Page 305 - DENG201_ENGLISH_II

Unit 23: Jhumpa Lahiri’s “This Blessed House”: Detailed Study

Now it was the friend’s turn to talk. Twinkle nodded, slouched on the floor in front of the fridge, Notes
wearing black stirrup pants and a yellow chenille sweater, groping for her Lighter. Sanjeev could
smell something aromatic on the stove, and he picked his way carefully across the extra-long phone
cord tangled on the Mexican terra-cotta tiles. He opened the lid of a pot with some sort of reddish
brown sauce dripping over the sides, boiling furiously.
“It’s a stew made with fish, I put the vinegar in it,” she said to him, interrupting her friend, crossing
her fingers, “Sorry, you were saying?” She was like that, excited and delighted by little things, crossing
her fingers before any remotely unpredictable event, like tasting a new flavor of ice cream or dropping
a letter in a mailbox. It was a quality he did not understand. It made him feel stupid, as if the world
contained hidden wonders he could not anticipate, or see. He looked at her face, which, it occurred to
him, had not grown out of its girlhood, the eyes untroubled, the pleasing features unfirm, as if they
still had to settle into some sort of permanent expression. Nicknamed after a nursery rhyme, she had
yet to shed a childhood endearment. Now, in the second month of their marriage, certain things
nettled him — the way she sometimes spat a little when she spoke, or left her undergarments after
removing them at night at the foot of their bed rather than depositing them in the laundry hamper.
They had met only four months before. Her parents who lived in California, and his who still lived in
Calcutta, were old friends, and across continents they had arranged the occasion at which Twinkle
and Sanjeev were introduced — a sixteenth birthday party for a daughter in their circle — when
Sanjeev was in Palo Alto on business. At the restaurant they were seated side by side at a round table
with a revolving platter of spareribs and egg rolls and chicken wings, which, they concurred, all
tasted the same. They had concurred too on their adolescent but still persistent fondness for Wodehouse
novels, and their dislike for the sitar, and later Twinkle confessed that she was charmed by the way
Sanjeev had dutifully refilled her teacup during their conversation.
And so the phone calls began, and grew longer, and then the visits, first he to Stanford, then she to
Connecticut, after which Sanjeev would save in an ashtray left on the balcony the crushed cigarettes
she had smoked during the weekend — saved them, that is, until the next time she came to visit him,
and then he vacuumed the apartment, washed the sheets, even dusted the plant leaves in her honor.
She was twenty-seven and recently abandoned, he had gathered, by an American who had tried and
failed to be an actor; Sanjeev was lonely, with an excessively generous income for a single man, and
had never been in love. At the urging of their matchmakers, they married in India, amid hundreds of
well-wishers whom he barely remembered from his childhood, in incessant August rains, under a
red and orange tent strung with Christmas tree lights on Mandeville Road.
“Did you sweep the attic?” he asked Twinkle later as she was folding paper napkins and wedging
them by their plates. The attic was the only part of the house they had not yet given an initial cleaning.
“Not yet. I will. I promise. I hope this tastes good.” she said, planting the steaming pot on top of the
Jesus trivet. There was a loaf of Italian bread in a little basket, and iceberg lettuce and grated carrots
tossed with bottled dressing and croutons, and glasses of red wine. She was not terribly ambitious in
the kitchen. She bought preroasted chickens from the supermarket and served them with potato
salad prepared who knew when, sold in little plastic containers. Indian food, she complained, was a
bother; she detested chopping garlic, and peeling ginger, and could not operate a blender, and so it
was Sanjeev who, on weekends, seasoned mustard oil with cinnamon sticks and cloves in order to
produce a proper curry.
He had to admit, though, that whatever it was that she had cooked today, it was unusually tasty,
attractive even, with bright white cubes of fish, and flecks of parsley, and fresh tomatoes gleaming in
the dark brown-red broth.
“How did you make it?”
“I made it up.”
“What did you do?”
“I just put some things into the pot and added the malt vinegar at the end.”
“How much vinegar?”
She shrugged, ripping off some bread and plunging it into her bowl.

LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY 299