evaporated milk. There are several small bags of yellow split peas and a large plastic bag of rice. A rice cooker sits mindfully unplugged on the counter. The ledge of the stove is lined with a few spice jars, labeled in his mother’s hand. Below the sink he finds a bottle of Windex, a box of trash bags, a single sponge.
He walks through the rest of the apartment. Behind the living room is a small bedroom with nothing in it but a bed, and across from it a windowless bathroom. A jar of Pond’s cold cream, his father’s lifelong answer to after- shave, sits at the side of the sink. He goes to work immediately, going through the room and putting things into garbage bags: the spices, the cold cream, the issue of Time magazine by his father’s bed. “Don’t bring anything back,” his mother had told him on the phone. “It’s not our way.” He lingers over nothing at first, but in the kitchen he pauses. He feels guilty throwing out the food; were it his father in his place, he would have packed the spare rice and tea bags into his suitcase. His father had abhorred waste of any kind, to the point where he complained to Ashima if a kettle had been filled with too much water.
On his first trip to the basement, Gogol sees a table on which other tenants have left things up for grabs: books, videotapes, a white casserole with a clear glass lid. Soon the table is filled with his father’s hand-held vacuum, the rice cooker, the tape player, the television, the curtains still attached to their collapsible plastic rods. From the bag he’d brought back from the hospital, he saves his father’s wallet, containing forty dollars, three credit cards, a wad of receipts, photographs of Gogol and Sonia when they were
babies. He saves the photograph on the fridge.
Everything takes much longer than he expects. The task of emptying three rooms, practically empty to begin with, leaves him exhausted. He is surprised to see how many garbage bags he’s managed to fill up, how many trips up and down the stairs he’s had to make. By the time he is finished, it is already beginning to get dark. He has a list with him of the people he has to call before the business day is over: Call rental office. Call university. Cancel utilities. “We’re so very sorry,” he is told by a series of people he’s never met. “We just saw him Friday,” one of his father’s colleagues says. “What a shock it must be.” The rental office tells him not to worry, that they will send someone by to remove the couch and the bed. When he finishes, he drives through town to the dealer who leased his father the car, and then he takes a cab back to Baron’s Court. In the lobby he notices a menu for pizza delivery. He orders a pizza, calls home as he waits for it to arrive. For an hour the line is busy; by the time he gets through, his mother and Sonia are both asleep, a friend of the family informs him. The house is filled with noise, and it is only then that he realizes how quiet it is on his end. He considers going back down to the basement to get the tape player or the television. Instead he calls Maxine, describing the details of his day, amazed to think she’d been with him at the beginning of it, that it was in her arms, in her bed, that he’d woken.
“I should have come with you,” she says. “I could still make it out there by morning.”
“I’m finished. There’s nothing else to do. I’m taking the first flight back tomorrow.”
“You’re not going to spend the night there, are you, Nick?” she asks him. “I have to. There aren’t any other flights tonight.”
“In that apartment, I mean.”
He feels defensive; after all his efforts, he feels protective of the three empty rooms. “I don’t know anyone here.”
“For God’s sake, get out of there. Check yourself into a hotel.” “Okay.” he says. He thinks of the last time he’d seen his father, three
months ago: the image of him waving good-bye as he and Maxine pulled out of the driveway on their way to New Hampshire. He cannot remember the last time he and his father had spoken. Two weeks ago? Four? His father was not
one to make frequent phone calls the way his mother does. “You were with me,” he tells her.
“What?”
“The last time I saw my father. You were there.”
“I know. I’m so sorry, Nick. Just promise me you’ll go to a hotel.”
