The Unknown Errors of Our Lives (18 page)

She started the paintings soon after that.

“It’s a series.” Ruchira stammered now, speaking too fast. “Mythic images from Indian legends. I’ve only managed to complete three so far. The first is Hanuman, the monkey god, carrying the magic herb that can bring you back to life—you know the story? When Lakshman was hurt in battle, and Hanuman plucked up an entire mountain because he wasn’t sure which herb he was supposed to bring back . . . ?” She’d painted Hanuman in purples and blues and looped his tail in an elegant, gentlemanly manner over an arm. In his right hand he held a miniature mountain the way one might hold a box of chocolates when paying a visit. She had given him a human face, her father’s (unexpectedly, she’d turned out to be good at portraits), his expression of puzzled kindness. She remembered the ecstatic day when the idea had first swooped down on her like a taloned angel. Now the painting looked fanciful, garish. It made her blush.

“But it’s brilliant. They’re all brilliant,” Biren said. “An amazing concept. I’ve never seen anything like it. This next one, isn’t that the magic cow, what’s her name, who possesses all the riches of the world—”

“Kama dhenu,” she supplied shyly, delighted by his recognition. The cow in the painting reclined on a cloud, her chin resting on demure, folded forelegs. A shower of gold coins fanned out from her hooves, carpeting the earth below. Her white wings were as tidily pleated as a widow’s sari. Around her head, words from old stories arched in a rainbow.
Long long ago. Beyond the fields of Tepantar. Once there was a poor brahmin who had a clever wife. And the snake carried a jewel on its head
. Her stubborn, alert face was that of Ruchira’s grandmother.

By the time they got to the third painting, it was too late to go to the concert and Ruchira no longer stammered. With precise gestures she explained to Biren that the huge eagle creature was Jatayu, who died trying to save Sita from the evil ten-headed Ravana as he was abducting her. In Ruchira’s painting Jatayu’s feathers were saffron and white and green, the colors of the Indian flag. His face was that of her grandfather, whom she only knew from sepia photographs because he died long before she was born—in the Andaman prisons, where the British used to send freedom fighters. Her grandmother had told her the story. They had caught him making bombs, he’d been part of a conspiracy to assassinate Lord Minto, the hated governor-general. In Ruchira’s painting, Ravana, pasty-faced and with a prominent overbite, was clearly British, and Jatayu had knocked off all his bowler hats with one giant swipe of his claw.

“I love it!” said Biren. “I just love it!”

They kissed their first kiss soon after that. He tasted of salted sunflower seeds (his secret weakness, she would learn later). His tongue was thin and pointy and intelligent. She doesn’t remember leading him to the bedroom, only that they were there already, lying on the crumpled blue bedcover, his fingers, her fingers, the small hollow inside his elbow and the vein pulsing in it. She thought she could see a faint radiation of heat where their skins touched. Did his hair smell of lemons? In her hurry she tore a loose button off his shirt. (Later they would laugh about that.) The back of his ear stud rasped her hand, raising a weal. He brought it to his mouth and licked it. The small mirrors embroidered into the bedcover pressed their cool disks against her bare back, then against his. His nipples were brown and hard as apple seeds in her mouth.

Then his hands were on hers, tight, stopping her as she tugged on his zipper.

“Don’t. It isn’t safe. I didn’t expect this. I don’t have anything with me. And I take it you don’t either. . . .”

The blood rocked so hard in the hollows of her body, she feared she’d break open. He had to repeat himself before she could understand the words. She shook her head vaguely, not caring. She wouldn’t let go. Her body, thwarted so long, had seized on wildness like a birthright. A part of her cried,
You’re insane, girl
. She pushed her face against him, his chest hairs wiry against her tongue, until finally his hands were gone. She could feel fingers, their drowning grip on her hair. She heard him say something. The words were too close, out of focus. Later she would think they had started with
God
. As in
God I hope you know what you’re doing
.

JUST THREE DAYS
left before her wedding, and Ruchira thinks, Does anyone ever know what they’re really doing? What the tightening of certain muscles and the letting go of others, the aspiration of certain vowels and the holding back of others, will lead to? What terrifying wonder, what injured joy? But she
had
known one thing that night, even before he asked her to marry him and she said yes. She’d known what this, the next and final painting in her Mythic Images series, would be.

