Mrs. Sen’s

“At home, you know, we have a driver.”

“You mean a chauffeur?”

Mrs. Sen glanced at Mr. Sen, who nodded.

Eliot’s mother nodded, too, looking around the room. “And that’s all…in India?”

“Yes,” Mrs. Sen replied. The mention of the word seemed to release something in her. She neatened the border of her sari where it rose diagonally across her chest. She, too, looked around the room, as if she noticed in the lampshades, in the teapot, in the shadows frozen on the carpet, something the rest of them could not. "Everything is there.”

“Whenever there is a wedding in the family,” she told Eliot one day, “or a large celebration of any kind, my mother sends out word in the evening for all the neighborhood women to bring blades just like this one, and then they sit in an enormous circle on the roof of our building, laughing and gossiping and slicing fifty kilos of vegetables through the night.” […] "It is impossible to fall asleep those nights, listening to their chatter.” She paused to look at a pine tree framed by the living room window. “Here, in this place where Mr. Sen has brought me, I cannot some­ times sleep in so much silence.”

“Mr. Sen says that once I receive my license, everything will improve. What do you think, Eliot? Will things improve?”

“You could go places,” Eliot suggested. “You could go any­ where.”

"Could I drive all the way to Calcutta? How long would that take, Eliot? Ten thousand miles, at fifty miles per hour?”

"My sister has had a baby girl. By the time I see her, depend­ing if Mr. Sen gets his tenure, she will be three years old. Her own aunt will be a stranger. If we sit side by side on a train she will not know my face.” She put away the letter, then placed a hand on Eliot’s head. "Do you miss your mother, Eliot, these afternoons with me?”

The thought had never occurred to him.

"You must miss her. When I think of you, only a boy, sep­arated from your mother for so much of the day, I am ashamed.”

“I see her at night.”

“When I was your age I was without knowing that one day I would be so far. You are wiser than that, Eliot. You already taste the way things must be."

‘“Send pictures,’ they write. ‘Send pictures of your new life.’ What picture can I send?” She sat, exhausted, on the edge of the bed, where there was now barely room for her. “They think I live the life of a queen, Eliot.” She looked around the blank walls of the room. “They think I press buttons and the house is clean. They think I live in a palace.”

In November came a series of days when Mrs. Sen refused to practice driving. The blade never emerged from the cupboard, newspapers were not spread on the floor. She did not call the fish store, nor did she thaw chicken.

"Eliot,” Mrs. Sen asked him while they were sitting on the bus, "will you put your mother in a nursing home when she is old?”

“Maybe,” he said. "But I would visit every day.”

“You say that now, but you will see, when you are a man your life will be in places you cannot know now.” She counted on her fingers: "You will have a wife, and children of your own, and they will want to be driven to different places at the same time. No matter how kind they are, one day they will complain about visiting your mother, and you will get tired of it too, Eliot. You will miss one day, and another, and then she will have to drag herself onto a bus just to get herself a bag of lozenges.”