“Yeah. I promise.” He hangs up and opens the phone book, looking at his choices of places to stay. He is accustomed to obeying her, to taking her advice. He dials one of the numbers. “Good evening, may I help you?” a voice inquires. He asks if there are any rooms available for the night, but while he is on hold he hangs up. He doesn’t want to inhabit an anonymous room. As long as he is here, he doesn’t want to leave his father’s apartment empty. He lies on the couch in the dark, in his clothes, his body covered by his jacket, preferring that to the stripped mattress in the bedroom. For hours he lies in the dark, falling in and out of sleep. He thinks of his father, in the apartment just yesterday morning. What had he been doing when he’d begun to feel badly? Was he at the stove making tea? Sitting on the sofa, where Gogol sits now? Gogol imagines his father by the door, bending over to tie his shoelaces for the last time. Putting on his coat and scarf and driving to the hospital. Stopping at a traffic light, listening to the weather report on the radio, the thought of death absent from his mind. Eventually Gogol is aware of bluish light creeping into the room. He feels strangely vigilant, as if, were he to pay close enough attention, some sign of his father might manifest itself, putting a stop to the events of the day. He watches the sky whiten, listens as the perfect silence is replaced by the faintest hum of distant traffic, until suddenly he succumbs, for a few hours, to the deepest sleep possible, his mind blank and undisturbed, his limbs motionless, weighted down.
It is nearly ten in the morning when he wakes up again, unobstructed sunlight brightening the room. A dull, steady ache persists on the right side of his head, emanating from deep inside his skull. He opens the sliding glass door to the balcony and stands outside. His eyes burn from fatigue. He gazes at the man-made pond, which, his father had told Gogol during a phone conversation, he walked around twenty times each evening before eating his dinner, that it equaled a distance of two miles. A few people are out there now, walking their dogs, couples exercising side by side, swinging their arms, thick fleece bands covering their ears. Gogol puts on his coat, goes outside and attempts to walk around the pond once. At first he welcomes the cold air on his face, but the chill turns brutal, unforgiving, slicing through his body
and pressing the backs of his pants against his legs, and so he returns to the apartment. He takes a shower, changing into the same clothes he’d worn the day before. He calls himself a cab and goes to the basement one last time to throw away the towel he’d used to dry off, the gray push-button phone. He is taken to the airport, boards a flight to Boston. Sonia and his mother will be there, along with a few friends of the family, waiting for him at the arrival gate. He wishes it could be otherwise. Wishes he could simply get into another cab, and ride along another highway, deferring the moment he must face them. He is terrified to see his mother, more than he had been to see his father’s body in the morgue. He knows now the guilt that his parents carried inside, at being able to do nothing when their parents had died in India, of arriving weeks, sometimes months later, when there was nothing left to do.
On the way to Cleveland, the journey had felt endless, but this time, staring out the plane window, seeing nothing, all too quickly he feels the plane’s descent in his chest. Just before landing he goes into the bathroom, retches into the tiny metal basin. He rinses his face and looks at himself in the mirror. Apart from a day’s growth on his face, he looks exactly the same. He remembers when his paternal grandfather died, sometime in the seventies, remembers his mother screaming when she walked in on his father, who was shaving off all his hair with a disposable razor. In the process his scalp had bled in numerous places, and for weeks he had worn a cap to work to hide the scabs. “Stop it, you’re hurting yourself,” his mother had said. His father had shut the door, and locked it, and emerged shrunken and bald. Years later Gogol had learned the significance, that it was a Bengali son’s duty to shave his head in the wake of a parent’s death. But at the time Gogol was too young to understand; when the bathroom door opened he had laughed at the sight of his hairless, grief-stricken father, and Sonia, just a baby, had cried.
For the first week they are never alone. No longer a family of four, they become a household of ten, sometimes twenty, friends coming by to sit with them quietly in the living room, their heads bent, drinking cups of tea, a cluster of people attempting to make up for his father’s loss. His mother has sham pooed the vermilion from her part. She has taken off her iron wedding bracelet, forcing it from her hand with cold cream, along with all the other bracelets she’s always worn. Cards and flowers come continually to the house, from his father’s colleagues at the university, from the women who work with his mother at the library, from neighbors who normally do little but wave from their lawns. People call from the West Coast, from Texas, from
Michigan and D.C. All the people in his mother’s address books, always added to, never crossed out, all of them are stricken by the news. Who had forsaken everything to come to this country, to make a better life, only to die here? The phone rings constantly, and their ears ache from speaking to all these people, their throats turning weak from explaining again and again. No he wasn’t ill, they say; yes, it was completely unexpected. A short obituary runs in the town paper, citing the names of Ashima and Gogol and Sonia, mentioning that the children had been educated at the local schools. In the middle of the night, they call their relatives in India. For the first time in their lives, it’s they who have bad news to bear.
