The Unknown Errors of Our Lives (14 page)

TO GET TO
California I had to travel through desert. But, no, the desert was part of California, too. Perhaps the best part, I would think later. Brown land, brown sky, hills like brown breasts. The Greyhound bus fishtailed in the wind, or maybe the driver was sleepy. I slid across the worn-slick vinyl seat with a slash in its center, as if someone had had to hide something fast. Or maybe he’d been searching. Or merely bored and needed it, the hard defined sound of the rip as the knife bit in, its controlled movement across the drab olive flatness. I slid all the way across and hit my head against the dusty window, but it didn’t hurt because I’d seen it coming and braced myself. Oh, I was quick. Because only the quick survive. Or the fortunate—but already my life had proved I wasn’t that.

We were passing the dunes now, the sand rippled into a thousand lines of cursive, a dangerous alphabet. Everywhere, mica glittered like eyes. Above, vultures waited to swoop down on the helpless skitter of smaller creatures. I loved it—how could I resist? I wanted to climb to the top of the highest dune. I wanted to be transformed to the bone.

Some of the scared hardness at my core was melting in the desert’s heat. For the first time since I got to America.

I felt myself growing into all the words my sister-in-law had shouted as I packed my things in her Dallas home two days ago. Selfish, yes. Ungrateful, yes. Following only my own pleasure. I would be all that.

I was a burning wind. I was a lit fuse.

And I was coming to California.

BUT FIRST THERE
was the lush, sweaty jostle of Bombay, the torrential monsoons that swept through the city where I was born, the greedy, flooded streets that sucked at your calves. On each corner the looming billboards promised romance, a dark air-conditioned theater and Amir Khan in your arms—or Madhuri Dixit, depending on your preference. All the passion you could want and none of the consequences. The white ocean at night, necklaced with lights from Marine Drive, rocked just for you.

Everything I had loved, and then hated.

People thought I came to Texas because my older brother was the only relative I had left. The real reason was that I needed something as different as possible from Bombay. How else could I begin to bear the memories, the city smoldering in the aftermath of riot? Hindus and Muslims, that inexplicable frenzy, smoke that rose solid in a hundred pillars. On the street, screams of women whose accents you could not have distinguished from mine. The smell of the water tank on our terrace where my mother made me hide.

What did I imagine? Open country, dust rising from hooves as herds headed home. Fountains of iridescent oil. Cougars. Cowboys with creased smiles and eyes blue as sapphire stone. Their kisses would be hard and innocent. Behind us in the night, rockets would take off for the moon, searing a path brighter than any meteor.

I found myself in a two-bedroom semidetached exactly like a hundred others, a pocket-sized square of lawn, browning in patches because water cost too much. “We’ll put in rocks, once we’re sure your brother won’t get laid off,” said my sister-in-law, who was kind in the beginning. “Come on, Mira, let’s take you to the mall.”

It was my own fault, my desperate mythologizing of America. But I blamed her for my disappointment. And my brother. I blamed him for his patience, his second-rate career, his crumpled, apologetic shoulders. His letter which had asked me to come stay with him.
It’s not safe in India, how many times I told you and Mother this. More so now that you’re unmarried and alone
.

The bus jerks to a halt. How many hours? It is a gray afternoon, a gray wind blowing Burger King wrappers across a scraggly city park. Gulls circle overhead, screaming, though there is no sign of water. I see graffiti on peeling walls, metal bars in a shop window.

“Sacramento,” shouts the driver, and I climb down.

IT IS DUSK
by the time I find Malik’s restaurant. The light has seeped away, leaving ink pools under the eyes of strangers in the street, in the secretive hollows of their throat.

In Bombay, before the riots, darkness had fallen dramatically, in one gay swoop.

Comparisons are futile, I know that. Now is all I have. But my feet hurt, the backpack straps bite into my shoulders, and the
frr-frr
of pigeons flying home is the rustle of my mother’s sari.

“Malik-ji?” says the manager, who is at the cash register, picking his teeth. “Yes, he’s in. You’re lucky. He hardly ever comes into the restaurant anymore.” He peers at the note which my brother had insisted on giving me. “I don’t know if he’ll talk to you. So many people come through here, claiming to be relatives of relatives.”

