"I thought," he continued, "since your bedroom is a good size, of putting the girls together there. Would you mind terribly staying in the guestroom when you visit, Kaushik? Most of your things are with you now anyway. It is just a matter of where to sleep. But please tell me if you mind." He seemed more concerned about my reaction to a new room than the fact that I had just acquired a new family.
"It's fine."
"You are being honest?" "I said I don't mind."
I returned to my dorm room. There was a girl in my bed that morning; she had remained asleep as I pulled on my clothes and stumbled barefoot into the hallway to answer the phone. Now she was lying on her stomach, a pen in her hand, finishing a crossword I'd abandoned. Her name was Jessica, and I'd met her in my Spanish class.
"Who was that?" she asked, turning to look at me. Strong sunlight angled in from the window behind her, darkening her to the point that her features were obscured.
"My father," I said, squeezing back into the bed beside her. For a while she continued pondering the puzzle as I lay curled at her side, the unfamiliar smell of her still thrilling. She knew nothing about my family, about my father's recent visit to Calcutta or about my mother's death the summer before I started college. In the course of our few weekends together I had told Jessica none of those things. That morning, after crying briefly against her body, I did.
After my exams I drove to Massachusetts, dropping off Jessica on the way at her parents' farmhouse in Connecticut. When I decided to attend Swarthmore my father gave me the Audi he'd bought after we moved back from Bombay. He said that it would make it easier for me to come home from Pennsylvania during weekends and holidays, but I knew it was really an excuse to get rid of yet another thing my mother had touched, known, or otherwise occupied. The day we came back from the hospital for the last time, he took every single photograph of her, in frames and in albums, and put them in a shoebox. "Choose a few, I know pictures are important to you," he told me, and then he sealed the box with tape and put it in a closet somewhere. He had wasted no time giving away her clothes, her handbags, her boxes of cosmetics and colognes. That is probably the last time I remember you from that period, you and your mother coming to the house one day and spending an afternoon going through my mother's drawers as many others already had, fingering her things, lifting her sweaters and shawls to their chests to see if they would flatter them, testing to see if Chanel No. Five would react as favorably with their skin. The items you and your mother and the other Bengali women had no need for were sent to charities in India, as there was nowhere in New England to donate all those saris with their matching blouses and petticoats. This was according to my mother's instructions. "I don't want all that beautiful material turned into curtains," she'd told us from her hospital bed. Her ashes were tossed from a boat off the Gloucester coast that a coworker of my father's, Jim Skillings, had arranged for, but her gold went back to Calcutta, distributed to poor women who had worked for my extended family as ayahs or cooks or maids.
It didn't matter to me that her things were gone. After Bombay she had little occasion to wear jewels and saris, saying no to most of the parties she and my father were invited to. Coming home from school toward the end, I would find her sitting wrapped in a blanket, looking out at the pool she no longer had strength to swim in. Sometimes I would take her outside for fresh air, walking carefully through the birches and pines behind the house and sitting with her on a low stone wall. Occasionally, feeling ambitious, she would ask me to drive her to the sea. "Be sure to keep my ruby choker and the pearl and emerald set for the person you will marry," she said during one of these walks. "I'm not planning on getting married any time soon," I told her, and she said that she wished she could say the same for dying. Ultimately, I disobeyed her. After she was gone I was unable to open up and examine the contents of all those flat red boxes she'd kept hidden in a suitcase on her closet shelf, never mind set something aside for the sake of my future happiness.
Late in the afternoon I climbed the road that led to our driveway. Our house was the only source of light for miles, amid isolated patches of hardened snow. It was not an easy, typically inviting place. Stone steps had been built into the uneven ground, flanked by overgrown rhododendrons leading to the entrance. I saw from the other car in the driveway that my father was home, and he stood behind the storm door, waiting for me to come in with my things.
"We were expecting you earlier," he said. "You said you would be here by lunchtime."
I knew then that it was true, that there was another person inside the house, a person who made it possible for my father, without hesitating, to say "We" instead of "I." I said nothing about my detour to Jessica's home and the two hours I'd spent there. Instead I said the traffic had been bad. I wondered if my father had left work early for my sake, or if perhaps he had not gone into the office that day. I could not tell from his appearance. He had given up wearing suits and was dressed as he might be for the weekend, in dark blue pants and an cream-colored sweater. There was more gray in his hair than I remembered, and though he was still vigorously handsome, old age was creeping into his face, the skin sagging at the sides of his nose, his pale greenish eyes-a trait that made my mother insist that there was Irish blood on his side of the family-less curious than they had once been. I tried to imagine him, just weeks before, in a silk kurta, a groom's topor on his head. I wondered who had taken photographs of the wedding, whether my father would show them to me.
I was unused, stepping into the house, to the heavy smell of cooking that was in the air. Otherwise things appeared unchanged, the black-and-white photographs I'd taken of the surrounding woods, which my mother had insisted on framing, still lining one wall of the entryway. The house had always maintained an impersonal quality, full of built-in cupboards concealing the traces of our everyday lives. Now that I no longer lived there I was astonished by how enormous it was, the soaring double-height ceiling of the living room and the great wall of glass looking out onto the trees, more befitting of an institution than a private home. There was a window-seat running along the length of the glass wall, enough space for twenty people to sit side by side, as they had during my mother's funeral.
As soon as I removed my coat, my father hung it in a cupboard, then led me to the dining table. My mother had insisted on furnishing the house with pieces true to its Modernist architecture: a black leather sectional configured in aU, a chrome floor lamp arcing overhead, a glass-topped kidney-shaped cocktail table, and a dining table made of white fiberglass surrounded by matching chairs. She had never allowed a cloth to cover the table, but one was there now, something with an Indian print that could just as easily have been a bedspread and didn't fully reach either end. In the center, instead of the generous cluster of fresh fruit or flowers my mother would have arranged, there was a stainless-steel plate holding an ordinary salt shaker and two jars of pickles, hot mango and sweet lime, their lids missing, their labels stained, spoons stuck into their oils. A single place had been set for me at one end, with translucent luchis piled on a plate, and several smaller bowls containing dal and vegetables arrayed in a semicircle.
"Sit down," my father said. "You must be hungry." He was nervous, as I was. There was no drink in his hand, no bottle of Johnnie Walker set out, as it usually was by this time, on the cocktail table.