She adds a last stroke of burnt sienna to the painting and stands back to examine it. It’s her best one so far, and it’s ready now, at least this phase of it. Just in time, because it’s to be her surprise wedding gift to Biren. She thinks how she’ll do it—steal into their new condo the evening before the wedding—she has the key already—and hang it in the foyer so that he will see it first thing when they enter together as husband and wife. Or maybe she’ll hang it opposite their bed, so they can look at it after lovemaking, or in the morning, waking each other up. The tree with its multicolored jewel leaves, its branches filled with silky birds. It’s the kalpa taru, the wish-fulfilling tree, and the birds are shalikhs, those bold, brown creatures she would find everywhere when she visited Calcutta, with their clever pin eyes and their strident cry. Her grandmother used to call them birds of memory. Ruchira had meant to ask her why but never got around to it. Now she doesn’t want to ask anyone else. She has given the birds the faces of the people she loves most dearly. And Biren too—she borrowed one of his photo albums, secretly, for this purpose. She has put him and herself, feathers touching, at the very center of the tree. (Why not? It’s her right as artist to be egoistic if she wants.) Below them she has left empty branches, lots of them, for the birds she will paint in. New friends, children. Is it sentimental to be thinking about grandchildren already? She’ll fill every space, and more. Maybe she’ll never be done.

Then Biren’s knocking, and she lifts the easel into the closet and rushes to the door and opens it. But it’s not him, of course not, it’s the middle of the afternoon, he’s at work. She really should be more careful and keep the chain on while she checks who’s outside, though this person doesn’t look particularly dangerous. It’s a young woman—well, maybe not so young, once you take in the cracked lines at the corners of her eyes—very thin and very pregnant, with spiky blond hair and a pierced eyebrow, wearing a shapeless pink smock that looks borrowed and a studded black leather jacket that she can no longer button over her belly. There’s a look on her face—determined? resigned? exhilarated? Ruchira gets ready to tell her that she has come to the wrong address. Then she sees it, above the smock’s meandering neckline, against the too-pale freckled skin. Red and blue. A bruise, or a half-healed wound. No. It’s the hilt of a tattooed knife.

RUCHIRA SITS AWKWARDLY
at her kitchen table, knees pressed together, as though she were the visitor here, and stares at the knife-woman. She had realized, right away, that she shouldn’t let her in. But she couldn’t just shut the door in the face of a pregnant woman who looked like she was starving, could she? It was not, however, a totally altruistic act. Ruchira knows this, though she is unable to articulate what it is that she hopes to gain from Biren’s ex-lover. Now she stares at the woman, who is sitting in a chair opposite her and crumbling, with self-possession, the muffin that Ruchira has given her into a small anthill. Ruchira tries to be angry with her for being here. But she feels like someone who drowned a long time ago. In the underwater world she inhabits, there are no emotions, only a slow, seaweedy drifting. She asks, “Why did you come?”

The woman looks up, and the light slip-slides over her hungry cheekbones. What is she hungry for? She’s finished demolishing the muffin, but her fingers continue to twitch. Ruchira suspects scars under the leather, puckered fang marks in the dip inside the woman’s elbow, the same place she loves to kiss on Biren’s arm. Where she has chewed away the lipstick, the woman’s lips are papery, like palest cherry blossom. Then she speaks, an unexpected dimple appears in her cheek, and Ruchira is shocked to discover she’s beautiful. “My name’s Arlene,” she says.

Ruchira wants to ask how she knew about her and Biren, about this apartment. Did she see them on Telegraph Avenue, perhaps, late one night, returning from a movie at the Pacific Film Archives? Did she follow them back? Did she watch from the shadows as they kissed under a streetlamp, their hands inside each other’s coats? Ruchira wants to ask if she loved him, too.

But she knows enough to wait—it’s a game of silences they are playing—and after a while Arlene says, “It’ll be born in a month, in February.” She narrows her eyes and stares as though Ruchira were a minor fact she’s memorizing for a future test, one she’d rather not take.

This time Ruchira loses the game because she can’t bear not to know.

“Does he know about the baby?”

“Yes.”

Ruchira holds this new, trembling knowledge like a too-heavy blob of paint at the end of a brush, threatening to ruin the entire painting unless she finds the right spot to apply it.

“He gave me the money for an abortion. But I didn’t.”

