Unaccustomed Earth

by Jhumpa Lahiri

“Be happy, love Baba,” he signed them, as if the attainment of happiness were as simple as that.

She’d always felt unfairly cast, by both her parents, into roles that weren’t accurate: as her father’s oldest son, her mother’s secondary spouse.

human being could be alive for years and years, thinking and breathing and eating, full of a million worries and feelings and thoughts, taking up space in the world, and then, in an instant, become absent, invisible.

that the entire enterprise of having a family, of putting children on this earth, as gratifying as it sometimes felt, was flawed from the start.

Here, in a handful of sentences she could not even read, was the explanation, the evidence that it was not just with Akash that her father had fallen in love.

Wasn’t it terrible that after all the work one put into finding a person to spend one’s life with, after making a family with that person, even in spite of missing that person, as Amit missed Megan night after night, that solitude was what one relished most, the only thing that, even in fleeting, diminished doses, kept one sane?

They did not speak of Rahul unless forced to by friends, and when they did, it was always the same unobjectionably impressive facts about him—that he was at Cornell, a sophomore now. These facts gave her parents a feeble hope: as if college, where he’d begun to fall apart, would magically put him together again.

Their mother, who had always hoped her children would live under her roof, was now ashamed that this was the case.

The sky was different, without color, taut and unforgiving. But the water was the most unforgiving thing, nearly black at times, cold enough, I knew, to kill me, violent enough to break me apart.