The Unknown Errors of Our Lives Read online

  But everything is getting mixed up, and her own young, trying-not-to-cry face blurs into another—why, it’s Shyamoli’s—and a thought hits her so sharply in the chest she has to hold on to the bedroom wall. And what good did it do? The more we bent, the more people pushed us, until one day we’d forgotten that we could stand up straight. Maybe Shyamoli’s doing the right thing, after all. . . .

  Mrs. Dutta lowers herself heavily on to her bed, trying to erase such an insidious idea from her mind. Oh, this new country where all the rules are upside down, it’s confusing her. Her mind feels muddy, like a pond in which too many water buffaloes have been wading. Maybe things will settle down if she can focus on the letter to Roma.

  Then she remembers that she has left the half-written aerogram on the kitchen table. She knows she should wait until after dinner, after her son and his wife have sorted things out. But a restlessness—or is it defiance?—has taken hold of her. She’s sorry Shyamoli’s upset, but why should she have to waste her evening because of that? She’ll go get her letter—it’s no crime, is it? She’ll march right in and pick it up, and even if Shyamoli stops in midsentence with another one of those sighs, she’ll refuse to feel apologetic. Besides, by now they’re probably in the family room, watching TV.

  Really, Roma, she writes in her head as she feels her way along the unlighted corridor, the amount of TV they watch here is quite scandalous. The children too, sitting for hours in front of that box like they’ve been turned into painted Kesto Nagar dolls, and then talking back when I tell them to turn it off. Of course, she will never put such blasphemy into a real letter. Still, it makes her feel better to say it, if only to herself.

  In the family room the TV is on, but for once no one is paying it any attention. Shyamoli and Sagar sit on the sofa, conversing. From where she stands in the corridor, Mrs. Dutta cannot see them, but their shadows—enormous against the wall where the table lamp has cast them—seem to flicker and leap at her.

  She is about to slip unseen into the kitchen when Shyamoli’s rising voice arrests her. In its raw, shaking unhappiness it is so unlike her daughter-in-law’s assured tones that Mrs. Dutta is no more able to move away from it than if she had heard the call of the nishi, the lost souls of the dead on whose tales she grew up.

  “It’s easy for you to say ‘Calm down.’ I’d like to see how calm you’d be if she came up to you and said, ‘Kindly tell the old lady not to hang her clothes over the fence into my yard.’ She said it twice, like I didn’t understand English, like I was an idiot. All these years I’ve been so careful not to give these Americans a chance to say something like this, and now—”

  “Shhh, Shyamoli, I said I’d talk to Mother about it.”

  “You always say that, but you never do anything. You’re too busy being the perfect son, tiptoeing around her feelings. But how about mine?”

  “Hush, Molli, the children . . .”

  “Let them hear. I don’t care anymore. They’re not stupid. They already know what a hard time I’ve been having with her. You’re the only one who refuses to see it.”

  In the passage Mrs. Dutta shrinks against the wall. She wants to move away, to not hear anything else, but her feet are formed of cement, impossible to lift, and Shyamoli’s words pour into her ears like smoking oil.

  “I’ve explained over and over, and she still keeps on doing what I’ve asked her not to—throwing away perfectly good food, leaving dishes to drip all over the countertops. Ordering my children to stop doing things I’ve given them permission for. She’s taken over the entire kitchen, cooking whatever she likes. You come in the door and the smell of grease is everywhere, in all our clothes. I feel like this isn’t my house anymore.”

  “Be patient, Molli, she’s an old woman, after all.”

  “I know. That’s why I tried so hard. I know having her here is important to you. But I can’t do it any longer. I just can’t. Some days I feel like taking the kids and leaving.” Shyamoli’s voice disappears into a sob.

  A shadow stumbles across the wall to her, and then another. Behind the weatherman’s nasal tones announcing a week of sunny days, Mrs. Dutta can hear a high, frightened weeping. The children, she thinks. It’s probably the first time they’ve seen their mother cry.

  “Don’t talk like that, sweetheart.” Sagar leans forward, his voice, too, miserable. All the shadows on the wall shiver and merge into a single dark silhouette.

