He offered these details as if responding diligently to questions I was not asking.Close Alert Close Sign In Search Search News Books Culture Fiction Poetry Humor Cartoons Magazine Crossword Video Podcasts Archive Goings On Open Navigation Menu Menu Story Saved To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.Close Alert Close Fiction December 24, 2007 Issue Years End By Jhumpa Lahir i December 17, 2007 Facebook Twitter Email Print Save Story Save this story for later.Mark GuthrieMillennium Images, Uk; Bharat Sikka (2002) Facebook Twitter Email Print Save Story Save this story for later.
I did not even know there had been a wedding until my father called early one Sunday during my final year at Swarthmore. I was roused from sleep by a pounding on my door, followed by the voice of one of my hallmates saying my last name. I knew before answering that it was my father; there was no one else who would have called me before nine. My father had always been an early riser, believing that the hours between five and seven were the most profitable part of the day. He would use that time to read the newspaper and then go for a walk, along Marine Drive when we lived in Bombay and on the quiet roads of our town on the North Shore of Massachusetts, where we moved when I was sixteen, after my mother got sick. As much as he used to encourage my mother and me to join him, I knew he preferred being alone. ![]() I knew that he no longer bothered to go for walks and that since my mothers death he hardly slept at all. He had been in Calcutta, visiting my grandparents, all four of whom were still alive, and when I picked up the phone, left for me hanging upside down by its cord, I expected him to say only that he had returned safely, not that I now had a stepmother and two stepsisters. It had been the hardest thing, in those first months after she was gone: having to go to Calcutta with my father and enter the home where my mother had been a girl, having to see the man and woman who had raised her, who had known her and loved her long before she had a husband and a son. My grandparents had already lived in a state of mild mourning since 1962, when my parents got married and moved away. My fathers first job was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which was where I was born, three years later. Occasionally, my mother would return to them, like Persephone in the myth, temporarily filling up and brightening the rooms, scattering her creams and powders on the dressing table, sleeping in the room where shed been small. After we called my grandparents to tell them my mother was dead, they had held on to the hope that it was only a matter of time, and that she would board a plane and walk through the door once again. When my father and I entered the house, my grandmother asked if my mother was still in the taxi that had already driven away, this in spite of the fact that a photograph of my mother, larger than life and draped with a tuberose garland, hung on their living-room wall. Shes not with us, Didun, I said, and it was only then that both my grandparents broke down, grieving freshly for my mother as neither my father nor I had done. Being with her through her illness day after day had denied us that privilege. They missed me and sent their love, he said, and then he told me about Chitra. She had lost her spouse two years ago, not to cancer but to encephalitis. Chitra was a schoolteacher and, at thirty-five, nearly twenty years younger than my father.
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