Ruchira closes her eyes. The insides of her eyelids are like torn brown silk, like hundreds of birds taking flight at a killing sound. When she opens them, Arlene lifts her shoulders in a shrug. The knife hilt moves up and down over the bumpy bones of her thin chest. The blade is curved in the shape of a Nepali kukri. Ruchira wonders how much it hurt to get the tattoo done, and how the tattooer knew about Nepali knives, and if Arlene ever looked in the mirror and thought of it as a mistake.

“He doesn’t know I kept it,” Arlene says. She grins suddenly, for the first time, with gamine charm, a kid who’s just won at kickball. There’s a small, neat gap between her front teeth. A famous poet—who was it?—had proclaimed gap-toothed women to be sexy. Why is it that Ruchira can never remember crucial information when she needs to?

Arlene stands up with a decisive scrape of her chair.

“Wait,” Ruchira cries. “Where do you live? Do you have health insurance? Do you need money?” She reaches for her purse and digs frantically in it, coming up with all the bills she can find, ones and fives and a twenty, and extends them to Arlene.

“I’m going to Arizona,” says Arlene. She doesn’t offer further details. She doesn’t stretch out her hand for the money. She does a little pirouette (was she a dancer, before?) and from the door she calls out, “Think of me in February, in Arizona.”

THE FIRST THING
Ruchira does after she is sure Arlene is gone is to run down the stairs to the garbage area. There it is, next to the Dumpster: the blue recycling bin with its triangle of arrows. In her mind she’s seeing the garbage bag, white, with a red tie, that she upended over it—was it just two days back?—freeing a tumble of papers and books. In her mind she’s already dug past the discards of other people’s lives—term papers and love letters and overdue bills—to grab it. She’s opened its purple cover and has started writing, she isn’t done writing even when her hand begins to cramp up, she fills her book of errors all the way to the back cover and has more to put down, that’s how much she’s learned in this one hour.

But the bin is empty.

Ruchira leans into the wall, pressing her forehead against the fake stucco. It smells of sour milk and diapers, and its bumps leave indentations on her skin. Behind her she hears footsteps approach.

“Arlene,” she calls, turning wildly, as though hoping for instructions. But it is a different woman, one of Ruchira’s neighbors, who looks vaguely alarmed. She carries a Hefty bag in one hand and holds on to a little boy with the other.

“Mommy,” the boy asks, “what’s wrong with the lady?”

IT’S VERY LATE
now, and Ruchira has packed everything, even the bedsheets, even the pillow. She lies down on the bare mattress and watches the shadows on the wall. She’s chilled, but inside her brain it feels hot and spongy.
What would you do, Thakuma?
Inside her brain, her grandmother says, Why do you ask me? Can you live your life the way I lived mine? She speaks with some asperity. Or maybe it’s sorrow she feels for the confused world her granddaughter has inherited. Ruchira recalls a prayer her grandmother used to chant in the mornings after her bath, in her raspy, sugarcane voice, as she waved a stick of incense in front of the brightly colored pictures on her altar.
Forgive us, O Lord Shiva, all our errors, both the known and the unknown
. It had seemed impossible to Ruchira that her grandmother could commit any errors. Now she knows better, but she is still unsure what those errors might have been.
Errors that took your life between their thumb and forefinger, Thakuma, and crumbled it like a muffin until you were alone, separated by oceans and deserts and a million skyscrapers from the people you loved, and then you were dead
. Ruchira wants to say the old prayer, but she has forgotten most of it. Does a fragmented prayer merit a fragmented forgiveness? On the wall the shadows move like sleepy birds. If there really were a kalpa taru, what would she wish for?

She had called Biren at home and got his answering machine. But how could you tell a machine, You lousy jerk, you son of a bitch, forget about the wedding? How could you explain to metal and plastic why you needed to grasp the promises a man had made to you and break them across the middle, snap-snap, like incense sticks?

At his work, his secretary informed her he was at a lunch meeting. Could she call back in an hour?

No, she could not. She rummaged through her phone book. Here it was, his cell phone number, written in his expansive, looped hand.

On this machine, his voice sounded huskier, sexy in a businesslike way. Against her will, she found herself listening as he asked people to leave a message at the tone. But the tone didn’t come on just yet. Instead, the voice said, “And in case this is Ruchira, I want you to know I’m crazy about you.”