  Mrs. Dutta stares at that silhouette, the solidarity of it. Sagar and Shyamoli’s murmurs are lost beneath a noise—is it in her veins, this dry humming, the way the taps in Calcutta used to hum when the municipality turned the water off? After a while she discovers that she has reached her room. In darkness she lowers herself on to her bed very gently, as though her body is made of the thinnest glass. Or perhaps ice, she is so cold. She sits for a long time with her eyes closed, while inside her head thoughts whirl faster and faster until they disappear in a gray dust storm.

  WHEN PRADEEP FINALLY comes to call her for dinner, Mrs. Dutta follows him to the kitchen where she fries luchis for everyone, the perfect circles of dough puffing up crisp and golden as always. Sagar and Shyamoli have reached a truce of some kind: she gives him a small smile, and he puts out a casual hand to massage the back of her neck. Mrs. Dutta demonstrates no embarrassment at this. She eats her dinner. She answers questions put to her. She smiles when someone makes a joke. If her face is stiff, as though she has been given a shot of Novocain, no one notices. When the table is cleared, she excuses herself, saying she has to finish her letter.

  Now Mrs. Dutta sits on her bed, reading over what she wrote in the innocent afternoon.

  Dear Roma,

  Although I miss you, I know you will be pleased to hear how happy I am in America. There is much here that needs getting used to, but we are no strangers to adjusting, we old women. After all, haven’t we been doing it all our lives?

  Today I’m cooking one of Sagar’s favorite dishes, alu-dum. . . . It gives me such pleasure to see my family gathered around the table, eating my food. The children are still a little shy of me, but I am hopeful that we’ll soon be friends. And Shyamoli, so confident and successful—you should see her when she’s all dressed for work. I can’t believe she’s the same timid bride I sent off to America just a few years ago. But, Sagar, most of all, is the joy of my old age. . . .

  With the edge of her sari Mrs. Dutta carefully wipes a tear that has fallen on the aerogram. She blows on the damp spot until it is completely dry, so the pen will not leave an incriminating smudge. Even though Roma would not tell a soul, she cannot risk it. She can already hear them, the avid relatives in India who have been waiting for something just like this to happen. That Dutta-ginni, so set in her ways, we knew she’d never get along with her daughter-in-law. Or worse, Did you hear about poor Prameela, how her family treated her, yes, even her son, can you imagine?

  This much surely she owes to Sagar.

  And what does she owe herself, Mrs. Dutta, falling through black night with all the certainties she trusted in collapsed upon themselves like imploded stars, and only an image inside her eyelids for company? A silhouette—man, wife, children—joined on a wall, showing her how alone she is in this land of young people. And how unnecessary.

  She is not sure how long she sits under the glare of the overhead light, how long her hands clench themselves in her lap. When she opens them, nail marks line the soft flesh of her palms, red hieroglyphs—her body’s language, telling her what to do.

  Dear Roma, Mrs. Dutta writes,

  I cannot answer your question about whether I am happy, for I am no longer sure I know what happiness is. All I know is that it isn’t what I thought it to be. It isn’t about being needed. It isn’t about being with family either. It has something to do with love, I still think that, but in a different way than I believed earlier, a way I don’t have the words to explain. Perhaps we can figure it out together, two old women drinking cha in your downstairs flat (for I do hope you will rent
it to me on my return), while around us gossip falls—but lightly, like summer rain, for that is all we will allow it to be. If I’m lucky—and perhaps, in spite of all that has happened, I am—the happiness will be in the figuring out.

  Pausing to read over what she has written, Mrs. Dutta is surprised to discover this: Now that she no longer cares whether tears blotch her letter, she feels no need to weep.

  THE INTELLIGENCE

  OF WILD THINGS

  THE SKY IS streaked with gray and a strange bleeding pink I’ve never seen before. Or perhaps the intense cold is distorting my perceptions. I huddle in a wool coat that is too large for me, borrowed from my brother Tarun for this boat trip, trying to remember how it feels to be warm. I am not quite sure why we are on this ferry, why we are attempting to cross this frozen lake whose name I cannot remember, although Tarun said it just a few minutes ago. The scratchy wool smells—it takes me a moment to place it—of musk. It is an odor I think of as dark and languid, the scent of the secret, passionate body. One that I find difficult to associate with my brother, younger to me by five years, the baby of the family. How angry he would get when I called him that! And now, this smell, as new to me as the hard adult line of his jaw, dark against the blinding snowbanks of the far shore. As disturbing.

