Interpreter of Maladies

Chapter One

A Temporary Matter

The notice informed them that it was a temporary matter: for five
days their electricity would be cut off for one hour, beginning at
eight P.M. A line had gone down in the last snowstorm, and the
repairmen were going to take advantage of the milder evenings to set
it right. The work would affect only the houses on the quiet tree-
lined street, within walking distance of a row of brick-faced stores
and a trolley stop, where Shoba and Shukumar had lived for three
years.

"It's good of them to warn us," Shoba conceded after reading the
notice aloud, more for her own benefit than Shukumar's. She let the
strap of her leather satchel, plump with files, slip from her
shoulders, and left it in the hallway as she walked into the kitchen.
She wore a navy blue poplin raincoat over gray sweatpants and white
sneakers, looking, at thirty-three, like the type of woman she'd once
claimed she would never resemble.

She'd come from the gym. Her cranberry lipstick was visible only on
the outer reaches of her mouth, and her eyeliner had left charcoal
patches beneath her lower lashes. She used to look this way
sometimes, Shukumar thought, on mornings after a party or a night at
a bar, when she'd been too lazy to wash her face, too eager to
collapse into his arms. She dropped a sheaf of mail on the table
without a glance. Her eyes were still fixed on the notice in her
other hand. "But they should do this sort of thing during the day."

"When I'm here, you mean," Shukumar said. He put a glass lid on a pot
of lamb, adjusting it so only the slightest bit of steam could
escape. Since January he'd been working at home, trying to complete
the final chapters of his dissertation on agrarian revolts in
India. "When do the repairs start?"

"It says March nineteenth. Is today the nineteenth?" Shoba walked
over to the framed corkboard that hung on the wall by the fridge,
bare except for a calendar of William Morris wallpaper patterns. She
looked at it as if for the first time, studying the wallpaper pattern
carefully on the top half before allowing her eyes to fall to the
numbered grid on the bottom. A friend had sent the calendar in the
mail as a Christmas gift, even though Shoba and Shukumar hadn't
celebrated Christmas that year.

"Today then," Shoba announced. "You have a dentist appointment next
Friday, by the way."

He ran his tongue over the tops of his teeth; he'd forgotten to brush
them that morning. It wasn't the first time. He hadn't left the house
at all that day, or the day before. The more Shoba stayed out, the
more she began putting in extra hours at work and taking on
additional projects, the more he wanted to stay in, not even leaving
to get the mail, or to buy fruit or wine at the stores by the trolley
stop.

Six months ago, in September, Shukumar was at an academic conference
in Baltimore when Shoba went into labor, three weeks before her due
date. He hadn't wanted to go to the conference, but she had insisted;
it was important to make contacts, and he would be entering the job
market next year. She told him that she had his number at the hotel,
and a copy of his schedule and flight numbers, and she had arranged
with her friend Gillian for a ride to the hospital in the event of an
emergency. When the cab pulled away that morning for the airport,
Shoba stood waving good-bye in her robe, with one arm resting on the
mound of her belly as if it were a perfectly natural part of her
body.

Each time he thought of that moment, the last moment he saw Shoba
pregnant, it was the cab he remembered most, a station wagon, painted
red with blue lettering. It was cavernous compared to their own car.
Although Shukumar was six feet tall, with hands too big ever to rest
comfortably in the pockets of his jeans, he felt dwarfed in the back
seat. As the cab sped down Beacon Street, he imagined a day when he
and Shoba might need to buy a station wagon of their own, to cart
their children back and forth from music lessons and dentist
appointments. He imagined himself gripping the wheel, as Shoba turned
around to hand the children juice boxes. Once, these images of
parenthood had troubled Shukumar, adding to his anxiety that he was
still a student at thirty-five. But that early autumn morning, the
trees still heavy with bronze leaves, he welcomed the image for the
first time.

A member of the staff had found him somehow among the identical
convention rooms and handed him a stiff square of stationery. It was
only a telephone number, b...