Unaccustomed Earth

"It's remarkable, the amount of food you get in first class," your mother said. "Champagne, chocolates, even caviar. But I saved room. I remembered your cooking, Shibani," she added.

"First class!" my mother exclaimed, with an intake of breath. "How did you end up there?"

"It was my fortieth birthday gift," your mother explained. She looked over at your father, smiling. "Once in a lifetime, right?"

"Who knows?" he said, clearly proud of the extravagance. "It could become a terrible habit."

Our parents spoke of the old Cambridge crowd, mine telling yours about people's moves and accomplishments, the bachelors who had married, the children who had been born. They spoke about Reagan wi

"Do not die before seeing the Pantheon," your father said, and my parents nodded, not knowing what the Pantheon was. I knew-I was, in fact, in the middle of learning about ancient Rome in my Latin class, writing a long report about its art and architecture, all of it based on encyclopedia entries and other books in the school library. Your parents spoke of Bombay and the home you had left behind, a flat on the tenth floor, with a balcony overlooking palm trees and the Arabian Sea. "A pity you didn't visit us there," your mother said. Later, in the privacy of their bedroom, my mother pointed out to my father that we had never been invited.

After di

"This is my room. Your room," I said, correcting myself.

After dreading it all this time, now I was secretly thrilled that you would be sleeping here. You would absorb my presence, I thought. Without my having to do a thing, you would come to know me and like me. You walked across the room to the window, opened it, and leaned out into the darkness, letting cold air into the room.

"Ever go out on the roof?" you asked. You did not wait for me to answer, and the next thing I knew you'd lifted the screen and were gone. I rushed over to the window, and when I leaned outside I couldn't see you. I imagined you slipping on the shingles, falling into the shrubbery, my being blamed for the accident, for standing by stupidly as you did such a brazen thing. "Are you okay?" I called out. The logical thing would have been to say your name, but I felt inhibited and did not. Eventually you came back around, seating yourself on the incline over the garage, gazing down at the lawn.

"What's behind the house?"

"Woods. But you can't go there."

"Who said?"

"Everyone. My parents and all the teachers in school." "Why not?"

"A boy got lost in them last year. He's still missing." His name was Kevin McGrath, and he'd been two grades behind me. For a week we'd heard nothing but helicopters, dogs barking, searching for some sign of him.

You did not react to this information. Instead, you asked, "Why do people have yellow ribbons tied to their mailboxes?"

"They're for the hostages in Iran."

"I bet most Americans had never even heard of Iran before this," you said, causing me to feel responsible both for my neighbors' patriotism and for their ignorance.

"What's that thing to the right?"

"A swing set."

The word must have amused you. You faced me and smiled, though not kindly, as if I'd invented the term.

"I missed the cold," you said. "This cold." The remark reminded me that none of this was new to you. "And the snow. When will it snow again?"

"I don't know. There wasn't much snow for Christmas this year."

You climbed back into the room, disappointed, I feared, by my lack of information. You glanced at yourself in my white-framed mirror, your head nearly cut off at the top. "Where's the bathroom?" you asked, already halfway out the door.

That night, lying on the cot in my parents' room, wide awake though it was well past midnight, I heard my mother and father talking in the dark. I worried that perhaps you would hear them, too. The bed where you slept was just on the other side of the wall, and if I had been able to stick my hand through it, I could have touched you. My parents were at once critical of and intimidated by yours, perplexed by the ways in which they had changed. Bombay had made them more American than Cambridge had, my mother said, something she hadn't anticipated and didn't understand. There were remarks concerning your mother's short hair, her slacks, the Joh

"It's a cigarette you smell," he said when he came back to bed. "Someone has been smoking in the bathroom."

"I didn't know Dr. Choudhuri smoked," my mother said. "Should we have put out an ashtray?"

In the morning you all slept in, victims of jet lag, reminding us that despite your presence, your bags crowding the hallways, your toothbrushes cluttering the side of the sink, you belonged elsewhere. When I returned from school in the afternoon you were still sleeping, and at di

Then one day I came home from school and found your parents awake, their ankles crossed on top of the coffee table, filling up the sofa where I normally sat to watch The Brady Bunch and Gilligan's Island. They were chatting with my mother, who was in the recliner with a bowl in her lap, peeling potatoes. Your mother was dressed in a nylon sari of my mother's, purple with red dots in various sizes. Distressing news of your mother's missing suitcase had come: it had been located in Rome but had been placed on a flight to Joha