Unaccustomed Earth

Kaushik narrates this story in the first/second person, occasionally addressing Hema as “you.” Kaushik begins by telling us that he did not attend his father’s second wedding: he did not even know that his father had remarried until his father called him on the phone on a Sunday morning during Kaushik’s senior year at Swarthmore.

Kaushik recalls that his father had always been one to wake early, and that he would often go for morning walks—first in Bombay, and then on the North Shore of Massachusetts. Kaushik muses, too, that while his father had also always enjoyed his solitude, the solitude that sprung up following Kaushik’s mother’s death had been imprisoning, rather than liberating, for him.

Kaushik recalls that his father informed him that he acquired a new wife during his most recent trip to Calcutta, which he made without Kaushik. Kaushik then recounts the visit to India that he and his father made in the wake of his mother’s death. He asserts that his maternal grandparents had asked after his mother, named Parul, when he and his father arrived, despite the large ceremonial photograph of his mother that adorned their wall. It was only when they were told that Kaushik’s mother was not with them that his grandparents succumbed to tears.