Interpreter of Maladies: "This Blessed House"

"Guess what I found.” Twinkle walked into the living room, lined from end to end with taped-up packing boxes, waving the vinegar in one hand and a white porcelain effigy of Christ, roughly the same size as the vinegar bottle, in the other.

She turned it upside down, then stroked, with her index finger, the minuscule frozen folds of its robes. “It’s pretty.”

By the end of the week the mantel had still not been dusted; it had, however, come to serve as the display shelf for a sizable collection of Christian paraphernalia.

“Please. I would feel terrible throwing them away. Obviously they were important to the people who used to live here. It would feel, I don’t know, sacrilegious or something.”

Nearly a week had passed before they discovered, one Saturday afternoon, a larger-than-life-sized watercolor poster of Christ, weeping translucent tears the size of peanut shells and sporting a crown of thorns, rolled up behind a radiator in the guest bedroom.

This was the first weekend after they’d moved into the house; by then the mantel had already filled up considerably, and they had bickered about it in the car on the way down.

Though he abandoned the argument, he knew for a fact that she didn’t spend all day at her desk; just that afternoon, when he got back from a run, he found her inexplicably in bed, reading.

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.

He was impressed by the elegant curved staircase with its wrought-iron banister, and the dark wooden wainscoting, and the solarium overlooking rhododendron bushes, and the solid brass 22, which also happened to be the date of his birth, nailed impressively to the vaguely Tudor facade.

Over hectic jazz records, played under Twinkle’s supervision, they laughed at her anecdotes and observations, forming a widening circle around her, while Sanjeev replenished the samosas that he kept warming evenly in the oven, and getting ice for people’s drinks, and opening more bottles of champagne with some difficulty, and explaining for the fortieth time that he wasn’t Christian.