Unaccustomed Earth

This story remains with Hema and Kaushik, although it documents a later time in their life, and is narrated in the third person. Hema is 37 years old and in Rome, Italy. It is November. She is staying in her friend Giovanna’s apartment, “in the Ghetto” (294). We learn that Hema has absconded there for no real reason, although she has told her parents and fiancée, Navin, that she is working in Rome as a visiting lecturer at a classical studies institute. By now, she has earned a PhD and a tenure-track professorship. Giovanna, Hema’s colleague, has made it possible for Hema to access the American Academy’s library, and also supplied Hema with the telephone numbers of her nearby friends, whom she assures Hema will be happy to host her. Hema also plans to wed Navin in Calcutta, where her parents have relocated to, right before Christmas.

Hema thinks about the life she has temporarily escaped from: the way the Wellesley campus looks at this time of the year, her students struggling over their Latin lessons. She has taken up going to one restaurant, very close to Giovanna’s apartment—due to the foreigner’s problems she comes up against when trying other options. It is a restaurant that she and Julian, the married man with whom she has been having an affair for nearly the past decade, once went during an ill-fated trip to Rome. The narrator intimates that in those days, Hema still believed that Julian would leave his wife for her. Hema remembers that she and Julian stayed at a hotel behind the Colosseum during their May trip, and that Julian had presented a paper at a conference. Hema had lied to her parents at the time, too, telling them that she was presenting a paper in Rome. However, having just successfully defended her dissertation, she was doing no such thing, and was instead taking a few months’ vacation.

Hema remembers her former trip to Rome with Julian as fruitless and contentious. She remembers listening to Julian’s daily phone calls to his wife and children, and the way that their entire relationship was conducted in hotel rooms, as she always lived with roommates during that time in her life, and taking her to his home in Amherst was out of the question.

In contrast, Navin would never come to Rome. The narrator intimates that Navin and Hema have spent only three weekends together, spread across three months. Navin has always been chaste and proper during these visits, treating the relationship like a teenage courtship. While Hema is in Rome, she communicates with Navin via email and an occasional phone call. Their interactions are weighted with the knowledge of the life they are about to embark on, but also lacking in the intimacy that they could not have possibly developed with each other yet.

Although Hema resists labeling her impending marriage as an arranged one, she knows, deep down, that it is. Her parents, completely unaware of her long relationship with Julian, would periodically offer to set her up with various Indian men over the years, and when Hema finally realized that Julian would never leave his wife for her, she accepted her parents’ offer and met Navin. Although Hema had proven to herself and her family that she was capable of managing the house that her parents had helped her buy in Newton and living a full life on her own, her own inability to enter her forties without a husband and children is what had guided her to Navin. After all of the ambiguity she had suffered in her relationship with Julian, she found the promise of marriage a welcome respite. She broke it off with Julian with one phone call. Julian then claimed that she had been deceptive with him, labeled her heartless, and stopped calling.

Hema feels free of both her past and her impending future during this visit to Rome. She also takes comfort in the ways that Rome reminds her of Calcutta, which she visited many times in her childhood. She also feels a quiet gratification about her academic work: she’d gone from an eighth grader obsessed with Latin to a published professor. She feels a sacred element to her work, as if all of her expertise in Latin imbues her with the ability to “bring a dead world to life” (299). Instead of calling the friends whose numbers Giovanna had supplied her with, she is busying herself with Roman history and the works of Cicero, Seneca, and Nigidius Figulus, among others. She also becomes aware of the Roman men who occasionally make passes at her. While she had remained impervious to such advances when she was involved with Julian, she finds herself more attuned to these advances in his absence, and this saddens her, reminding her that “her heart [does] not belong to Navin in the same way” (301).

Hema also sometimes witnesses the young, sophisticated mothers who populate Campo de’ Fiori on the weekends bantering with vendors while pushing their children in strollers. The narrator notes that both Hema and Navin were aware of her age, and Navin has voiced his desire to get started on a family with her right away.

