“Year's End,” by Jhumpa...Pdf“Year's...Pdf

12/30/2020 “Year’s End,” by Jhumpa Lahiri | The New Yorker Fiction December 24 & 31, 2007 Issue Year’s End By Jhumpa Lahiri December 17, 2007 Photographs (left to right) by Mark Guthrie / Millennium Images, UK; Bharat Sikka (2002) did not attend my father’s wedding. I did not even know there had been a wedding until my father called early one Sunday I during my nal year at Swarthmore. I was roused from sleep by a pounding on my door, followed by the voice of one of my hallmates saying my last name. I knew before answering that it was my father; there was no one else who would have called me before nine. My father had always been an early riser, believing that the hours between ve and seven were the most protable part of the day. He would use that time to read the newspaper and then go for a walk, along Marine Drive when we lived in Bombay and on the quiet roads of our town on the North Shore of Massachusetts, where we moved when I was sixteen, after my mother got sick. As much as he used to encourage my mother and me to join him, I knew he preferred being alone. Things were different now, of course; those solitary hours he’d once savored had become a prison for him, a commonplace. I knew that he no longer bothered to go for walks and that since my mother’s death he hardly slept at all. I had not spoken to my father in several weeks. He had been in Calcutta, visiting my grandparents, all four of whom were still alive, and when I picked up the phone, left for me hanging upside down by its cord, I expected him to say only that he had returned safely, not that I now had a stepmother and two stepsisters. “I must tell you something that will upset you,” he began, and I wondered if perhaps one of my grandparents had fallen ill, if my mother’s parents, in particular, could no longer endure the loss of their only daughter at the age of forty-two. It had been the hardest thing, in those rst months after she was gone: having to go to Calcutta with my father and enter the home where my mother had been a girl, having to see the man and woman who had raised her, who had known her and loved her long before she had a husband and a son. My grandparents had already lived in a state of mild mourning since 1962, when my parents got married https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/12/24/years-end 1/21 12/30/2020 “Year’s End,” by Jhumpa Lahiri | The New Yorker and moved away. My father’s rst job was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which was where I was born, three years later. When I was nine, we went back to India, to Bombay. Occasionally, my mother would return to them, like Persephone in the myth, temporarily lling up and brightening the rooms, scattering her creams and powders on the dressing table, sleeping in the room where she’d been small. After we called my grandparents to tell them my mother was dead, they had held on to the hope that it was only a matter of time, and that she would board a plane and walk through the door once again. When my father and I entered the house, my grandmother asked if my mother was still in the taxi that had already driven away, this in spite of the fact that a photograph of my mother, larger than life and draped with a tuberose garland, hung on their living-room wall. “She’s not with us, Didun,” I said, and it was only then that both my grandparents broke down, grieving freshly for my mother as neither my father nor I had done. Being with her through her illness day after day had denied us that privilege. But my grandparents were ne, my father reported now. They missed me and sent their love, he said, and then he told me about Chitra. She had lost her spouse two years ago, not to cancer but to encephalitis. Chitra was a schoolteacher and, at thirty-ve, nearly twenty years younger than my father. Her daughters were seven and ten. He offered these details as if responding diligently to questions I was not asking. “I don’t ask you to care for her, even to like her,” my father said. “You are a grown man, you have no need for her in your life as I do. I only ask, eventually, that you understand my decision.” It was clear to me that he had prepared himself for my outrage—harsh words, accusations, the slamming down of the phone. But no turbulent emotion passed through me as he spoke, only a diluted version of the nauseous sensation that had taken hold the day that I learned my mother was dying, a sensation that had dropped anchor in me and never fully left. “Is she there with you?” I asked. “Would you like me to say something?” I said this more as a challenge than out of politeness, not entirely believing him. Since my mother’s death, I frequently doubted things my father said in the course of our telephone conversations: that he had eaten dinner on any given night, for example, and not simply polished off another can of almonds and a few Johnnie Walkers in front of the television. “They arrive in two weeks. You will see them when you come home for Christmas,” my father said, adding, “Her English is not so good.” “Worse than my Bengali?” “Possibly. She will pick it up, of course.” I didn’t say what came to my lips—that my mother had learned English as a girl, that she’d had no need to pick it up in America. “The girls are better at it,” my father continued. “They’ve gone to English-medium schools. I’ve enrolled them in their grades to start in January.” He had known Chitra just a few weeks, had met her only twice before their marriage. It was a registry wedding, followed by a small dinner at a hotel. “The whole thing was arranged by relatives,” he explained, in a way that suggested that he was not to blame. This remark upset me more than anything my father had said so far. My father was not a malleable man, and I knew that no one would have dared to nd him a new wife unless he had requested it. “I was tired, Kaushik,” he said. “Tired of coming home to an empty house every night.” I didn’t know which was worse—the idea of my father’s remarrying for love or of his actively seeking out a stranger for companionship. My parents had had an arranged marriage, but there was a touch of romance about it, too, my father seeing my mother for the rst time at a wedding and being so attracted that he had asked, the following week, for her hand. They had always https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/12/24/years-end 2/21 12/30/2020 “Year’s End,” by Jhumpa Lahiri | The New Yorker been affectionate with each other, but it wasn’t until her illness that he seemed fully, recklessly, to fall in love with her, so that I was witness to a courtship that ought to have faded before I was born. He doted on her then, arriving home at our Bombay at with owers, lingering in bed with her in the mornings, going in late to work, wanting to be alone with her to the point where I, a teen- ager, felt in the way. “I thought,” he continued, “since your bedroom is a good size, of putting the girls together there. Would you mind terribly staying in the guest room 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 ne.” “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 stumbled barefoot into the hallway to answer the phone. Now she was lying on her stomach, a pen in her hand, nishing 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 wereobscured. “My father,” I said, squeezing back into the bed beside her. For a while, she continued pondering the puzzle as I lay there, 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 briey against her body, I did. fter my exams, I drove to Massachusetts, dropping off Jessica at her parents’ farmhouse in Connecticut on the way. When I A decided to attend Swarthmore, my father had given me the Audi he’d bought after we moved back from Bombay.

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