She picked up because the number had a Tucson area code. The voice on the other end said her husband’s name.
The house on East Pima Street in midtown Tucson had belonged to Maya Choudhury since 2014. She was forty-two. She worked as a medical billing specialist at a small private cardiology practice on Speedway Boulevard, which meant she spent her days reading insurance codes and her evenings reading novels in the small back garden where her late mother had once planted a row of pomegranate trees. She had been married for nine years to a man named Arvind Choudhury, who taught civil engineering at the University of Arizona and who was, on the Tuesday evening I am writing about, in the kitchen making dinner.
She had been folding laundry on the living room couch when the phone rang. The number on the screen was a 520 area code — Tucson — but not a number she recognized. She almost let it go to voicemail. She had been getting, like most Americans her age, a steady drift of spam calls from local-looking numbers, and she had developed the small reflex of not answering unfamiliar 520 numbers unless she was expecting one.
But she answered. She did not know, when she later told me the story, exactly why. Maybe it was the small unguarded moment between two folded towels. Maybe it was the small habit of a billing specialist who answered phones for a living. She picked up.
“Hello?”
There was a small pause. Then a woman’s voice — younger, maybe in her late twenties, with a slight tightness that suggested she had been working up to the call for a while.
“Is this — is this Mrs. Sharma?”
Maya did not respond immediately. Sharma had been her surname before her marriage. She had stopped using it in 2016, when the last of her professional documentation had finally been updated to Choudhury. The only people who still occasionally used the old name were her older cousins in Delhi and the small handful of college friends who had not, in nine years, fully updated their address books.
“This is Maya,” she said. “Who is calling?”
“My name is Devon. Devon Larkin. I — I am sorry. I do not know if I have the right number. I am looking for the wife of Arvind Sharma. He used to live in Tucson, I think, about twelve or thirteen years ago. He was an engineer.”
Maya looked at the phone. Then she looked at the kitchen doorway, through which she could see her husband at the stove, stirring something in a small saucepan.
Arvind’s surname had never been Sharma.
II. The small Tuesday evening.
She walked, with the phone still pressed to her ear, into the small bedroom at the back of the house. She closed the door behind her.
“I think you may have the wrong number,” she said quietly. “I am Maya Choudhury. My husband’s surname is Choudhury, not Sharma. He has never used the name Sharma.”
The young woman on the other end was quiet for a moment. When she spoke again, her voice had the small flat tone of a person who had been hearing different versions of this answer for some time.
“Is your husband Arvind?” she said. “Born September fourth, 1981? Worked at the engineering firm Hartwell & Bryce in Tucson between 2010 and 2013?”
Maya sat down on the edge of the bed.
Her husband Arvind had been born on September fourth, 1981. He had told her this on their second date in 2014, the way men in their early thirties tell their birthdays to women they have just begun to date. She had, in the eleven years since, baked him eleven small September birthday cakes.
He had told her, in the long slow conversations of their early dating, that he had moved to Tucson from Phoenix in 2013 to take the university teaching job. He had said, in those long slow conversations, that he had worked for a small firm in Phoenix before that, doing structural consulting on commercial buildings.
He had not, in eleven years, ever mentioned a firm called Hartwell & Bryce.
“I am sorry,” Maya said. “Who did you say you were?”
“Devon Larkin,” the young woman said. “I am — I am twenty-eight. I live in Phoenix now. I think — Mrs. Choudhury, I think the man you are married to may be my father. I am sorry. I have been trying to figure out how to make this call for almost four months.”
III. The small kitchen door.
Maya did not, in the moment, hang up. She did not stand up. She did not, by any visible sign, react in the way that some women might have reacted. She sat on the edge of the bed in the small back bedroom, with the phone pressed to her ear, and she did the slow private arithmetic of a medical billing specialist who had spent fourteen years of her professional life learning how to listen carefully to information that did not, at first, make sense.
“Devon,” she said. “Could you tell me what makes you think that?”
The young woman on the other end took a small breath. She told Maya, in the slow patient way of a person who had been rehearsing the explanation for four months, the small piece of family history that had brought her to the Tuesday-evening phone call.