One day, Hema walks to both the Piazza del Popolo and the Villa Giulia. In the museum, she finds herself enraptured with the ancient items that once touched peoples’ bodies. While regarding a huge sarcophagus of a bride and groom, she begins crying: “Like the young smiling couple sitting affectionately on top of a shared casket, there was something dead about the marriage she was about to enter into” (301). She comes home to a message from Edo, one of Giovanna’s friends, who is concerned that he has not heard from her. Because Edo’s concern seems kind and genuine, Hema returns the call and agrees to join Edo and his wife for lunch the following Sunday.

At this point, the narrative abruptly switches to regard Kaushik. Kaushik had become acquainted with Paola, Edo’s wife, while both of them were working in Netanya, “a resort town on the Israeli coast” (302). Kaushik now works as a photojournalist, which brings him to various parts of the world, but has spent the bulk of the last year working in Gaza and the West Bank. He became a photojournalist during his post-college trek in South America. On his trip, he befriended a Dutch journalist named Espen, who shared stories with Kaushik about all of the human carnage he witnessed in his line of work.

One day, when Kaushik was eating lunch with Espen in a village outside of Morazán, they became chance witnesses to the death of a man who was shot in the head in the street while they were dining. Kaushik remembers coming upon the man lying in the street, his clothes notably spotless while a torrent of blood escaped his head and he lay there dying. Kaushik took pictures of the man that day, and by the time he was finished, the man was dead. He was the only one to document the death, and that photograph, later published by an Amsterdam-based Catholic newspaper, essentially launched his career. He has since traveled to Buenos Aires, Africa, and the Middle East, among other destinations, and documented more corpses than he can count, “their faces bloated, their mouths stuffed with dirt, their vacant eyes reflecting passing clouds over their heads” (305).

Kaushik’s job, too, enables him to permanently evade the United States. His father has transformed into a 70-year-old whose favored pastime is golf. Too, his father habitually looks for Kaushik’s name next to newspaper photographs as a manner of tracking his son’s international travels. Rupa has married and become an elementary school art teacher; Piu is enrolled in medical school at Tufts.

Kaushik maintained a diminutive apartment in Trastevere, but it was just a place to recover in between assignments, and a woman named Franca had originally brought him to Italy. However, when it came time to propose to Franca, he had balked, and the affair ended bitterly.

Kaushik remembered Rome from the layover vacation that he took there with his father and mother during their move from Bombay to Massachusetts. He recalls that at that time, his mother was still basically healthy, and had recently turned forty, the age Kaushik is about to be in the story’s narrative present. His father and Chitra had also once visited Rome. It was during their trip that Kaushik had become aware of a dim, grey speck swimming in his line of vision, which a doctor quickly informed him was a basically harmless consequence of his age. This malady struck him as invasive, an assault on the sense that was most precious to him—his sight.

Kaushik thinks of his mother periodically. During his myriad travels, he would sometimes think of the way his mother prioritized nurturing home spaces while he never looked at living spaces as trusted places of refuge. All of his trips to refugee camps also reminded him of his family’s relocations. While he wanted to regard himself as a constant traveler, unbound by the trappings of the world, he understood himself and his work to be completely beholden to the material things of this world.

Kaushik has recently finalized a move to Hong Kong, to accept a position as a newspaper photo editor, and arranged for a layover in Thailand during the last week of December. He’s been informed that a fellow Indian has been invited to Edo and Paola’s, and he fully expects to find a bespectacled, middle-aged archaeologist (which is also Edo’s profession). However, he finds a face he already knows: Hema’s.

Hema and Kaushik fall into an easy intimacy; a few other guests assume they are a couple. Kaushik does not hide his desire for Hema, who has grown attractive in the intervening years since their last meeting. Hema, for her part, still remembers the intensity of her teen crush on Kaushik, and, in Kaushik’s presence, feels as though no time has passed between that time in her life and the current one.

