The Unknown Errors of Our Lives (12 page)

Aparna’s first impulse is to duck behind the enormous display of floral bedsheets across the way. But that would be cowardly. Besides, Dr. Michaels has spotted her already and walks up to her with his head slightly cocked, as though he isn’t quite sure that she’s who she is. She’s afraid he’ll be accusing or, worse still, sentimental, but he only puts out the hand she knows so intimately—the way we know objects out of our childhood, or our dreams—and touches her on the elbow.

“I’m so glad to see you,” he says. “How have you been? And your baby? A boy, wasn’t it?”

Aparna struggles to find an intelligent answer. But that touch—it disturbs her, bringing back that long-ago afternoon, her hand on his sun-tinted cheek. The embarrassment she had not felt then floods her face. Then she notices how he’s looking at her. Her strong, slender legs, the sheen in her newly washed hair—he gazes at them with the marveling eyes of someone who lives each day with bodies broken by disease.

She feels a rush inside her, but it is different from the clutching, shameful emotion she felt toward him in the hospital. It dizzies her. When she looks up, everything—his face, the bedsheet display, the ceiling of Macy’s—is tinged with a tender gold. She wants to tell him that he will always be unique in her life, the man who opened her up and touched the innermost crevices of her body. Who traveled with her, Orpheus-like, the dusky alleyway between life and death.

“I’d love to hear all your news,” Dr. Michaels is saying. “Do you have time for coffee?” He’s holding her hand in a proprietorial fashion. As though she were still in the hospital, and he still in charge, thinks Aparna with slight annoyance. The look in his eyes has changed, and is easier to read. Once she had sat up in her sickbed, rubbing lipstick into cracked lips, darkening sunken eyes with shaky fingers, longing for such a look from him. Now it fills her with sadness because it reveals him to be no different from other men.

Aparna has time. The party isn’t until next week, and being a compulsive planner she has already organized the major details. Aashish, who is at the house of a friend with whom she exchanges child care twice a week, doesn’t need to be picked up until afternoon. But she whispers an apology and frees her hand from Dr. Michaels’s.

“Maybe at another time, then?” he says. “That might be better—some afternoon when we aren’t rushed. For lunch, or maybe drinks? We could go up to San Francisco . . .” He takes out a card, writes a number on the back. “My cell phone,” he says. “Call me . . . ?”

She takes the card and inclines her head slightly. It is a gesture not of assent—as he takes it to be, she can tell by his pleased, boyish grin—but of acceptance. The acceptance of frailty—hers and his, their different, inevitable frailties. She will never tell him—or anyone—about how, just a moment ago, everything was touched with gold. Some things can’t be spoken. The body alone knows them. It holds them patiently, in its silent, intelligent cells, until you are ready to see.

When, with a jaunty wave, Dr. Michaels turns the corner, she drops his card—but gently—into a garbage can. At the cash register, laying her purchases on the counter, she closes her eyes for a moment.
What, then, are we to do?
No answers come. Only an image: a hillside brown as a lion’s skin, her husband running with a spool, her son yelling his excitement as she releases the kite. The fabric unfurling above them into the brief, vivid shape of human joy.

THROUGH THE YEARS
of my childhood when there wasn’t much else to hold on to, I had a fantasy. Those rum-scented evenings when Father’s slurred yells slammed into the peeling walls of wherever we were living at the moment, I would lie wedged behind a sofa or under a bed, and close my eyes and slide into it. Sometimes my brother lay there also, curled tight against me, sucking his thumb, although Mother had told him he was too old to be doing that. The knobs of his spine would push into my chest; his heart would thud against my palm like the hooves of a runaway horse—like my own heart, so that after a while I couldn’t tell the two apart. Maybe that’s how he, too, became part of the fantasy.

Our family moved a lot those days, flurried migrations that took us from rooming house to dingier rooming house as my father lost one job after another. He always managed to find a new one because he was a skilled machinist—perhaps that was part of his trouble, knowing that he would. But each job was a little worse than the previous one, a small movement down the spiral that our life had turned into. We never spoke of it—we were not a family much given to discussion. But we saw it in our mother’s face, the way she sometimes broke off in the middle of a sentence and stared out the window, forgetting that my brother and I were waiting.

