The Unknown Errors of Our Lives (19 page)

There were three short, impatient beeps. She held the phone pressed to her ear until the machine disconnected her. He hadn’t informed her about that voice mail greeting, which was a kind of public avowal of his love. He trusted that one day, at the right time, she would find out.

Was that trust enough to outweigh a lifetime of imagining, each time she kissed Biren, that Arlene’s papery lips had bloomed there already? He had never pretended Ruchira was his first. How could she blame him for a past he had admitted to right at the start, just because it had come to her door wearing a pierced eyebrow, an implosive, elfish smile? And the baby, smooth and oval in its ivory sheath, its head pushing up against the echo of a knife. The error its father had paid to erase. She couldn’t blame Biren for that either. Could she?

She won’t tell Biren about Arlene and the baby. Ruchira knows this as she watches the shadows detach themselves from her walls to flap their way across the ceiling. And she won’t be sad for him. The baby, she means. A boy. She knows this inside herself as surely as though she were his mother. A boy—she whispers this to herself—named Arizona. There are many ways in the world to love. With luck he’ll find one. And with luck Ruchira will, too. But what is she thinking? She already loves Biren. Isn’t that why all evening she has been folding and stuffing and tearing strips of tape and printing words on brown cartons in aggressive black ink?
Books: living room. China: dining alcove
. Their lives are already mixed, like past and future, promise and disappointment, linseed oil and turpentine. Like the small exhalations of birds on a wish-fulfilling tree. Maybe they can be separated, but she doesn’t have the expertise for it, even if she wanted to. Marriage is a long, hobbled race, learning the other’s gait as you go, and thanks to Arlene she has a head start.

The wind has dropped. On Ruchira’s window sill the shadows lie stunned, as though they’ve been shot. She wonders if Biren and Arlene did drugs together. It wouldn’t have been a needle, he was too fastidious for that. Maybe pills. Ecstasy? Dexedrine? It annoys her suddenly that she doesn’t know enough about these things.
Clothes: master bedroom. Medicines: bathroom cabinet. Paints: studio
. Because Biren wants her to have a studio in their new condo, on the airy top floor with its view of Coit Tower, next to the balcony where they’re planning to sit in the evenings and drink jasmine tea and talk. (But what will they talk about?) Until one day in February the wind will be like cherry blosssoms, and she’ll take down the painting she hung in the foyer and go into the studio and add in a bird with a boy-face and spiky gold hair, with Biren’s square chin and an unsuspected dimple. And if Biren asks about him . . . ? This is what Ruchira wants from the kalpa taru: that when Biren asks, she’ll know how to ask him back.

THE CHILDREN LOVED
the bamboo forest behind the house. That’s what they all called it, even the adults, banshban, bamboo forest, though
thicket
would have been a more suitable word for the modest clumps that separated the house from the neighbor’s pond. And yet there
was
something forestlike in the way the bamboo shoots poked the dark, intent sharpness of their leaves closer and closer to the house, even into it, through the bars of the dining room window. Something instinctive, predatory, and the children, who were four and five, felt it. It made them open their blue eyes very wide and jump up and down with a wild, adrenaline thrill, chanting the old folk rhyme their grandmother had taught them, bansh boner kaché, burho shial naché, which she had explained was about foxes dancing in a bamboo forest. They didn’t know much Bengali, and the words came out of their mouths wrongly accented, making all the adults laugh. The adults were their grandmother, their great-uncle, his wife, and the servant-woman, who all lived in the house, and any neighbor ladies who happened to drop by to see the little Americans, as they called the boys. They were all wonderfully ancient and wore long, drapey clothes and moved floatingly, as though through an invisible lake. Like very wise elephants, the older boy said to the younger one. Even their smiles took a long time to form, and then stayed on their faces forever, until the children couldn’t tell them apart from their wrinkles.

The adults also included their mother. But was it really their mother, this woman who had put away the jeans and T-shirts they were familiar with and now wore a blue-striped sari and a dusty red dot in the middle of her forehead? They liked the change. She seemed younger and foreign and laughed more than at home and ate with her hands, expertly deboning a lethal-looking catfish while they watched with fascinated repulsion. She wasn’t in a hurry all the time, jangling her car keys and saying, Let’s
go
, boys, come
on
, boys, we’re late al
ready
. The second day they’d been in the village, she’d stopped at the all-purpose store and bought a dozen bangles of silvery glass, and these made a faint windy music around her wherever she went. She reminded them of the characters in the stories their grandmother told them nightly in the dark.