Kaushik brings Hema back to his apartment after the lunch, their continued contact having become a given, despite the decades that separate their last meeting from this one. They continue to catch each other up on the respective movements of their lives, and learn that they were near each other during their undergraduate years, when Hema was at Bryn Mawr and Kaushik at Swarthmore. Julian remains obscured and unimportant in Hema’s recollections; she does eventually inform Kaushik of her impending marriage to Navin. At one point, too, Kaushik catches sight of the bangle that still adorns Hema’s wrist, the same one that she wore as a child. He playfully hooks his finger into it and pulls her wrist toward him when he notices it. The bangle was a present from Hema’s grandmother, and she had always adored its flower-and-vine motif. She had even taken it to a jeweler to expand it when her wrist outgrew it.

When Kaushik asks Hema why she is marrying Navin, she tells him the truth: “I thought it might fix things” (313). Kaushik takes this information for what it is, and does not condemn or congratulate Hema. The declaration of Hema’s betrothal peculiarly opens the door for Hema and Kaushik, and Hema notices that his kisses are much more aggressive than Navin’s chaste and reserved ones. Navin also never let his hands roam over Hema’s body, nor has he ever told her she is beautiful in the manner that Kaushik presently does. She even recalls to Kaushik that his mother was the first one to pay her this compliment, while they shared a fitting room in a department store decades ago. This utterance does not create awkwardness: conversely, it creates an intimacy between them. Hema knows, without Kaushik saying so, that she is the “first person he’d ever slept with who’d known his mother, who was able to remember her as he did” (313).

Hema and Kaushik spend the next few weeks regularly seeing each other, wandering through Rome as Hema shares her extensive knowledge of the history of various historical sites. The international news on the TV becomes their regular soundtrack, thereby asserting the fact that Kaushik’s entire existence relies heavily upon the here and now, which brings the way that Hema’s consciousness is predicated upon historical events into sharp relief.

When Hema pulls up Kaushik’s photography website, she can see all of the carnage he has witnessed, and feels quietly grateful that his new job in Hong Kong will tie him to a desk and keep him out of danger. She feels, too, that Parul would also find relief in this. She begins to see Kaushik’s profession as a result of his constant need to disappear. She also sees herself as one casual sexual relationship among the many that Kaushik has entertained over the years, and her experience with Julian hardens her, making her unwilling to make herself vulnerable to Kaushik in any similar way. She contents herself with expecting nothing from Kaushik, and they make sure to use a condom every time they have sex.  

One night, Kaushik confides in Hema. He asserts that he does not like the way that his career has desensitized him to human tragedy, and recalls a time that he came upon a car accident by chance: although no one was killed, Kaushik documented the scene in photographs, including the scared children who had been in one of the cars, before calling for help.

After three weeks, Navin calls Hema and leaves a message on the machine, while Hema and Kaushik are present. The narrator tells us that it is because of Hema’s assurance of the fleeting nature of their dalliance that she allowed Kaushik to begin undressing her, even as Navin’s voice filled the air. In the meantime, she feeds Navin lies about her work and travels that serve as alibis for her gaps in communication with him.

During the week before Christmas, Hema and Kaushik travel to Volterra. While there, she wears Kaushik’s pea coat to protect herself from the cold, and remembers the hated hand-me-down jacket she once inherited from him when she was a child. At the Guarnacci Etruscan Museum, the two of them come upon ancient urns, which look more like coffins. They also come upon another sarcophagus featuring a husband and wife. But, in contrast to the “languid, loving pair” that Hema saw in Rome, this couple appears “older, cruder, still bristling after years of marriage, ill at ease” (320).   

Later that day, Kaushik asks Hema to come with him to Hong Kong, instead of marrying Navin. He even tells her that she should go to India to manage the whole affair, and that he will wait for her in the meantime. While a part of Hema feels thrilled by this proposal, she also feels struck by Kaushik’s selfishness: unlike Navin, Kaushik did not propose that he come to her, but rather commanded her to change her entire life for him. Hema tells Kaushik that it is too late for such plans; his rejoinder is that it will only become too late once Hema goes through with the marriage.

