Jhumpa Lahiri - Unaccustomed Earth

At the restaurant his father pulled out the admissions packet for Langford, showing photographs of the campus, smiling students gathered around classroom tables, teachers standing in front of blackboards, caught midsentence by the camera's lens. Academically it was far superior to the school he'd been attending, his father told him, mentioning the percentage of Lang-ford graduates who went on to Ivy League colleges. Amit realized, as his father spoke, that the position in Delhi had been accepted, their house in Winchester already put up for sale. There was no question of his going to school in Delhi; it wasn't worth the trouble to adjust to education in a different country, his father said, given that eventually Amit would be attending an American college.

From Langford, during Christmas after each academic year came to an end, Amit went to Delhi to be with his parents, staying in their flat full of servants in Chittaranjan Park, in a barren room set aside for his stays. He never enjoyed his visits to Delhi, his broken Bengali of no use in that city. It made him miss Calcutta, where all his relatives lived, where he was used to going. His parents had moved to Delhi the year of Indira Gandhi's assassination, and the riots that subsequently raged there, the curfews and the constant vigilance with which his parents had to live, meant that Amit remained cooped up inside, without friends, without anything to do. In that sense it was a relief to him to return to this peaceful town. Four years later his parents were back in America, moving to Houston. In Delhi his father had perfected a laser technique to correct astigmatism that earned him invitations to work and teach in hospitals all over the world. After five years in Houston they'd moved yet again, to Lausanne, Switzerland. They lived in Saudi Arabia now.

At Langford, Amit was the only Indian student, and people always assumed that he'd been born and raised in that country and not in Massachusetts. They complimented him on his accent, always telling him how good his English was. He'd arrived when he was fifteen, for sophomore year, which at Langford was called the fourth form, and by that time friendships and alliances among the boys of his class were already in place. At his high school in Winchester he'd been a star student, but suddenly he'd had to work doggedly to maintain his grades. He had to wear a jacket every morning to his classes and call his teachers "masters" and attend chapel on Sundays. Quickly he learned that his parents' wealth was laughable compared to the majority of Langford boys. There was no escape at the end of the day, and though he admitted it to no one, especially not his parents when they called from Delhi every weekend, he was crippled with homesickness, missing his parents to the point where tears often filled his eyes, in those first months, without warning. He sought traces of his parents' faces and voices among the people who surrounded and cared for him, but there was absolutely nothing, no one, at Langford to remind him of them. After that first semester he had slipped as best as he could into this world, swimming competitively, calling boys by their last names, always wearing khakis because jeans were not allowed. He learned to live without his mother and father, as everyone else did, shedding his daily dependence on them even though he was still a boy, and even to enjoy it. Still, he refused to forgive them.

Every Thanksgiving, he and the other students who had nowhere to go were taken in by Pam's family-boys who were from Santiago and Tehran and other troubled parts of the world, or were the sons of diplomats and journalists who moved around even more frequently than Amit's parents. They would eat in the Bordens' house, located at one end of the campus, with Pam and her three brothers, all of whom went to different boarding schools but always came home for the holidays. For Amit it was the highlight of each year. He and all the other boys were in love with Pam, who was the only girl in her family, the only girl on campus, the only girl, it had felt back then, in the world. They would pray to be seated close to her at the table, and for weeks afterward they would talk about her, imagining her life at Northfield Mount Hermon, imagining what her breasts looked like, or the feel of her light brown poker-straight hair, wondering what it was like in the morning, messily trailing over her back. They wondered about the room upstairs, where Pam slept when she came home. They noticed if she ate white meat or dark, and they noticed the year she did not eat any turkey at all.

She seemed fully aware of their admiration, flattered but off-limits. She was that rare, unsettling thing, a teenage girl already conscious of her power over men while at the same time uninterested in them. She was comfortable with the opposite sex in a way most girls were not, perhaps because she'd grown up in a house full of boys. The Bordens were forthright people, all of them, even the children, trained to act as friendly hosts for the students who washed up at their holiday table. Pam would talk to Amit and the others, asking each of them about their courses as if she were her mother's age and not a girl of fifteen. And then they would disappear from her consciousness until the following year. After the meal, Headmaster Borden would take them out onto the lawn for a game of touch football with Pam's brothers. Or they stayed inside, where Mrs. Borden, who taught French at the school, would conduct complicated word games or charades.

In his final year at Langford Amit was admitted to Columbia University. No one else from his class was going there, but then one day Headmaster Borden told Amit that Pam had decided on Columbia, too. "Keep an eye on her for me," the headmaster said, but it was Pam who'd called first in that same ambassadorial way her parents had, even though New York City, and the world of college, was as foreign to her as it was to him. Suddenly, because she had decided so, they were friends. They would go to dinner twice a week after the religion class they took together, either to Cafe Pertutti, treating themselves to creamy plates of pasta, or to La Rosita for caffe con leche and rice and beans. After that they would study in the same small room in Butler Library, sitting across from each other on armchairs, reading Milton and Marx. Odd things made him love her. The fact that she never put her books into a backpack or a bag, hugging them instead against her chest. That she always appeared somehow underdressed, still wearing a fringed suede jacket at a time of year when everyone else was bundled in wool and down. That the last two letters in her name were the first two in his, a silly thing he never mentioned to her but caused him to believe that they were bound together.

He'd wondered at first if it was romantic but quickly realized that she was involved in affairs, that he was just a friend. She was used to being surrounded by men who, like her brothers, were protective of her, loyal to her, who paid court without seducing her. And she had appointed Amit to play that role while they were in college. She would ask him to investigate boys she was curious about, learning about their reputations, their history, before deciding whether to pursue them. In exchange she would give him advice on how to approach other girls, how most effectively to flirt with them. It was Pam who had coached Amit through his first college relationship, with

Ellen Craddock, going out of her way and befriending Ellen just for the sake of being able to throw her and Amit together on College Walk.

Only once had Amit worked up the nerve to make a pass at Pam, in their sophomore year, kissing her after getting drunk at a party and putting his hand on her breast, on top of a dark green turtleneck sweater she was wearing. She had kissed him back, allowed him to touch her, but then she'd drawn away, as if she'd known all along that one day this would happen. "Now we know what that feels like," she told him, and he knew then that it was impossible, that she did not like him in that way. She had indulged him, just as her family had indulged him once a year in their home, offering a small piece of herself and then shutting the door.