THE IMMIGRANT Read Online Free Page B

something to eat first? Ananda accepted, and as he ate a dry and tasteless tomato sandwich his uncle told him this was lunch, and everybody made their own.
    Too tired to register anything more, he sank into the soft foam of the sofa bed. Against the crispness of the cotton sheet and the fluffiness of the comforter he felt cocooned as though in a fortress.
    He slept for hours, through dinner, through half the night. Three o’clock found him rambling in a strange house, too scared to make a noise that might disturb, longing for a cup of tea, unable to even find the bottles of drinking water. He was alone, all alone, with relatives who did not wake with the fall of his feet on the floor, the blood that joined them diluted with the waters of an ocean. The glossy magazine house felt cold and alien. Tears gathered and fell silently as he sat huddled on the soft yellow silk love seat, shivering with grief and cold in his new pyjamas.
    The family awoke finally. He was taught how to make tea, he was told of tap water clean enough to drink, he was shown where breakfast materials lay. His helplessness reminded the uncle that boys fresh from India needed to be guided in every step they took.
    Breakfast over, Dr Sharma and wife Nancy continued with their explanation of Western domestic arrangements. Everybody had to do everything themselves. They both cooked dinner, but breakfast, lunch, tea, snacks, each one made according to their needs. Washing, ironing, bed making, similarly all on their own. ‘You will learn soon, beta,’ said the uncle gently. Here Nancy stubbed her cigarette butt into an ashtray and carefully picked a speck of tobacco from her painted mouth, creased by faint wrinkles scratched into her upper lip.
    The tightness in Ananda’s chest increased. Not even one day had passed and they were giving him rules to live by—presupposing he was an ignorant, good for nothing freeloader. All his life he had been praised for being a good boy. He had assumed responsibility, performed well in exams, done his duty by his parents, met every expectation placed on his shoulders. Carefully he put on a pleasant expression to mask his humiliation.
    The uncle and aunt got up. Lenny would show him the ropes downstairs. He must make his bed and get ready. Then, it being such a beautiful day, they would drive out to Peggy’s Cove, and follow this with a special Indian lunch in his honour at the Taj Mahal restaurant on Spring Garden Road.
    ‘No, no,’ said Ananda politely, trying to convey that he didn’t want the familiarity of Indian food so soon after he had left it. He wanted something Western and exciting.
    ‘Oh, don’t worry,’ said Nancy, ‘it will be a treat for all of us. We love Indian food.’
    So Ananda went down into the basement to have a shower, carefully moving the curtains outside the tub so they didn’t touch him. Water streamed onto the floor. His first lesson on how to bathe in the West and how to clean the bathroom afterwards, followed. As Lenny watched, he mopped the floor, and wrung the dirty water out into a bucket. He felt soiled and desperately in need of another bath, but he grimly ignored these feelings. He could live with an unclean body, he had lived with so much else. Now, said Lenny simply, here is the toilet cleaning stuff, here, you use the brush like this, and he proceeded to attack some brown stains that Ananda, to his mortification, had not registered as his responsibility.
    Then the bed had to be remade, yes it had to disappear every day, so people could sit in front of the TV. This was the den (ie not Ananda’s room), explained Lenny as they folded the bedding inside the sofa and replaced the cushions.
    ‘In India we had a maid who did all this, I mainly studied,’ explained Ananda in turn.
    ‘Lucky man, I could do with a few servants picking after me.’
    ‘It was not quite like that,’ said Ananda. He had never felt particularly pampered. Rather they were the struggling ones, always