She had been raised by her mother, a woman named Lisa Larkin, in a small house in north Phoenix. She had never known her father. Her mother had told her, for her entire childhood, that her father had been a man named Arvind Sharma — an engineer from India who had been a small brief presence in her mother’s life in the spring of 1996, who had not known about the pregnancy, who had moved away before her mother had been able to track him down, and whose forwarding address her mother had never managed to find.
Lisa Larkin had died of breast cancer in November of the previous year. She had been fifty-six.
In the slow weeks after her mother’s funeral, Devon had been going through her mother’s papers. She had found, in a small file folder labeled simply Important, a single photograph and a single name on a single sheet of paper. The photograph was a small color snapshot from the spring of 1996, showing her mother at about twenty-eight, standing in a small park with a young man in his mid-thirties. The young man had been thin, dark-haired, with the small reserved smile of a man who was not entirely comfortable in front of a camera.
The sheet of paper had said only: Arvind Sharma · Hartwell & Bryce · Tucson AZ.
Devon had done what young women in their late twenties in the year I am writing about do. She had taken a small DNA test. The test had identified, with the small loose precision that consumer DNA tests offer, a small handful of distant relatives — all of whom had Indian heritage. The test had also, more crucially, identified a closer relative — a small predicted second cousin — who had been an active user of the same testing service and who had, by his small visible family tree on the platform, been the nephew of a man named Arvind Sharma who had been born in Hyderabad in 1961.
The 1961 Arvind Sharma had been, by the small available public records, a working engineer in the United States in the 1990s.
The 1961 Arvind Sharma had been — by additional records Devon had pieced together over four months of slow patient internet research — the older brother of a man named Arvind Choudhury. The two men had shared a first name through the small accident of being named for the same maternal grandfather, in the small family naming custom that some Bengali families practiced. The two men had also been, by an additional small accident of timing, the same age at certain points in their respective careers — within four years of each other, with overlapping work histories in the American Southwest.
Devon had not, until late January, been certain which of the two men her mother had photographed in 1996.
The photograph was the part that had taken the longest.
She had finally, in February, found a small published university faculty photograph of Arvind Choudhury from his small university website. She had compared it carefully to her mother’s 1996 photograph. The faces were similar. The faces were not, by her own honest reading, identical.
The face in her mother’s 1996 photograph was, by Devon’s slow patient comparison over many evenings, almost certainly that of the older brother — the Arvind Sharma who had worked at Hartwell & Bryce in Tucson between 1995 and 1998.
Not the husband of Maya Choudhury.
IV. The small precise question.
Maya listened to all of this in the small back bedroom on East Pima Street, with the phone pressed to her ear and the small sounds of her husband’s cooking faintly audible through the closed door. She did not, in the slow listening, do any of the dramatic things she had briefly, in the first thirty seconds of the call, been afraid she might have to do. She did not, by every gentle reading of the slow careful explanation, need to.
The man Devon was looking for was not her husband.
The man Devon was looking for was, by every reasonable interpretation of the small accumulated evidence, her husband’s older brother.
She had known her husband’s older brother by reputation. Arvind had spoken of him in the slow gentle way that adult immigrants sometimes speak of older brothers who had moved to the United States ten or twelve years before them and who had served, in those small early years of immigration, as small available landmarks and small available cautionary examples. The older brother had been, by Arvind’s small private description, a difficult man. He had returned to India in 1999, after a small unspecified personal crisis in Tucson that Arvind had never fully explained. He had died of a small unrelated heart attack in Hyderabad in 2003 at the age of forty-two.
He had not, by any account Arvind had ever given Maya, been married. He had not, by any account, had children.
He had also not, by any account, been the kind of man whose 1996 small spring romance in Phoenix would have been mentioned by his younger brother in the small slow conversations of an immigrant family settling into a new country.
Maya took a small breath.
“Devon,” she said carefully. “I think you are right. The man in the photograph is not my husband. But I think — I think the man in the photograph is my husband’s older brother. He passed away in 2003. I have never met him. But I have heard about him. He was an engineer at the firm you mentioned. He worked in Tucson in the years you described.”
Devon was quiet for a long moment.
“He passed away?” she said.
“In 2003. In Hyderabad. He was forty-two.”