For ten days following his father’s death, he and his mother and Sonia eat a mourner’s diet, forgoing meat and fish. They eat only rice and dal and vegetables, plainly prepared. Gogol remembers having to do the same thing when he was younger, when his grandparents died, his mother yelling at him when he forgot one day and had a hamburger at school. He remembers, back then, being bored by it, annoyed at having to observe a ritual no one else he knew followed, in honor of people he had seen only a few times in his life. He remembers his father sitting unshaven on a chair, staring through them, speaking to no one. He remembers those meals eaten in complete silence, the television turned off. Now, sitting together at the kitchen table at six-thirty every evening, the hour feeling more like midnight through the window, his father’s chair empty, this meatless meal is the only thing that seems to make sense. There is no question of skipping this meal; on the contrary, for ten evenings the three of them are strangely hungry, eager to taste the blandness on their plates. It is the one thing that structures their days: the sound of the food being warmed in the microwave, three plates lowered from the cupboard, three glasses filled. The rest of it—the calls, the flowers that are everywhere, the visitors, the hours they spend sitting together in the living room unable to say a word, mean nothing. Without articulating it to one another, they draw comfort from the fact that it is the only time in the day that they are alone, isolated, as a family; even if there are visitors lingering in the house, only the three of them partake of this meal. And only for its duration is their grief slightly abated, the enforced absence of certain foods on their plates conjuring his father’s presence somehow.
On the eleventh day they invite their friends to mark the end of the mourning period. There is a religious ceremony conducted on the floor in one corner of the living room; Gogol is asked to sit in front of a picture of his father, as a priest chants verses in Sanskrit. Before the ceremony they had spent a whole day looking for a picture to frame, going through albums. But there are almost no pictures of his father alone, his father who was forever
behind the lens. They decide to crop one, of him and Ashima standing together years ago in front of the sea. He is dressed like a New Englander, in a parka and a scarf. Sonia takes it to CVS to have it enlarged. They prepare an elaborate meal, fish and meat bought one bitterly cold morning at Chinatown and Haymarket, cooked as his father liked them best, with extra potatoes and fresh coriander leaves. When they shut their eyes, it’s as if it is just another party, the house smelling of food. All those years of entertaining have prepared them somehow. Ashima frets that there will not be enough rice; Gogol and Sonia take people’s coats and put them upstairs, on the guest room bed. The friends his parents have collected for almost thirty years are in attendance, to pay their respects, cars from six different states lining the whole of Pemberton Road.
Maxine drives up from New York, bringing Gogol the clothes he normally keeps at her house, his laptop, his mail. His bosses have given him a month off from work. It’s a bit of a shock to see Maxine, to introduce her to Sonia.
This time he doesn’t care how the house, how the pile of guests’ shoes heaped by the doorway, might appear to her eyes. He can tell that she feels useless, a bit excluded in this house full of Bengalis. And yet he doesn’t bother to translate what people are saying, to introduce her to everyone, to stay close by her side. “I’m so sorry,” he hears her say to his mother, aware that his father’s death does not affect Maxine in the least. “You guys can’t stay with your mother forever,” Maxine says when they are alone for a moment after the ceremony, upstairs in his room, sitting side by side on the edge of the bed. “You know that.” She says it gently, puts her hand to his cheek. He stares at her, takes her hand and puts it back in her lap.
“I miss you, Nikhil.” He nods.
“What about New Year’s Eve?” she says. “What about it?”
