Interpreter of Maladies

by Jhumpa Lahiri

He thought of how long it had been since she looked into his eyes and smiled, or whispered his name on those rare occasions they still reached for each other’s bodies before sleeping.

Nearly three feet had fallen in the last storm, so that for a week people had to walk single file, in narrow trenches. For a week that was Shukumar’s excuse for not leaving the house. But now the trenches were widening, and water drained steadily into grates in the pavement.

He liked that Shoba was different. It astonished him, her capacity to think ahead.

Shukumar enjoyed cooking now. It was the one thing that made him feel productive. If it weren’t for him, he knew, Shoba would eat a bowl of cereal for her dinner.

It was the one time in the day she sought him out, and yet he’d come to dread it. He knew it was something she forced herself to do.

She was polite to Shukumar without being friendly. She folded his sweaters with an expertise she had learned from her job in a department store. She replaced a missing button on his winter coat and knit him a beige and brown scarf, presenting it to him without the least bit of ceremony, as if he had only dropped it and hadn’t noticed.

In the dimness, he knew how she sat, a bit forward in her chair, ankles crossed against the lowest rung, left elbow on the table.

They weren’t like this before. Now he had to struggle to say something that interested her, something that made her look up from her plate, or from her proofreading files.

“Let’s do that,” she said suddenly. “Do what?” “Say something to each other in the dark.”