Interpreter of Maladies. Jhumpa Lahiri
in Tucson. I barely remember them now.”
Shukumar hadn’t spent as much time in India as Shoba had. His parents, who settled in New Hampshire, used to go back without him. The first time he’d gone as an infant he’d nearly died of amoebic dysentery. His father, a nervous type, was afraid to take him again, in case something were to happen, and left him with his aunt and uncle in Concord. As a teenager he preferred sailing camp or scooping ice cream during the summers to going to Calcutta. It wasn’t until after his father died, in his last year of college, that the country began to interest him, and he studied its history from course books as if it were any other subject. He wished now that he had his own childhood story of India.
“Let’s do that,” she said suddenly.
“Do what?”
“Say something to each other in the dark.”
“Like what? I don’t know any jokes.”
“No, no jokes.” She thought for a minute. “How about telling each other something we’ve never told before.”
“I used to play this game in high school,” Shukumar recalled. “When I got drunk.”
“You’re thinking of truth or dare. This is different. Okay, I’ll start.” She took a sip of wine. “The first time I was alone in your apartment, I looked in your address book to see if you’d written me in. I think we’d known each other two weeks.”
“Where was I?”
“You went to answer the telephone in the other room. It was your mother, and I figured it would be a long call. I wanted to know if you’d promoted me from the margins of your newspaper.”
“Had I?”
“No. But I didn’t give up on you. Now it’s your turn.”
He couldn’t think of anything, but Shoba was waiting for him to speak. She hadn’t appeared so determined in months. What was there left to say to her? He thought back to their first meeting, four years earlier at a lecture hall in Cambridge, where a group of Bengali poets were giving a recital. They’d ended up side by side, on folding wooden chairs. Shukumar was soon bored; he was unable to decipher the literary diction, and couldn’t join the rest of the audience as they sighed and nodded solemnly after certain phrases. Peering at the newspaper folded in his lap, he studied the temperatures of cities around the world. Ninety-one degrees in Singapore yesterday, fifty-one in Stockholm. When he turned his head to the left, he saw a woman next to him making a grocery list on the back of a folder, and was startled to find that she was beautiful.
“Okay,” he said, remembering. “The first time we went out to dinner, to the Portuguese place, I forgot to tip the waiter. I went back the next morning, found out his name, left money with the manager.”
“You went all the way back to Somerville just to tip a waiter?”
“I took a cab.”
“Why did you forget to tip the waiter?”
The birthday candles had burned out, but he pictured her face clearly in the dark, the wide tilting eyes, the full grapetoned lips, the fall at age two from her high chair still visible as a comma on her chin. Each day, Shukumar noticed, her beauty, which had once overwhelmed him, seemed to fade. The cosmetics that had seemed superfluous were necessary now, not to improve her but to define her somehow.
“By the end of the meal I had a funny feeling that I might marry you,” he said, admitting it to himself as well as to her for the first time. “It must have distracted me.”
The next night Shoba came home earlier than usual. There was lamb left over from the evening before, and Shukumar heated it up so that they were able to eat by seven. He’d gone out that day, through the melting snow, and bought a packet of taper candles from the corner store, and batteries to fit the flashlight. He had the candles ready on the countertop, standing in brass holders shaped like lotuses, but they ate under the glow of the copper-shaded ceiling lamp that hung over the table.
When they had finished eating, Shukumar was surprised to see that Shoba was stacking her plate on top of his, and then carrying them over to the sink. He had assumed she would retreat to the living room, behind her barricade of files.
“Don’t worry about the dishes,” he said, taking them from her hands.
“It seems silly not to,” she replied, pouring a drop of detergent onto a sponge. “It’s nearly eight o’clock.”
His heart quickened. All day Shukumar had looked forward to the lights going out. He thought about what Shoba had said the night before, about looking in his address book. It felt good to remember her as she was then, how bold yet nervous she’d been when they first met, how hopeful. They stood side by side at the sink, their reflections fitting together in the frame of the window. It made him shy, the way he felt the first time they stood together in a mirror. He couldn’t recall the last time they’d been photographed. They had stopped attending parties, went nowhere together. The film in his camera still contained pictures of Shoba, in the yard, when she was pregnant.
After finishing the dishes, they leaned against the counter, drying their hands on either end of a towel. At eight o’clock the house went black. Shukumar lit the wicks of the candles, impressed by their long, steady flames.
“Let’s sit outside,” Shoba said. “I think it’s warm still.”
They each took a candle and sat down on the steps. It seemed strange to be sitting outside with patches of snow still on the ground. But everyone was out of their houses tonight, the air fresh enough to make people restless. Screen doors opened and closed. A small parade of neighbors passed by with flashlights.
“We’re going to the bookstore to browse,” a silver-haired man called out. He was walking with his wife, a thin woman in a windbreaker, and holding a dog on a leash. They were the Bradfords, and they had tucked a sympathy card into Shoba and Shukumar’s mailbox back in September. “I hear they’ve got their power.”
“They’d better,” Shukumar said. “Or you’ll be browsing in the dark.”
The woman laughed, slipping her arm through the crook of her husband’s elbow. “Want to join us?”
“No thanks,” Shoba and Shukumar called out together. It surprised Shukumar that his words matched hers.
He wondered what Shoba would tell him in the dark. The worst possibilities had already run through his head. That she’d had an affair. That she didn’t respect him for being thirty-five and still a student. That she blamed him for being in Baltimore the way her mother did. But he knew those things weren’t true. She’d been faithful, as had he. She believed in him. It was she who had insisted he go to Baltimore. What didn’t they know about each other? He knew she curled her fingers tightly when she slept, that her body twitched during bad dreams. He knew it was honeydew she favored over cantaloupe. He knew that when they returned from the hospital the first thing she did when she walked into the house was pick out objects of theirs and toss them into a pile in the hallway: books from the shelves, plants from the windowsills, paintings from walls, photos from tables, pots and pans that hung from the hooks over the stove. Shukumar had stepped out of her way, watching as she moved methodically from room to room. When she was satisfied, she stood there staring at the pile she’d made, her lips drawn back in such distaste that Shukumar had thought she would spit. Then she’d started to cry.
He began to feel cold as he sat there on the steps. He felt that he needed her to talk first, in order to reciprocate.
“That time when your mother came to visit us,” she said finally. “When I said one night that I had to stay late at work, I went out with Gillian and had a martini.”
He looked at her profile, the slender nose, the slightly masculine set of her jaw. He remembered that night well; eating with his mother, tired from teaching two classes back to back, wishing Shoba were there to say more of the right things because he came up with only the wrong ones. It had been twelve years since his father had died,