The young woman on the other end of the line did not, for several seconds, say anything. When she spoke again, her voice had the small particular quiet of a person who had, over the slow patient four months of her search, been preparing herself for a number of possible outcomes and who had not, by her own admission, fully prepared herself for the outcome of arriving at a closed door.
“He died,” she said. “Twenty-two years ago.”
“Yes.”
There was another small pause.
“Mrs. Choudhury — could I — could I ask you something? Would your husband — would he know anything about him? About my mother?”
Maya looked at the closed bedroom door. She thought about the small slow weight of the evening that was about to begin. She thought about her husband at the stove. She thought about the eleven September birthday cakes she had baked. She thought about the small loose collection of small things her husband had told her about his older brother over eleven years of marriage, and how very few of those small things had ever fit together into a portrait of the kind of man who would have been remembered by a twenty-eight-year-old woman from Phoenix as her father.
“Devon,” she said. “I do not know what my husband knows. I have not, until this phone call, ever had any reason to ask him. Could you give me your number? I am going to talk to him tonight. I am going to call you back tomorrow.”
Devon gave her the number. Maya wrote it down on the small notepad on the bedside table. They said good evening to each other in the small awkward formal way of two women who had just shared a small unexpected piece of family information across a phone line. Maya hung up. She sat on the edge of the bed for almost ten minutes.
Then she walked into the kitchen and asked her husband, with as much gentleness as she could find in the small surprised middle of her own confusion, what he could tell her about his older brother’s last year in Tucson.
V. The conversation at the kitchen table.
I am going to be careful, in writing the rest of this piece, about what I do and do not say. The conversation that Maya Choudhury had with her husband Arvind that Tuesday evening at the small kitchen table on East Pima Street was, by their mutual subsequent decision when I sat with them in August, a conversation that belongs primarily to them. They have given me gentle permission to summarize its broad shape. They have asked me not to quote it.
Arvind told Maya, that evening, several things he had not, in eleven years of marriage, told her before.
He had known about Lisa Larkin. He had known about her in the small gentle indirect way that younger brothers in immigrant families sometimes know about the small private complications of their older brothers' American lives. He had not, in 1996, met Lisa Larkin. He had been a graduate student in Texas at the time. But he had known, in the slow weeks after his older brother’s return to India in 1999, that there had been a small unfinished situation in Phoenix that his older brother had been, by every small available reading, unable to face.
He had not, in 2003, when his older brother had died of the small unrelated heart attack in Hyderabad, known whether the small unfinished situation in Phoenix had ever resolved itself.
He had not, in the eleven years of his marriage to Maya, raised the matter, because he had not had any specific reason to raise it, and because the small unfinished thing had felt, in his own private mind, like the small unfinished thing of a brother who was now dead and whose small unfinished things were no longer, in any sense, his to finish.
He had not, in any of those eleven years, known that the small unfinished situation in Phoenix had resulted in a daughter.
He sat at the small kitchen table with his wife for almost three hours that Tuesday evening. They talked. They did not, by Maya’s gentle description in our conversation in August, raise their voices. They did not, by her description, do any of the things that less long marriages sometimes do in the face of a piece of new and difficult information. They did the small slow available work of two adults who had been married for nine years and who had, by then, developed the small steady muscle for hard conversations.
They decided, by the small slow agreement they reached at almost eleven that evening, to call Devon together the next morning.
VI. The conversation in August.
I sat with Maya and Arvind Choudhury and Devon Larkin in the small back garden of the house on East Pima Street in mid-August, about six months after the small Tuesday evening phone call. Devon had flown down from Phoenix for the weekend. She was twenty-nine. She was the small composed version of the slow patient voice on the phone — dark hair pulled back, dark eyes, the small particular shape of cheekbones that I could recognize, if I looked carefully, in the small framed photographs of Arvind’s older brother that Arvind had brought out from a small family box in the upstairs bedroom that morning to share with her.
The three of them had been in slow patient contact since February. They had spoken on the phone, by Maya’s small gentle estimate, perhaps fifteen times. They had exchanged small photographs and small careful family records. Arvind had sent Devon, with the slow careful permission of his elderly father in Hyderabad, a small collection of his older brother’s letters from the late 1990s — letters that did not, by Arvind’s small honest description, contain any direct mention of Lisa Larkin, but that contained, in the small particular voice of the man who had written them, the small available answer to the question of what kind of man Devon’s father had been.
