Interpreter of Maladies. Jhumpa Lahiri
his father had liked, but she was too upset to eat the dishes herself, and her eyes would well up as Shoba stroked her hand. “It’s so touching,” Shoba had said to him at the time. Now he pictured Shoba with Gillian, in a bar with striped velvet sofas, the one they used to go to after the movies, making sure she got her extra olive, asking Gillian for a cigarette. He imagined her complaining, and Gillian sympathizing about visits from in-laws. It was Gillian who had driven Shoba to the hospital.
“Your turn,” she said, stopping his thoughts.
At the end of their street Shukumar heard sounds of a drill and the electricians shouting over it. He looked at the darkened facades of the houses lining the street. Candles glowed in the windows of one. In spite of the warmth, smoke rose from the chimney.
“I cheated on my Oriental Civilization exam in college,” he said. “It was my last semester, my last set of exams. My father had died a few months before. I could see the blue book of the guy next to me. He was an American guy, a maniac. He knew Urdu and Sanskrit. I couldn’t remember if the verse we had to identify was an example of a ghazal or not. I looked at his answer and copied it down.”
It had happened over fifteen years ago. He felt relief now, having told her.
She turned to him, looking not at his face, but at his shoes—old moccasins he wore as if they were slippers, the leather at the back permanently flattened. He wondered if it bothered her, what he’d said. She took his hand and pressed it. “You didn’t have to tell me why you did it,” she said, moving closer to him.
They sat together until nine o’clock, when the lights came on. They heard some people across the street clapping from their porch, and televisions being turned on. The Bradfords walked back down the street, eating ice-cream cones and waving. Shoba and Shukumar waved back. Then they stood up, his hand still in hers, and went inside.
Somehow, without saying anything, it had turned into this. Into an exchange of confessions—the little ways they’d hurt or disappointed each other, and themselves. The following day Shukumar thought for hours about what to say to her. He was torn between admitting that he once ripped out a photo of a woman in one of the fashion magazines she used to subscribe to and carried it in his books for a week, or saying that he really hadn’t lost the sweater-vest she bought him for their third wedding anniversary but had exchanged it for cash at Filene’s, and that he had gotten drunk alone in the middle of the day at a hotel bar. For their first anniversary, Shoba had cooked a ten-course dinner just for him. The vest depressed him. “My wife gave me a sweater-vest for our anniversary,” he complained to the bartender, his head heavy with cognac. “What do you expect?” the bartender had replied. “You’re married.”
As for the picture of the woman, he didn’t know why he’d ripped it out. She wasn’t as pretty as Shoba. She wore a white sequined dress, and had a sullen face and lean, mannish legs. Her bare arms were raised, her fists around her head, as if she were about to punch herself in the ears. It was an advertisement for stockings. Shoba had been pregnant at the time, her stomach suddenly immense, to the point where Shukumar no longer wanted to touch her. The first time he saw the picture he was lying in bed next to her, watching her as she read. When he noticed the magazine in the recycling pile he found the woman and tore out the page as carefully as he could. For about a week he allowed himself a glimpse each day. He felt an intense desire for the woman, but it was a desire that turned to disgust after a minute or two. It was the closest he’d come to infidelity.
He told Shoba about the sweater on the third night, the picture on the fourth. She said nothing as he spoke, expressed no protest or reproach. She simply listened, and then she took his hand, pressing it as she had before. On the third night, she told him that once after a lecture they’d attended, she let him speak to the chairman of his department without telling him that he had a dab of pâté on his chin. She’d been irritated with him for some reason, and so she’d let him go on and on, about securing his fellowship for the following semester, without putting a finger to her own chin as a signal. The fourth night, she said that she never liked the one poem he’d ever published in his life, in a literary magazine in Utah. He’d written the poem after meeting Shoba. She added that she found the poem sentimental.
Something happened when the house was dark. They were able to talk to each other again. The third night after supper they’d sat together on the sofa, and once it was dark he began kissing her awkwardly on her forehead and her face, and though it was dark he closed his eyes, and knew that she did, too. The fourth night they walked carefully upstairs, to bed, feeling together for the final step with their feet before the landing, and making love with a desperation they had forgotten. She wept without sound, and whispered his name, and traced his eyebrows with her finger in the dark. As he made love to her he wondered what he would say to her the next night, and what she would say, the thought of it exciting him. “Hold me,” he said, “hold me in your arms.” By the time the lights came back on downstairs, they’d fallen asleep.
The morning of the fifth night Shukumar found another notice from the electric company in the mailbox. The line had been repaired ahead of schedule, it said. He was disappointed. He had planned on making shrimp malai for Shoba, but when he arrived at the store he didn’t feel like cooking anymore. It wasn’t the same, he thought, knowing that the lights wouldn’t go out. In the store the shrimp looked gray and thin. The coconut milk tin was dusty and overpriced. Still, he bought them, along with a beeswax candle and two bottles of wine.
She came home at seven-thirty. “I suppose this is the end of our game,” he said when he saw her reading the notice.
She looked at him. “You can still light candles if you want.” She hadn’t been to the gym tonight. She wore a suit beneath the raincoat. Her makeup had been retouched recently.
When she went upstairs to change, Shukumar poured himself some wine and put on a record, a Thelonius Monk album he knew she liked.
When she came downstairs they ate together. She didn’t thank him or compliment him. They simply ate in a darkened room, in the glow of a beeswax candle. They had survived a difficult time. They finished off the shrimp. They finished off the first bottle of wine and moved on to the second. They sat together until the candle had nearly burned away. She shifted in her chair, and Shukumar thought that she was about to say something. But instead she blew out the candle, stood up, turned on the light switch, and sat down again.
“Shouldn’t we keep the lights off?” Shukumar asked.
She set her plate aside and clasped her hands on the table. “I want you to see my face when I tell you this,” she said gently.
His heart began to pound. The day she told him she was pregnant, she had used the very same words, saying them in the same gentle way, turning off the basketball game he’d been watching on television. He hadn’t been prepared then. Now he was.
Only he didn’t want her to be pregnant again. He didn’t want to have to pretend to be happy.
“I’ve been looking for an apartment and I’ve found one,” she said, narrowing her eyes on something, it seemed, behind his left shoulder. It was nobody’s fault, she continued. They’d been through enough. She needed some time alone. She had money saved up for a security deposit. The apartment was on Beacon Hill, so she could walk to work. She had signed the lease that night before coming home.
She wouldn’t look at him, but he stared at her. It was obvious that she’d rehearsed the lines. All this time she’d been looking for an apartment, testing the water pressure, asking a Realtor if heat and hot water were included in the rent. It sickened Shukumar, knowing that she had spent these past evenings preparing for a life without him. He was relieved and yet he was sickened. This was what she’d been trying to tell him for the past four evenings. This was the point of her game.
Now it was his turn to speak. There was something he’d sworn he would never tell her, and for six months he had done his best to block it from his mind. Before the ultrasound she had asked the doctor not to tell her the sex of their child, and Shukumar had agreed. She had wanted it to be a surprise.
Later, those few times they talked about what