Cul de Sac Oindrila Mukherjee
The first night her parents arrive from India is the one that means the most, because there is so much to look forward to, even now, even after everything that’s happened. As the car turns into Swapna’s street, evening is creeping in on the neighborhood. The house that will soon belong exclusively to her is white with gold squares of light at the windows and stands at the end of the cul de sac. Even as families gather for dinner in the other homes, this one waits in silence. Swapna’s parents notice as soon as they climb out of the car. “It’s so quiet,” says her mother, putting a hand to her chest. The crickets chirp in unison, emphasizing the silence when they pause. “This is a residential neighborhood,” Swapna shrugs. “That’s why we – I – chose it.” She opens the door with some hesitation. What she has grown accustomed to is likely to appear unnerving to her parents. They have always found America lonely. But tonight, the quiet desolation of the living room, which Linda cleaned only yesterday with such meticulous care, slams them in the face. Swapna catches a glimpse of their surprised and tired faces and wishes again that she hadn’t yielded to their requests to come and “help.” Her father is too exhausted to reflect but her mother, never quite able to switch off her intuition or her concern for her daughter, looks around and sniffs. Swapna wonders with sudden panic if she is searching for Tom’s smell. Linda and she have sprayed bottles of bleach, window cleaner, floor polish, fabric softener, carpet stain remover, and other liquids in the last six months, in a maniacal bid to sanitize, but one never knows. Swapna hopes her mother cannot smell the debris of her marriage on her first night here. The longer the interval between their meetings, the more significant the reunions become. She knows her parents feel it too, because even though they are so tired they feel like they are walking inside a cloud, they insist on staying up with her for a while. Eventually, when her father goes to bed, Swapna and her mother sit on the cream leather sofa. They barely talk, and every few minutes her mother lets out a yawn so wide and mournful that it makes Swapna want to curl up right there and doze off. Finally, her mother’s eyes start to close and Swapna nudges her towards her room gently. “Tomorrow,” Ma says, as she stands up. “Tomorrow, we will talk about everything.” Swapna goes to her own room and slips under the covers from where she can stare out at the large ghostly moon in the blue-black sky. Tonight she feels like a child again. She feels safe and warm and knows that unlike the last five months, tonight she will sleep through the night.
The next morning, as soon as she wakes up, Swapna remembers that some remnants of Tom linger around the house. The mug with the picture of the Eiffel Tower that he brought back from a European History conference stands among the other mugs on the top kitchen shelf. His toolbox lies in the garage for a time when Swapna might need to fix something even though she, like most other Indian women, has never learned to fix anything in her life. His faded brown corduroy jacket, which he wore on his walks every evening through the mild Atlanta winter, hangs in the closet. His books are in the library they built together over the years. Most of them are biographies. Of American presidents, European royalty, country musicians, baseball players. All of them have his name on the first page, scrawled in ink, alongside the dates and locations where he purchased them. Vienna, New Orleans, Toronto, New York, Jaipur. Somewhere there is a box full of Italian ties in various shades of red, the one vanity he permitted himself despite the jeers from his scholarly colleagues. When Swapna opens the top drawer of her dresser each morning, a blue Tiffany’s box stares at her. She never glances inside. She doesn’t need to. She knows what lies there, how it sparkles in the sun, and how it feels against her skin, hard and cold. The way she speaks of Tom, anyone would think he were dead. She wonders if her parents will discover any of these objects. It makes her almost smile to think how things remain the same over the years. The first time her parents visited her in the apartment she then shared with two roommates up north, back when Swapna was just a graduate student, she had removed things before they arrived. The bottle of whiskey from her bookshelf, the tube of KY Jelly from her bathroom closet, the packet of condoms from her nightstand, the subscription to the adult channels, and all pictures of Tom. This time, she did not bother to hide anything. That is the strange thing about marriage, even a failed one. It gives you a kind of legitimacy that no relationship can, at least not if you are Indian. She finds her father in the living room, studying the switch for the air conditioning. “Why do you have it on all the time?” he asks. “How much is your electricity bill?” The question irritates Swapna. The temperature is in the eighties outside, and soon the house will warm up. It’s summer in the deep south, she wants to tell him. Everyone uses air-conditioning. It’s not India. But she says nothing and goes into the kitchen where her mother is making tea. “What will you eat for breakfast?” her mother asks. “Ma,” Swapna protests. “It’s the first day. Don’t do chores.” It’s no use of course. By the end of the day the kitchen looks different.
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