“Do you still want to try to go up to New Hampshire?” For they had talked of this, going away together, just the two of them, Maxine picking him up after Christmas, staying at the lake house. Maxine was going to teach him how to ski.
“I don’t think so.”
“It might do you good,” she says, tilting her head to one side. She glances
around the room. “To get away from all this.” “I don’t want to get away.”
In the weeks that follow, as their neighbors’ hedges and windows are decorated with strings of colored lights, as piles of Christmas cards arrive at the house, each of them assumes a task his father normally had done. In the mornings his mother goes to the mailbox and brings in the paper. Sonia drives into town and does the weekly grocery shopping. Gogol pays the bills, shovels the driveway when it snows. Instead of arranging the Christmas cards on the fireplace mantel, Ashima glances at the return addresses and then, without opening the envelopes, she throws them away.
Each small event seems like an enormous accomplishment. His mother spends hours on the phone and has all the names changed on the bank account, the mortgage, the bills. She is unable to stem the tide of junk mail that will continue to arrive for years, addressed to her dead husband. In the wan, dreary afternoons Gogol goes running. Sometimes he drives to the university, parking behind his father’s department, running along the campus roads, through the confined, picturesque universe that had been his father’s world for most of the past twenty-five years. Eventually, on weekends, they begin to visit the homes of their parents’ friends who live in surrounding suburbs. Gogol drives one way, Sonia the other. Ashima sits in the back seat. At the homes of their friends, his mother tells the story of calling the hospital. “He went in for a stomachache,” she says each time, reciting the details of the afternoon, the pink streaks that had been in the sky, the pile of cards, the cup of tea at her side, reciting it in a way that Gogol cannot bear to have repeated, a way he quickly comes to dread. Friends suggest she go to India, see her brother and her cousins for a while. But for the first time in her life, Ashima has no desire to escape to Calcutta, not now. She refuses to be so far from the place where her husband made his life, the country in which he died. “Now I know why he went to Cleveland,” she tells people, refusing, even in death, to utter her husband’s name. “He was teaching me how to live alone.”
Early in January, after holidays they don’t celebrate, in the first days of a year that his father does not live to see, Gogol boards a train and goes back to New York. Sonia is staying on with Ashima, thinking of getting an apartment in
Boston or Cambridge so that she will be nearby. They come to the station to see him off, standing on the platform in the cold, his diminished family, straining but failing to see Gogol, who waves at them through the tinted glass. He remembers them all coming to see him off each time, in his first year of college, he would head back to Yale. And though, over the years, his departures had become mundane, his father would always stand on the platform until the moment the train was out of sight. Now Gogol raps his knuckles on the window, but the train begins to move as his mother and Sonia are still struggling to spot him.
The train rattles forward, jostles from side to side, its engine making a sound like the propeller of a plane. The whistle blares intermittently in a minor key. He sits on the left side of the train, the winter sunlight strong on his face. Instructions for removing the window in the event of an emergency, in three steps, are pasted to the glass. Snow covers the straw-colored ground. Trees stand like spears, dried copper leaves from the previous season still clinging to a few of the branches. He sees the backs of houses made of brick and wood. Small snowy lawns. A solid shelf of winter clouds stops just short of the horizon. More snow, possibly heavy, is expected by evening. He hears a young woman somewhere in the compartment, talking to her boyfriend on a cell phone, softly laughing. She talks about where they should meet for dinner once she gets into the city. “I’m so bored,” she complains. Gogol will arrive in New York in time for dinner as well. Maxine will be there to greet him at Penn Station, something she has never bothered to do in the past, waiting for him under the arrivals-and-departures board.
The landscape jerks forward, falls away, the train casting a passing shadow on an expanse of nondescript buildings. The tracks resemble endless ladders that stretch ahead rather than upward, rooted to the ground. Between Westerly and Mystic, the tracks are at an angle, embedded into the sloping land, so that the whole train threatens, ever so slightly, to topple over. Though the other passengers seldom comment on this, the way they do, for example, when the engine changes at New Haven from diesel to electric with a sudden jolt, this momentary shift never fails to rouse Gogol from his nap, or the book he is reading, or the conversation he is engaged in, or the thought that has gathered in his head. The train tilts to the left heading south to New York, to the right on the way to Boston. In that brief period of suggested peril, he thinks, always, of that other train he has never seen, the one that had nearly killed his father. Of the disaster that has given him his name.