Which one? the mother asked, smiling, when the younger boy told her this. The princess, I hope? The boy shook his head and said it was the farmer’s youngest daughter-in-law, the clever one who saves the family because she knows the language of animals.

That was their favorite time, just before sleep, in their grandmother’s narrow widow’s bed. They pressed against the buttery, pleated skin of her arms, interrupting whenever she lapsed into Bengali, what does it mean, Didima, what does it mean, until she would call across the dark room to their mother, Really, Khuku, you’ve got to do a better job teaching these children their mother tongue. That always made them hysterical with laughter, because Khuku meant baby girl, they knew that much. Next morning they’d make fun of her, calling, Khuku, Khuku, take us for a bath in the pond, and she’d pretend to get mad and say, I’ll khuku your behinds if you don’t show some respect right now. Then they’d laugh again, they hadn’t laughed so much in their entire lives, they’d never thought India would be this much fun, they wished they could stay forever.

When they said that, both their mother and grandmother grew quiet and didn’t answer.

In the middle of the bedtime story, the grandmother would stop and say, Hush, children, listen to the foxes, and they would all listen—first the raucous sawing of the crickets, then the asthmatic whistle of a passing train, then the bamboo leaves, secretive, like dry palms rubbed together, and, finally, faint and mournful with distance, the hua-hua of the foxes rising thin and smoky in the dark. The sound made a hot, scratchy feeling happen in their chests, like hooks pulling. It became impossible to lie still. They bounced around in the bed, they knew they would explode otherwise. The old wood let out complaining moans, but the grandmother didn’t scold them. It was as if she, too, knew that feeling.

As soon as the story was done, the grandmother would grab them, one ankle in each hand, and say, Now, boys, no running off to your ma. You have to sleep with me tonight. This, too, was part of the ritual. They giggled and slip-slided their feet from her grasp, blew her loud kisses, and felt their way across the shadowy room to their mother. A mattress had been laid down for them on the cool floor, which during the day was a pale-green mosaic flecked with silver. Like fish fins, the younger boy had told the older one. They burrowed into their mother’s body, its damp, grassy smells. When they went back to America, they weren’t ever going to sleep in their own beds alone, without her. They’d already decided that between themselves. They put their heads on her pillow, one on each side, and listened as she talked to the grandmother. They mostly didn’t understand the words, and that was fine. Sometimes happy, sometimes sad, the women’s voices flowed over them like melted ice cream, Häagen-Dazs vanilla, their favorite flavor, and their father’s as well. Thinking of their father caused a small noose of sorrow to tighten around them. But they wriggled from it easily. They’d all be together again before they knew it, he’d said, kissing them good-bye in San Francisco. Meanwhile, the village was the greatest adventure of their lives.

AT THE POND
, her sari lifted discreetly to her knees, the mother dangles her feet in the moss-green water and watches the children splashing around. Soon the sun will grow uncomfortably hot. But for the moment the brick steps that lead down to the pond are lazily, familiarly warm under her thighs. In her muscles she feels a memory struggling to wake. This same pleasant end-of-winter glow seeping through frock and knickers into her skin, her father’s hands firm around hers, smelling of cinnamon. (Why cinnamon, she has no idea. He had been no cook, her father. Never set foot in the kitchen if he could avoid it.) He was helping her hold a homemade fishing rod. Did they do this more than once? Did they catch anything? She cannot recall, and this fills her with an absurd sense of loss.

She had been worried about making this trip to India—her first since the boys were born—without her husband. But they both agreed it was important to do it this way. To have him along—even if he could have spared the six weeks from his job—would have changed the ambience of her homecoming. Because though her mother had written a separate letter asking him to come, he was an outsider. No matter how much she loved him, she knew that.

The only time he’d visited India was for the wedding, which had turned out to be a stony-lipped, rushed affair, with just a few relatives attending. It took place in a squalid courthouse in Calcutta with sooty windows and a fan that didn’t work and a long corridor which smelled like rancid fruit, where they’d had to wait a long time. They’d been forced to come to this dismal place, like runaways, because none of the priests in the village would conduct the marriage. They had asked her husband if he was Hindu, and he had replied he wasn’t, although he held the religion in high esteem. But your father is Hindu, right? they asked, offering him one last chance. To which he replied with American frankness that his father, though born a Hindu, had stopped practicing the religion long before he married his white, Episcopalian wife.

Waiting in the corridor of the courtroom, her aunt—her father’s sister—had said, It’s a good thing your father isn’t alive to see this day. Shocked and stung, the daughter turned to her mother, expecting her to come to her rescue. But her mother merely looked down at the grimy floor, and the daughter realized that she, too, believed this.