  It is March in Vermont. The last day of my visit. Tomorrow I will return to Sandeep, my two daughters, my garden in Sacramento where purple bougainvilleas bloom even in winter. I haven’t done what I came here to do. I haven’t found a time to tell Tarun that our mother, to whom he hasn’t spoken in years, is dying in India. I haven’t found a way to beg him to go to her.

  The River Queen’s rusty deck shudders under my feet as the boat makes its uneven way across the lake. I can hear the crunch of ice being crushed somewhere below. Enormous metal jaws closing in underwater dimness on the huge, slippery blocks, grinding down till they crack, spraying ice needles in every direction. Perhaps there are fish down there, their slight, silver bodies mangled by the steel teeth, the water slowly turning the same pink as the sky. Wrong again! my brother would say if he knew what I was thinking. The fish know to stay away from the boat. They possess the intelligence of wild things.

  Or would he? I’m not sure anymore. I pull the coat collar farther up and turn from the wind. It’s been a long time since we shared our fantasies. Our fears.

  * * *

  I NOTICED THE photograph on his bedside stand, first thing, when I arrived from Sacramento. A laughing girl with freckled skin and reddish-gold hair. She was wearing a T-shirt and jeans which I thought of as too tight. There was a hint of blue in the background, perhaps this same lake. Even through my disapproval I noticed the maple tree she was leaning against, each green leaf perfect, webbed like amphibious fingers.

  I shouldn’t have been angry. I knew that. He had the right to his own life. To run around with a white girl, if that’s what he wanted. He had the right not to tell me. A decade of living in this country had taught me that. Still, my face smarted as though someone had slapped it.

  “Tarun, whose photo is this?”

  “My girlfriend’s.” He spoke in English. He’d been doing that ever since I got to Vermont. It was like a mismatched dance, my long Bengali sentences, his monosyllabic, foreign answers. Was it because he had forgotten our mother tongue, or was he doing it to provoke me? Perhaps it was neither. Perhaps it was just that, after so many years among Americans, it was for him the language of least effort.

  “Your girlfriend!” To my annoyance I found that I’d switched over to English, too. “You never told me you had a girlfriend, especially a white one! What is Ma going to say when she finds out!” I hated the shrill sisterly note in my voice, the banality of my response. It wasn’t what I had meant to say.

  Tarun shrugged. In the light of the bedside lamp, his face was as polished as an egg, as empty of guilt or concern.

  “You can have the bed if you like. I’ll sleep on the sofa.”

  For a moment, before I forced the image from my mind, I saw the girl’s red hair spread over the pillow. Her pale arms tight around my brother’s brown back. “No, no, it’s all right,” I said. “I’ll be very comfortable on the sofa.”

  “I thought you might say that,” Tarun said. The look in his eyes could have been amused, or sardonic, or merely polite.

  “Are you going to let Ma know about her?” I blurted out.

  It was a stupid question. Tarun hadn’t written to our mother or replied to her letters ever since he came to this country. But sometimes stupidity is all we’re left with.

  “There’s a nice movie at the Empire tonight. Want to go?”

  This time I had no trouble reading my brother’s eyes. They were bored.

  WHAT I REMEMBER most clearly of Tarun from his childhood are his eyes. They were very bright and very black. If I brought my face close to his, I could see myself reflected in them, tiny and clear and more beautiful than I really was. Maybe that was why I loved him so much.