During the drive back from Volterra, Hema asserts her explicit refusal of Kaushik’s proposal. She tells him that she is unable to give up her whole life in order to follow him, that she doesn’t expect anything equivalent to a drastic life change from him, and does not want to become accused, later, of putting a ball and chain on him, while also asserting that her refusal does not preclude the continuation of an affair between them. When Hema begins to cry, Kaushik remains stoic, in much the same manner as the day that the graves in the forest caused Hema to cry. Hema feels that her refusal has caused Kaushik to withdraw entirely, and is surprised when he ultimately accompanies her to the airport for her voyage out of Rome.

It is only after Kaushik has gone, and the flight is boarding, that Hema realizes that she has left her beloved bangle at the airport security checkpoint. When she is forced to either return to the checkpoint or miss her flight, she chooses to continue boarding, despite the fact that her mother’s opinions about the inauspiciousness of losing gold echo in her ears. Although she becomes gripped by fear that catastrophe will strike her plane as a result, she allows the graphic on the plane’s monitors, which shows the plane’s approach to India, to steady her as it makes “clear the only road available now” (324).

Kaushik soon finds himself alone and friendless in Khao Lak, Thailand. The intervening time has lessened his wrath at Hema, leaving only a yearning for her in its place. He feels bereft without her, the only woman who has any comprehension of his past, and the only woman with whom he actively desires to nurture a connection.

A Swedish man named Henrik, who occupies the bungalow next to Kaushik’s with his wife and children, befriends Kaushik. As Kaushik observes their family, he feels a flash of anger at Hema, at the prospect of her beginning a family and a life with a man she does not love.

Henrik works as a film editor for a Stockholm TV station. He tells Kaushik that this is the fourth Christmas his family has spent at the Thai resort, finding their array of relations too much work for the holiday season. When Henrik eventually asks Kaushik for the details surrounding Kaushik’s involvement with Hema, he assures Kaushik that he will be fine alone. Kaushik’s mood sours as he realizes the gravity of what he was asking Hema to leave behind: her work and her world (328).

Kaushik eventually joins Henrik for a guided boat ride in the ocean, during which Kaushik snaps many photographs. The last image that we receive of him is of him entering the water, wanting to “show his mother that he [is] not afraid” (321).

The narrative then switches back to Hema, who speaks in the first person. Upon her arrival in Calcutta, she finds herself foolishly searching for Kaushik’s face in the streets. News of a tsunami that decimated portions of the Indian and Sri Lankan coasts reaches her, and she learns that Thailand was also struck. Knowing that Kaushik planned on spending time on the beaches of Thailand prior to his arrival in Hong Kong, Hema searches the newspapers fruitlessly for a photograph attributed to Kaushik.  

By the end of the week, Navin arrives in Calcutta to wed Hema. She feels repulsed by the sight of him—not because of her infidelity, but because “he still breathed, because he was there for [her] and had countless more days to live” (322). She then quickly recounts their wedding: “We were married, we were blessed, my hand was placed on top of his, and the ends of our clothing were knotted together” (323).

Hema returns to her life, sans Kaushik: to the life she chose instead of him (333). In February, Giovanna contacts Hema to say that she has received news of Kaushik’s death from Paola. The New York Times prints a short obituary for Kaushik, but by that time, Hema “needed no proof of [his] absence from the world: [she] felt it as plainly and implacably as the cells that were gathering and shaping themselves in [her] body” (333). Navin, already feeling pride for Hema’s burgeoning pregnancy, does not question the way that Hema retreats to bed, “unable to speak” and “burning with new life but mourning [Kaushik’s] death” (333). She reflects that, had they not used condoms, the child growing within her could very well have been Kaushik’s. But “we had been careful,” she writes to Kaushik, “and you had left nothing behind” (333).