The August weekend was their first in-person meeting.
Devon did not, in the small back garden among the small pomegranate trees that Maya’s late mother had planted, characterize the meeting in any dramatic way. She characterized it the way a twenty-nine-year-old woman who had spent four months looking for a small piece of her own private history would characterize it. She had been hoping, by her own honest admission, to find a father. She had instead found, by the small careful patience of a Tuesday evening phone call, a small uncle, a small new aunt, and a small extended family in Hyderabad that had, in the slow weeks since February, written her three small letters of careful gentle welcome.
She had not, by her own honest description, expected the family in Hyderabad. She had not, by her own honest description, expected the slow patient kindness of her father’s younger brother. She had expected, perhaps, a closed door.
She had received, instead, a small open one.
Some small unfinished situations from twenty-nine years earlier are, in the long arithmetic of immigrant family life, only ever resolved by the patient slow work of the next generation.
VII. The pomegranate trees.
I want to write the rest of this piece, by the gentle agreement of all three people I sat with, in the spirit of the small private decisions they have collectively made about what their three lives are going to look like going forward.
Devon is, as of the writing of this piece, considering a small possible relocation from Phoenix to Tucson. Her work — she is a small careful elementary-school teacher in north Phoenix — is portable. She has, by gentle private agreement with Maya, been spending one weekend a month on East Pima Street. She has, by gentle private agreement with Arvind, been writing slow patient letters to her grandfather in Hyderabad, who is eighty-six and who has, in the seven months since the small Tuesday-evening phone call, written her four small letters in his small steady English describing the small available history of the small family she has, by the slow accidents of small Bengali brothers and small Phoenix spring romances, found herself a small late member of.
Maya and Arvind have, by their gentle mutual decision, not had children of their own. The decision had been made, in the slow careful early years of their marriage, for small private reasons that are not mine to share. The small unexpected late arrival of a small niece, by the slow careful accidents of 1996, has not, by Maya’s gentle description in our conversation, in any way replaced or amended that earlier private decision. It has, instead, added a small unexpected and gently welcome piece to a household that had not, in any sense, been looking for one.
The small pomegranate trees in the small back garden are, this October, beginning to fruit. Maya’s late mother planted the first three in 1991. Maya planted a fourth in 2014. She has, by her own gentle decision in March, planted a fifth this past spring. The fifth tree is, by her own private description, for Devon.
VIII. Why it stays.
I have been writing for The Chapbook for almost nine years, and the stories I have come to write most carefully are the stories in which a single Tuesday-evening phone call — a phone call placed by a small composed twenty-eight-year-old woman in Phoenix who had been preparing herself for four months for the small possible closed door of the conversation — does not, in the end, close any door at all.
Devon Larkin had, by the small slow patience of her four-month search, prepared herself for almost every possible outcome of the call. She had not, by her own honest description in the small back garden in August, prepared herself for the outcome of being welcomed.
Across the United States, in small kitchens and small back bedrooms and small unfamiliar 520 area-code phone calls answered on the small uncertain hesitation between two folded towels, the slow accumulated arithmetic of small immigrant family histories is still, occasionally, arriving in the small available hands of the women in their late twenties and early thirties who have been doing the small patient work of looking for it. Most of the time, the search does not, in any usual sense, lead to anything. A very small handful of the time, it leads to a small open door, a small back garden, and a small fifth pomegranate tree. For broader context on the long American history of small immigrant family reconstruction through consumer genetic testing, readers can spend time with the materials at the National Institutes of Health or the long-form reporting at PBS NewsHour. The Chapbook keeps its narratives clean, human, and responsible — read more in the Editorial Policy.
The small framed 1996 photograph of Lisa Larkin standing in a small Phoenix park with the man who would, twenty-nine years later, turn out to have been Arvind Sharma the older brother, now lives on a small bookshelf in the small spare bedroom of the house on East Pima Street. The room is, by Maya’s gentle private designation, the room Devon stays in on her monthly weekends.
The photograph is, by every visible sign, exactly where it ought to be.