We children learned some skills of our own as we traveled through the small hot factory towns of north India that after a while blurred into a single oily smell, a grimy dust that stung the nostrils. We knew how to be almost invisible as we sat on the last bench in class, not knowing the answers because we had missed the previous lessons or didn’t have the books. Or as we sat in the far corner of the canteen at lunchtime because we didn’t want anyone to see the rolled brown rutis Mother packed for us in old paper. We looked longingly—but sidewise, so no one would guess—at the starched uniforms of the others, their tiffin boxes filled with sandwiches made from store-bought bread so white it dazzled the eye. Each time they laughed, we flinched, pulling the edge of a skirt over a bruised thigh, a shirtsleeve over discolored finger marks left on a forearm. Were they talking about us—how Mother had asked the sabji-wallah for credit, how Father had to be helped home from the toddy shop last payday? How long before they learned of the noises that sometimes exploded from our flat at night? We learned to arrange our hair so that the pink ridges of a forehead scar would hardly show. To look casually into the middle distance, as though we didn’t notice the curious eyes. To not think of the futile, scattered trailings we had left behind: a book of fairy tales, a stray yellow dog we used to feed, a mango tree perfect for climbing, the few friendships formed before we knew better.

We. That was how I thought of my brother in those days, as though he were as much a part of me as my arm or leg. Indispensable, to be protected instinctively, like one shields the face from a blow, but not something one thinks about. It never occurred to me as he followed me around in silence (he was not a talkative boy) that he might feel differently about our life—that knotted, misshapen thing, like a fracture healed wrong—which I accepted because it was what I’d always known. Perhaps that was my first mistake.

The year I was eleven and my brother eight, we ended up in Duligarh, an Assam oil town as sagging and discolored as a cardboard box left to rot in the rain. It was a town of many toddy shops, all of which my father would soon discover. A town where credit was difficult to get, where from the first people looked at us with faces like closed fists. I didn’t blame them. We were a far cry from the model families displayed on the family-planning posters the municipal office had put up all over town.

One of these posters was pasted on the back wall of our school. I remember it perfectly from all the afternoons I stood there looking up until my neck ached. My fantasy fed on that poster through those sweat-studded afternoons, spreading its insidious roots, leading me to my other errors.

In the poster, a young couple held hands and smiled into each other’s eyes while a boy and girl played tag around them. The man carried a shiny leather briefcase. The woman’s gold chain sparkled in the sun, and the edge of her pink sari lifted in the breeze. The children wore real leather Bata shoes, the kind I’d seen in the store window in Lal Bahadur Market, spit-shined to a mirror polish.
We Two, Our Two
, declared the poster, as though it were the mantra for a happy life.
We Two, Our Two
. Where then had our parents gone wrong?

Sometimes I stood watching until the sky changed to the dull yellow of late afternoon and my brother tugged at my arm in exasperation. Let’s go, Didi, I’m hungry. Why do you like to waste your time staring at that silly picture? He wanted, instead, to be shaking down ripe guavas from the trees on the edge of the orchard across the street. People shouldn’t plant their trees along the public road if they don’t want anyone to pick the fruit, he said, thrusting out his chin, when I protested.

Sometimes we missed the bus because of that poster and had to walk home, trudging through the heat, our clothes sticking to our skin, our books getting heavier, all the way past the edge of town. Walking through the bazaar I would feel the shopkeepers’ unsmiling eyes on us, a lanky girl with hair pulled back in two tight, careful braids, a juice-stained boy with his wrists sticking out of a shirt he’d outgrown, striding impatiently ahead of his sister. Did they connect us with our parents—that woman who came down to the bazaar at the end of the day, moving among the dull-scaled fish and shriveled beans, her beautiful face like a parched oleander, that man who held his body with brilliant belligerence like a boxer who knew that the key to his survival was to trust no one? Did they compare us to the family on the poster?

IN ASSAM WE
lived in an old British bungalow which we children loved. It was the first real house we’d lived in, a long, low structure built for some forgotten purpose outside of town. It was inconveniently far from everything (it took Father an hour to bike to the factory where he tested drilling equipment), but the rent was cheap and there were no prying neighbors. If it was lonely for Mother all day when we were gone, she didn’t complain. Perhaps she was glad to have the time to herself. Only occasionally would she grumble that the house was falling apart on us.

And it was. Perhaps in sympathy with some other, invisible disintegration, flakes of falling plaster coated everything like giant dandruff. The windows would not shut properly, so that malevolent-looking insects with burnished stings wandered in at will. The roof leaked and when it rained, which was often, we had to make our way around strategically placed buckets.

But we children thought it was perfect—the wooden porch where we played marbles, the claw-footed bathtub where Mother would pour steaming water for our baths, the spear-shaped grilles at the windows that made us feel as if we were living in a medieval fortress.

Best of all we loved the servant’s quarter, a small cottage set far back into the bamboo grove that grew behind the house. My brother and I were the first to discover it. When we told Mother, she gave an unusually bitter laugh. A servant’s quarter for us! she said, the corners of her mouth turning downward. What a joke! For a while she kept asking Father to see if he could rent it out to one of the factory watchmen. But nothing ever came of that. Perhaps we were too far from the factory. Perhaps Father, who wasn’t the type to go around asking, never mentioned it to anyone. My brother believed it was because he and I had prayed so hard for it to stay empty.