The air is cumin and coriander, a roasted brown smell. They must be frying samosas inside. My mother used to make the best samosas, fat and crisp. “Stuff carefully, Mira,” she’d say. “Wet the dough ends and pinch the tips together so no air bubbles remain.” But I never had the patience.

“Did I say I was a relative?” I let my voice hit the shadowed ceiling. My head feels like a bubble, enormous with hot air. “I’m looking for a job. If you don’t have one, I’ll be happy to look elsewhere.”

A few early diners turn to stare.

“Arre bas, what temper,” says the manager, not unkindly. “Just left home, didn’t you? A week on the streets and you’d be singing a different song. Sit there, on the empty side, I’ll go ask if he’ll see you. Ei Priya, bring this bahinji a cup of chai.”

I sit in the banquet section of the restaurant, decorated with maroon velvet and mirrors, curtains with thick gold pull ropes, wall-to-wall plush carpeting. I want to feel disdain. In our drawing room in Bombay there had been a hundred-year-old rug from Srinagar that belonged to my grandfather, its faded design a glimmering of jewels through fog. But this American carpet is so soft around my ankles, so innocent of history—like young grass—that I can’t stop myself from slipping off my shoes.

The tea comes, brought by a young woman in a purple sari and neat braids. Her blackbird eyes take in my wrinkled jeans, my less-than-clean shirt, my hair bundled into a knot, even—I am sure—the giant blister taking angry shape on my left heel. She is about to speak, but someone shouts “Pri-ya,” and with a flash of a smile she is gone. The kitchen door swings open to her touch, closes on a burst of female laughter, a question that could be
Who is she
, or maybe
What does she want
, the old, known smells and the boundaries they once promised. Sputtering mustard seed, the bright green glaze of chilies cooking in my mother’s karhai. I no longer feel desert-dangerous, only tired and, again, afraid.

THE WATER TANK
in our Bombay house smelled of river bottoms, of rust, of sun-heated metal and still water. Inside, it was colder than I had expected, shiver-cold, and the smallest sounds echoed and boomed against my ear.

We were lucky to have a water tank at all. It had been put in a long time ago by my grandfather, when such things were still allowed. Having grown up in the lake-filled villages of Bengal, he had liked long baths. Now it meant that when the municipal supply was cut off twice a day, we had water to cook and drink.

But our real luck lay in the fact that none of the surrounding houses had tanks. This meant the rioters would not think to look on the terrace, my mother said. From her voice I knew she was only hoping.

The tank was not large. Still, it could have held us both. When I said that, my mother shook her head. “I must padlock the house from outside,” she said. “That way they might believe it’s empty.”

“Where will you go?” I asked.

“I’ve let half the tank water out,” she said, “but you might need the rest. It’s a good thing this old lid doesn’t close too well. There’ll be enough air. Don’t come out, no matter what you hear. Here’s some fruit, it’s the only thing that’ll keep in there. Eat it sparingly. Who knows when—”

There were shouts in the distance, a rumbling sound like heavy machinery. Perhaps there were guns. I thought I smelled burning oil.

My mother pushed me down into the tank, handed me a banana and two oranges. She let her hand linger for a moment on my hair. “God bless you,” she said.

I thought of saying,
Who? The god that’s letting this happen to us, to this city?
And,
What if they set the house on fire?
Of saying,
None of this would have happened if we’d moved to America after Baba died, like my brother invited us to
.

If there’s one thing I’m glad of now, it’s that I stayed silent.

I ate the banana that night. Next evening I ate the oranges. The screams had stopped by then, mostly. I let the peels fall from my hand and watched them float, slow motion, to the tank bottom. I crushed the seeds in my teeth as though the bitterness could bring me relief. For a long time, the moist, weighted air of the tank smelled of oranges and tears.

“YOU WON’T BE
happy working for me, not for long,” says Malik in his resigned, matter-of-fact voice. “You’re too educated, too smart, I can see it in your face. . . .”

What had I expected him to look like? When my brother told me of his empire of restaurants and groceries and apartment buildings, I’d pictured someone like Seth Ramchand back home, corpulent in an overstarched Nehru jacket, smoking a cheroot, flashing a diamond on every finger. Or, given the American context, maybe a suave, Armani-clad villain. (Who but a villain could so easily rake in the millions that steadily eluded my brother?) Bodyguards would hover in the background as he stepped out, dark-glassed, from his limousine. But here he is, a trim man, not too tall, with a bland blue department-store shirt and a cautious haircut. (He does own a limousine, but I will not learn this fact until much later.) His mustache is neat and nondescript. I’ve seen a thousand mustaches like that on the streets of Bombay.

