The box I was looking for was labeled "x-mas" in my mother's hand, not on the side so that it was easily identifiable, but in a corner on top. I had no sentimental attachment to the items inside, and yet I didn't want to see them. The thought of Chitra going through the box, watching her sift through everything, upset me just as it had upset me, throughout the day, to watch her handle the cutlery, the teakettle, at one point to hold the telephone and speak with my father to learn that he was on his way home. When my father had tried to remove the signs of my mother from the house I blamed him for being excessive, but now I blamed him for not having done enough.
"I can't find it," I said, after returning upstairs. My father did not press the issue, did not insist on going down and looking for it himself. He behaved differently around Chitra, was more accepting of the minor defeats of life. I offered to go to a drugstore and buy what we needed, glad to have another reason to leave the house. When I came back my father and I trimmed the tree together, Chitra and the girls watching us from the sectional. We placed the tree in the stand and tightened the screws and draped lights over the branches. There was nothing personal or idiosyncratic to put on it, just a box of sapphire-blue balls, so that it looked less like a tree in someone's home and more like one in the corner of a bank or an office lobby. But Rupa and Piu were delighted, exclaiming that they'd never seen anything more beautiful. My father went upstairs and returned with a shopping bag full of gifts. They'd all been wrapped at whatever store he bought them in, the same green-and-gold paper professionally taped and tied. He distributed them under the tree, eight boxes altogether. "Two for each of you," he said to no one in particular. Rupa and Piu got up and went to look at them then, excited to find their names written on the tags.
"Can we open them?" Piu asked Chitra, Chitra who did not know the answer.
"Not until Christmas morning," I said. "Until then you can just look. And maybe shake them a little."
"So lovely," Chitra said, impressed now that the tree had been trimmed.
"Kaushik, what about a picture?" my father suggested.
I shook my head. I had left my camera, my father's old Yashica, at school.
"But you always have it with you." That look of irritated disappointment, the one that had appeared the day my mother died and was missing now that he'd married Chitra, passed briefly across my father's face.
"I forgot it," I said. It was true, I did always have the camera with me. Even on quiet weekends when I came home and my father and I saw no one I would bring it, taking it with me on walks. This time I had left it behind, knowing that I would not want to document anything.
"I don't understand," my father said.
"Neither do I," I replied. "You haven't wanted a picture of anything in years." "That's not true." "It is."
We were stating facts and at the same time arguing, an argument whose depths only he and I could fully comprehend. I went to the kitchen to pour myself a drink, bringing it with me to the dining table when Chitra announced, a few minutes later, that dinner was ready. No one said anything during the meal. When we were done eating, Chitra cleared all the plates and took them into the kitchen, just as she had the night before, allowing my father and me to relax after dinner in a way that we'd never been able to during the last years of my mother's life. We no longer had to assume the responsibility of scraping the plates and loading the dishwasher so that my mother could rest. I sat finishing my drink, and Rupa and Piu slithered out of their seats and returned to the sectional to watch more television. My father got up and followed them, settling into his recliner with the newspaper. He opened it to a large ad for Lechmere that featured cameras for sale, circling things with a ballpoint pen.
Two days later was Christmas Eve, and my father stayed home from work, suggesting that we all go, the five of us, into Boston to show Chitra and the girls the city. I had no excuse and so I joined them, sitting in the backseat of my father's car, between Rupa and Piu. Though we were only going for a short ride, the trip felt strangely momentous. For the last two years of my mother's life, when she was always in and out of the hospital, we had gone nowhere, taken no trips for pleasure apart from those occasional walks along the beach. The last thing in my life that was anything close to a vacation was the layover in Rome with my parents, on our way back from Bombay. All I had learned about New England was the immediate region that surrounded our house, and the way to Mass General, making the trip back and forth until it was no longer necessary.
My father drove us first into Cambridge to look at Harvard and MIT, Chitra asking me why I had chosen a college so far away when I could have attended those schools instead. I ignored her question, as I ignored so many of the things she said to me. "He wanted to get out of Massachusetts," my father explained.
I had thought we would get out of the car at various points and walk around, but Chitra said it was too cold and my father agreed. After circling around Kendall Square he drove over the Mass Avenue Bridge and turned onto Commonwealth Avenue, which was decorated with lights and wreaths, and then drove around the Public Garden and the Common. He pointed out the golden dome of the State House, and the beautiful homes that lined the steep streets of Beacon Hill. Behind those homes was Mass General, where my father and I had gone together so many times. A phone call had woken us in the early hours one morning, and we had driven down to Boston just as the first light was intruding with harsh orange streaks in the sky. She looked the same as the night before, lying in the bed with her eyes closed, only all the machines were shut off, making the room in which we had spent so many quiet hours all the more silent. Her skin felt chilled when I touched it, as if she had just returned from a brisk walk in winter. I looked up now at the windows of the hospital, but my father turned toward Chitra. "This is where America's Brahmins live," he said, laughing at his own joke, and in the front seat Chitra smiled in a way that revealed to me that she was falling in love.
For Christmas my father bought me a sweater and a shirt, but later he gave me an envelope containing ten hundred-dollar bills. "You will need it for this and that," he said when I told him it was too much. My father had also arranged to go to Disney World for five days; this, along with the toys under the tree, was his present to the girls. "You are welcome to join us," my father said when he announced this news on Christmas morning, but I said no, making up something about there being a winter session at Swarthmore. My father did not convince me to join them. But Rupa and Piu were devastated. "Why don't you want to come?" they kept asking, all the more bewildered when they discovered that I had never been to Disney World. I sensed that they needed me to guard them, as I needed them, from the growing, incontrovertible fact that Chitra and my father now formed a couple. My presence was proof that my mother had once existed, just as they represented the physical legacy of their dead father. "Won't you be lonely staying all by yourself?" Chitra asked me more than once. At the same time I gathered that she, like my father, was relieved to hear my plans. I had no plans, of course, other than to be in the house alone.