The cottage was dim and cool even in the brassy Assam afternoons because it sat under a huge tree of a kind I’d never seen before, with large round leaves like upturned palms. Spiderwebs hung from its ceilings, intelligently angled to enmesh intruders, and in the far room we discovered a trapdoor that blended almost perfectly into the wooden flooring. Underneath was a small space with a packed dirt floor, just right for a make-believe prison or an underground cave. We told no one of it, and never used it ourselves. It was enough to know it was there. Instead, we dusted off a rope cot that was in the corner and dragged it over the trapdoor to hide it. Then we smuggled an old sheet from the house. In the afternoons when we got back from school we lay on the cot in the half-dark and I told my brother stories.

That was when I told my brother about the fantasy. For a long time I’d kept it to myself, knowing instinctively that it was not for sharing. But something about the cottage made me feel weightless and uncatchable, as though I were a dust mote tumbling in lazy light. When I looked up from the cot, the leaves made a canopy of hands, holding off the rest of my life. I’d thought my pragmatic brother would laugh at the fantasy. But from the beginning it was his favorite, the final story I had to tell before we returned to the house to help Mother with chores.

HERE IS THE
fantasy:

My parents are moving again. They climb into a battered three-wheeler loaded down with bundles and boxes. But we are not with them because they have forgotten us. From behind the bamboo grove we watch as the three-wheeler lurches to a start, as it becomes smaller and smaller and finally disappears. We emerge from the fronds cautiously. Yes, they’re really gone. For a moment we are stunned. Then we grab each other and spin until the world is an ecstatic whirl.

The fantasy is not without its problems. The most important one is our mother. Just before she gets into the three-wheeler she looks around uncertainly, the way an animal might, scenting something amiss in the air. (I do not tell my brother this, but I know he sees it, too.) I would like to include her in the fantasy. To have her see a flicker of white—my brother’s shirt—in the bamboo. She would walk into the grove to explore and never return to my father. But I know it cannot be. Their lives are tangled together beyond my powers of extrication. So, sadly, I let her go.

We live in the servant’s quarter. By now the bamboo has grown so thick that no one remembers the existence of the cottage. I cook and clean and teach my brother everything I learned at school. He catches fish for us in the stream behind the cottage, lots of fish, and we sell some of it in the bazaar and buy rice, salt, shoes. We begin to look like the children in the family-planning poster.

You think I’ll be able to catch that many? my brother always asks at this point, not totally convinced of his angling skills.

Of course, I reply.

In our fantasy, no one drags us over the cracked driveway so that its exposed brick scours our backs. In the dark garage, no one lights a match and brings it so close that we can feel the heat of it on our eyelids. In our fantasy, entire sections of words have disappeared from the dictionary:
fear, fracture, furious, fatal, father
.

We keep on living like this.

What about when we get old? my brother asks.

We don’t, I say. But he is not satisfied. So I have to devise an end for the fantasy.

One winter it snows and snows.

Snow? asks my brother. He has never seen any. Nor have I, but in my geography book I’ve come across pictures of the silvered peaks of the Himalayas. I explain it to him.

One winter it snows and snows. The snow drifts in through the windows and doors. It falls on the bed where the brother and sister are sleeping side by side.

Like this? My brother slips his hand into mine and lays his head on my shoulder. A pale scar whose origin I cannot remember slants across his cheekbone.

Yes, I say.

The snow forms a thick white quilt that covers the brother and sister. It doesn’t hurt. They never wake up. They sleep like this forever.

Sleep forever, repeats my brother consideringly as we walk back to the house through the humid afternoon.

THINGS WERE DISAPPEARING
from the house. At first it was food, little items that Mother wouldn’t have noticed if money hadn’t been so tight—a small box of biscuits, a half-empty packet of sugar. Then it was clothes—an old shirt of my brother’s, my green kameez with the frayed collar. A moth-eaten blanket that Mother was intending to throw away as soon as we could afford a new one.

Did you take it for a game? she asked when I came into the kitchen for a snack after school.

No, I didn’t, I said, glad not to have to lie. I was afraid she might follow up with questions I’d have more difficulty sidestepping. But she shook her head in a preoccupied way and started kneading dough for rutis.

I can’t figure it out, she said. It’s not as though we have a servant who might be stealing. And now the level in the rice bin seems to be dropping.

Spirits, that’s what it is, declared Lakshmi-aunty, the old woman who sold spices down in the bazaar, when Mother mentioned it to her the next day. Spirits. People say a saheb lived in that house a long time ago—a smuggler, they say he was—came to a bad end. Hanged himself from the living room rafters. Here, take this mustard seed and burn it in an iron pot while chanting the name of Rama. That should make the spirit go away.