The train rights itself, the angle falls behind. Again he feels its motion at the small of his back. For several miles the tracks hug the ocean, which is
close enough to touch. The shallowest waves lap against mere inches of shore. He sees a stone bridge, scattered islands the size of rooms, gracious gray and white homes with pleasant views. Boxy houses built on stilts. Lone herons and cormorants perch on bleached wooden posts. Boats with naked masts crowd the marina. It is a view his father would have appreciated, and Gogol is reminded of the many times he had driven with his family, on cold Sunday afternoons, to the sea. There were times when it had been so cold that they had simply sat in the car, in the parking lot, looking at the water, his parents sharing tea from a thermos in the front seat, the engine running to keep them warm. Once they had gone to Cape Cod, driving along that curving piece of land until they could drive no farther. He and his father had walked to the very tip, across the breakwater, a string of giant gray slanted stones, and then on the narrow, final inward crescent of sand. His mother had stopped after a few stones and waited with Sonia, too young to go with them, at her side. “Don’t go too far,” his mother had warned, “don’t go so that I can’t see you.” His legs began to ache halfway there, but his father marched ahead, stopping at times to lend Gogol an arm, his body slightly tilted when he rested on a rock. While on these rocks, some far apart enough to make them pause and consider the best way to reach the next one, water had surrounded them on both sides. It was early winter. Ducks swam in the tide pools. The waves flowed in two directions. “He’s too little,” his mother had called out. “Are you listening? He’s too little to go so far.” Gogol had stopped then, thinking that perhaps his father would agree. “What do you say?” his father had said instead. “Are you too little? No, I didn’t think so.”
At the end of the breakwater, there was a field of yellow reeds to the right, and dunes beyond, and the ocean behind it all. He had expected his father to turn back, but still they had continued, stepping onto the sand. They walked along the water to the left, heading toward the lighthouse, past rusted boat frames, fish spines as thick as pipes attached to yellow skulls, a dead gull whose feathery white breast was freshly stained with blood. They began to pick up small, faded black stones with white stripes running around them, stuffing them into their pockets so that they drooped on either side. He remembers his father’s footprints in the sand; because of his limp, the right toe of his shoe was always turned outward, the left straight ahead. Their shadows that day were unnaturally slender and long, leaning in toward each other, the late afternoon sun at their backs. They paused to regard a cracked wooden buoy painted blue and white, shaped like an old parasol. The surface was wrapped with thin brown strands of seaweed and encrusted with barnacles.
His father lifted and inspected it, pointing to a live mussel underneath. Finally they stood by the lighthouse, exhausted, surrounded by water on three sides, pale green in the harbor, azure behind. Overheated from the exertion, they
unzipped their coats. His father stepped away to urinate. He heard his father cry out—they had left the camera with his mother. “All this way, and no picture,” he’d said, shaking his head. He reached into his pocket and began to throw the striped stones into the water. “We will have to remember it, then.” They looked around, at the gray and white town that glowed across the harbor. Then they started back again, for a while trying not to make an extra set of footsteps, inserting their shoes into the ones they had just made. A wind had picked up, so strong that it forced them to stop now and then.
“Will you remember this day, Gogol?” his father had asked, turning back to look at him, his hands pressed like earmuffs to either side of his head.
“How long do I have to remember it?”
Over the rise and fall of the wind, he could hear his father’s laughter. He was standing there, waiting for Gogol to catch up, putting out a hand as Gogol drew near.
“Try to remember it always,” he said once Gogol had reached him, leading him slowly back across the breakwater, to where his mother and Sonia stood waiting. “Remember that you and I made this journey, that we went together to a place where there was nowhere left to go.”