  Everyone called Tarun a good boy. He never got into trouble like the other neighbor kids who talked back to teachers, or got into fistfights, or stole lozenges from the Sarada Debi All Purpose Store. Coming back from school, he rarely joined the raucous game of cricket in progress on the empty field across from our house. He preferred being with mother and me. Even when he was a teenager, he’d come into the kitchen where we were fixing dinner and knead the dough for her, or help me slice the bitter gourd. If asked, he would give us an obedient description of his day (theorems in maths class, essay test in English, atoms and molecules in science). But what he liked best was listening to my mother’s stories—tales her mother had told her—of princes and princesses, wondrous talking beasts, and jewels which, touched to the walls of caverns, made secret entryways appear.

  When they came to visit, our women relatives would compliment Ma on bringing him up so well. (They thought me too talkative, too flighty, always flipping through the foreign magazines I’d borrowed from wealthier classmates.) “And all by yourself too, a widow-woman like you,” they would add, in between mouthfuls of pakoras.

  “Actually, I think he’s too quiet,” Ma would say, frowning a little. “He spends too much time with just the two of us. I’d rather he went out and made more friends. Learned more about the world and how to feel comfortable in it. After all, I won’t always be around, and his sister will soon get married and go into a different household.”

  “Really, Malabika!” the women would tell her, patting their mouths delicately with their handkerchiefs. “Like they say, You don’t appreciate a good thing until you lose it!”

  Now, with so many things slipping from my grasp, I understand the truth of that saying.

  If I’d been an artist, this is what I would have painted, to keep it safe from loss—and from change, which is perhaps crueler than loss. This is what I would have brought to Tarun today: that dim kitchen, our own cave, with its safe odors of coriander and fenugreek; the small blue glow of the gas stove in the corner; three people, cross-legged on the cool cement, making food for each other while the stories wrapped us in their enchantment.

  ON THE BOAT the wind yanks at my long hair, whipping it into knots that will take me hours to untangle. Across the deck from me, a group of young men in dull green parkas are joking around, jostling each other, drinking from brown paper bags. From time to time they dart sideways glances at me and my Indian clothes. I can tell they haven’t seen many of us. I clutch at the boat’s railings, shivering, wishing myself back in Sacramento, where no one stares when I walk to the store in my salwaar kameez. I hate it all, the knifing wind, the furtive looks, the effortless way in which my brother ignores everything equally—the cold, the men, his visiting sister. He gazes with concentration at the dead landscape as though he were alone in it. Maybe in a way he is, though in his hip-hugging jeans and army surplus jacket, he looks to me just like all the other young men on the ferry. Even the expression on his closed face is so totally American. This strikes me as parti
cularly ironic. Because unlike me—who had eagerly (too eagerly?) agreed to have a marriage arranged with Sandeep mostly because he lived abroad—Tarun had never wanted to come to America.

  A FEW WEEKS before Tarun arrived in Vermont, my mother wrote me a letter.

  Today Taru and I had a terrible fight. He still refuses to go to college in America, although his acceptance letter has arrived. He says he wants to stay with me. But I’m terrified to keep him here. You know how bad the Naxal movement is right now in Calcutta. Every morning they find more bodies of young men in ditches. Taru keeps telling me he’s safe, he doesn’t belong to any political party. But that means nothing. Just last week there was a murder right on our street. Remember Supriyo, that good-looking boy? He didn’t belong to any party either. I heard from Manada Pishi next door that his face was sliced to shreds. His poor mother has had a nervous breakdown. I reminded Taru of that. He still wouldn’t listen.

  Finally I called him a coward, hiding from the world behind his mother’s sari, a fool who lived in a fantasy land. How could he throw away this opportunity, I shouted, when I’d worked so hard to bring him this far. I said he was ungrateful, a burden to me. Didn’t he see that I couldn’t sleep at night, worrying, because he was here? You can imagine how I hated saying it—I could see the abhimaan on his face, like a wound—but it was the only thing I knew that would make him go.

  She had been right. He had gone. What she hadn’t foreseen was how absolute that going would be.

  Today I am thinking about the word Ma had used to describe Tarun’s reaction. Abhimaan, that mix of love and anger and hurt which lies at the heart of so many of our Indian tales, and for which there is no equivalent in English. If Tarun pushed her away, would the red-haired girl feel abhimaan? Or are we capable of an emotion only when the language of our childhood has made it real in our mouths?