“Too pretty also,” says Malik, and suddenly the look in his eyes is neither bland nor cautious.

WHEN I ANNOUNCED
my plans for leaving Dallas, my brother tried his best to stop me. He explained how dangerous it was, a girl traveling America alone.
Dangerous
was a word my brother liked to use. In this he was like all men who have never experienced its reality firsthand. He cajoled and pleaded, said he’d pay for me to take classes at the local community college. He tried damage containment. “Why does it have to be California? Go to the East Coast instead, if it’s excitement you want. I have friends in New Jersey, solid family men, they’ll take you in, treat you like a sister.”

At last he gave me Malik’s address in Sacramento. He and my brother had gone to college together briefly, before Malik dropped out to start his first restaurant. Now they stayed desultorily in touch, sending each other Diwali cards, informing each other of the births of children or changes of address.

My brother kept at me until I said, Very well, I would go to Sacramento rather than Los Angeles, like I wanted. Even then he wasn’t happy.

“Leaving us like this to live by yourself,” he said at the bus station, handing me my backpack with a sigh. “Ma would have been most upset! Oh, well, at least Malik will be there in case you run into trouble. But you’d better . . .”

I’d shoved past him without answering. My face felt like someone had rubbed ground glass into it. What right did he have to speak of my mother? He wasn’t the one who’d searched for her through streets filled with the stench of kerosene and burned flesh, calling her name. He wasn’t the one who had gone to one police station after another with her photo, to be told by exhausted officials that there were too many missing people for them to keep track.

“Maybe it’s better if you don’t find her,” one inspector had told me finally.

I kept my face turned away from the tinted bus window, from my brother’s waving arm, the crease of worry between his brows, simple as a Crayola line drawn by a child. Still, I heard him through the engine’s backfiring: “ .         .         . watch out for Malik—he has a reputation.”

I SIT ON
one end of the sagging sofa that takes up most of our living room and watch Priya trying on makeup. She outlines her lips in Scarlet Madness and pouts into the mirror she is holding. She flutters her mascara-thickened lashes. She is practicing, because soon she is to be a wife. Her hair, unbraided now, falls over her left breast.

Malik has given me a job at the restaurant—I am to be a cashier, morning shift, until I’m ready to handle the heavier evening crowds—and a room in an apartment building he owns down the street. The rent, to be deducted from my pay, is reasonable. I can eat in the restaurant kitchen for free, if I wish.

“He’s a fair man, you have to admit,” Priya says as she shifts her hips, trying to find a comfortable spot on the sofa. She wears a demure nightgown, high-necked and long-sleeved. Malik had called her into his office and told her that he was putting me in her apartment, since it had a second bedroom. I would have resented the intrusion, but she doesn’t seem to mind. “Also kind. Looking at him, you’d never believe the stories.”

She pauses, lips parted expectantly, until I ask what the stories are.

I listen absently as she talks of under-the-table deals with warehouses, a partner who died too conveniently, huge bribes paid to Immigration so they won’t look too closely at his employees’ visas. A manager who crossed him, and now he’s gone, disappeared, even his family doesn’t know where. And then there’s the matter of his second wife.

Priya’s sleeves are pulled up above her elbow, her arms are smooth and dimpled as she raises them in a languorous stretch. She undoes the two top buttons of her gown—it is a warm night—and fans herself with an old copy of
Good Housekeeping
. The damp gleam of her skin disturbs me. But why? Where I come from, it isn’t unusual for women to undress in front of each other. Growing up, I saw naked women many times, in the jenana changing rooms by the sea, and paid them no more attention than the rickety clothes racks on which we threw our saris.

“He saw her on a trip back to India—by chance, just like in the movies! He’d gone to his cousin’s village for a wedding, and saw her in the crowd of guests. He liked her so much he married her that same week, didn’t even ask for a dowry. Her parents were delighted, they knew how rich he was. But when she got here she found he was married already, even had kids and all. So she tried to kill herself. Slit her wrists, right here in this building—he’d put her on the top floor, in the best apartment. What a mess it was, ambulances, police, scared us all to death.”