Unaccustomed Earth

"I'm sorry we haven't seen your new apartment," she said to her father. "Adam doesn't have any vacation for a while. But we'll come after the baby's born."

"There is nothing to see there. Just a TV and a sofa and my things. There is no space for all of you to stay. Not like here."

"I'd like to see it anyway," she said. "We can stay in a hotel."

"There is no need, Ruma. No need to travel all that way, just to see an apartment," her father said. "You are a mother now," he added. "No need to drag your children."

"But that's what you and Ma did, taking us to India all those times."

"We had no alternative. Our parents weren't willing to travel. But I will come here again to see you," he said, looking approvingly into the distance and taking a sip of his tea. "I like this place."

"My dad's planting flowers in the backyard," she told Adam that night on the phone.

"Does he plan to be around to take care of them?"

His flippancy irritated her, and she felt defensive on her father's behalf. "I don't know."

"It's Thursday, Ruma. How long are you going to torture yourself?"

She didn't feel tortured any longer. She had pla

"For God's sake, Ruma," Adam said. "He's your father. You've known him all your life."

And yet, until now, she had not known certain things about him. She had not known how self-sufficient he could be, how helpful, to the point where she had not had to wash a dish since he'd arrived. At di

The first night Akash slept with her father she went downstairs to make sure he'd fallen asleep. She saw a sliver of light under her father's door and heard the sound of his voice, reading Green Eggs and Ham. She imagined them both under the covers, their heads reclining against the pillows, the book between them, Akash turning the pages as her father read. It was obvious that her father did not know the book by heart, as she did, that he was encountering it for the first time in his life. He read awkwardly, pausing between the sentences, his voice oddly animated as it was not in ordinary speech. Still, his effort touched her, and as she stood by the door she realized that for the first time in his life her father had fallen in love. She was about to knock and tell her father that it was past Akash's bedtime, that he should turn out the light. But she stopped herself, returning upstairs, briefly envious of her own son.

The garden was coming along nicely. It was a futile exercise, he knew. He could not picture his daughter or his son-in-law caring for it properly, noticing what needed to be done. In weeks, he guessed, it would be overgrown with weeds, the leaves chewed up by slugs. Then again, perhaps they would hire someone to do the job. He would have preferred to put in vegetables, but they required more work than flowers. It was a modest planting, some slow-growing myrtle and phlox under the trees, two azalea bushes, a row of hostas, a clematis to climb one of the posts of the porch, and in honor of his wife, a small hydrangea. In a plot behind the kitchen, unable to resist, he also put in a few tomatoes, along with some marigolds and impatiens; there was just time for a small harvest to come in by the fall. He spaced out the delphiniums, tied them to stalks, stuck some gladiola bulbs into the ground. He missed working outside, the solid feeling of dirt under his knees, getting into his nails, the smell of it lingering on his skin even after he'd scrubbed himself in the shower. It was the one thing he missed about the old house, and when he thought about his garden was when he missed his wife most keenly. She had taken that from him. For years, after the children had grown, it had just been the two of them, but she managed to use up all the vegetables, putting them into dishes he did not know how to prepare himself. In addition, when she was alive, they regularly entertained, their guests marveling that the potatoes were from their own backyard, taking away bagfuls at the evening's end.

He looked over at Akash's little plot, the dirt carefully mounded up around his toys, pens and pencils stuck into the ground. Pe

"When will the plants come out?" Akash called out from the swimming pool, where he stood crouching over a little sailboat.

"Soon."

"Tomorrow?"

"Not so soon. These things take time, Akash. Do you remember what I taught you this morning?"

And Akash recited his numbers in Bengali from one to ten.

In bed that night, after Akash had fallen asleep beside him, he wrote Mrs. Bagchi a postcard. It was safer, he decided, than sending an e-mail from Ruma's computer, a mode of communication he could not bring himself fully to trust. He had bought the card off a rack at the hardware store where he had bought Akash's swimming pool. The picture was a view of ferries on Elliott Bay, a sight he had not seen. In Europe he was always careful to buy postcards only of places he'd been to, feeling dishonest otherwise. But here he had no choice. He composed the letter in Bengali, an alphabet Ruma would not be able to decipher. "I am planting Ruma a garden," he began. "Akash has grown and is learning to swim. The weather is pleasant, no rain here in summer. I am looking forward to Prague," he ended. He did not sign his name. He looked through his wallet, where on a folded slip of paper he had written down Mrs. Bagchi's mailing address. He carried only a few addresses with him: his son and his daughter and now Mrs. Bagchi, all written on slips of paper that lived behind his driver's license and Social Security card. He filled out the address in English, and finally, at the top, her name.

He wondered where the nearest post office was. Would Ruma find it odd if he were to ask her for a stamp? He could take it back with him to Pe

He turned to face his sleeping grandson, the long lashes and rounded cheeks reminding him of his own children when they were young. He was suddenly conscious that he would probably not live to see Akash into adulthood, that he would never see his grandson's middle age, his old age, this simple fact of life saddening him. He imagined the boy years from now, occupying this very room, shutting the door as Ruma and Romi had. It was inevitable. And yet he knew that he, too, had turned his back on his parents, by settling in America. In the name of ambition and accomplishment, none of which mattered anymore, he had forsaken them. He kissed Akash lightly on the side of his head, smoothing the curling golden hair with his hand, then switched off the lamp, filling the room with darkness.