The trip from California to Calcutta had been long and exhausting, every bit as bad as she had feared. Each time she needed to use the bathroom, the boys had insisted on accompanying her, even into the minuscule airplane stall. In Heathrow airport, they’d run off around the corner while she was busy at the passport counter, and for a few terrifying minutes she thought she’d lost them. When in desperation she belted them into the double stroller they considered themselves too grown up for, the older one pulled the younger one’s hair, and the younger one bit him hard enough to leave a ragged half-moon of tooth marks on his arm. Then they both cried so energetically that passersby stopped to shoot her disapproving glances, until finally the mother had to resort to taking a Valium.

But it was worth every bit of trouble, she thinks now, as she watches them splash about in waist-deep water, pretending to swim. Mostly they whoop and churn up mud. How well they got along with her mother, right from the first. And her mother—more than anything else, she was amazed at her own mother. The hours she spent listening to knock-knock jokes which must have made no sense to her, the hours she spent making them elaborate snacks which they quite often refused to eat. They showed her their comic books and told her in dramatic detail about their favorite superheroes. They tied a handkerchief over her eyes and made her play blind man’s buff with them. She had never been this patient with her own daughter, the mother thinks, stung by a small resentment. Then she is ashamed.

The boys have scared off the ducks, who are clumped under the dark-splotched taro leaves at the other end of the pond, quacking indignantly. The servant boy who is in the water with them—in case they slip or wander too deep—flaps his elbows like wings and quacks back in a nasal falsetto that sets the boys off again into fits of squirmy laughter. The servant boy annoys the mother. Perhaps it is because she had to bring him to watch the boys even though she is a good swimmer herself. But she isn’t confident about how well she would do in a sari, six waterlogged yards of cotton pulling her down, and of course in the village a swimsuit is out of the question. She hasn’t even brought one, she doesn’t want to cause trouble, not during this visit. There has been enough trouble in her past already.

This time the memory comes as a sensation on her skin. She is as old as the servant boy—twelve, perhaps—swimming across the pond in her frock and knickers. She has tucked up the skirt so she can swim better. It sloshes pouchlike against her stomach, makes her feel ancient and marsupial. Ahead, the water stretches out forever, a veritable sea—the way her children must be seeing it now. But she is not afraid. She will never tire. Tiny bubbles of rainbow air wink from her arm when she lifts it for a stroke.

There was an incident. She has forgotten the details by now. She only remembers the boys waiting by the road, smoking beedis as she returned home from the pond. That sour, wild stench, those thin corkscrews of smoke. They’d shouted comments, made vulgar kissing sounds, though she had been careful to wrap a large towel around her frocked-and-knickered body. She had run home, her heart rattling like a stone inside a box that someone shook and shook. It was her first encounter with terror.

When her mother heard—in the village, you always heard—she had put an end to the swimming. Even though the girl had wept and pleaded and refused to eat for two days and said she would only go in a group with the other girls. But there
were
no other girls, her mother pointed out, reasonably enough. Good families didn’t let grown girls swim in ponds so everyone could ogle them. This was true. So the girl took her rage and sank it in her chest, where it waited like a cylinder of radioactive waste deep beneath the ocean. Everyone thought she’d accepted her mother’s decree. But she was gathering her strength for the next confrontation.

Sitting on the pond steps, the mother thinks her way back to her teenage self, the secret hardness growing inside her. The day she would finally reveal it, it would shock everyone—as though they’d sliced open a ripe papaya to find a rock inside. Because all this time they’d thought her pleasantly quiet and studious, changed for the better. Such a sober girl, they said in admiration. She had stopped going to the village fair with her schoolmates. She was no longer interested in the plays performed by visiting troupes in the marketplace. In class she knew all the right answers. She asked the librarian if she could borrow the fat, dusty tomes, math and science, that none of the other girls ever looked at. A termite-gnawed copy of Shakespeare. She read them from beginning to end. Sometimes after school she went to the headmistress’s home to discuss the more complex sections with her. This was not because of a love for learning. Already she knew this about herself. She read with ruthless concentration, the way one studies code in wartime. Somewhere hidden in the books, she knew, lay the theorem of her escape, the formula for the life she craved. Somewhere there was a soliloquy she could appropriate as her own.

When she had passed her higher secondary exams with the highest marks in the district, she went to the headmistress and told her she wanted to go to college in Calcutta, and asked her to speak to her parents. She knew that her parents, however reluctant, would not be able to refuse the headmistress. They would be intimidated by her position, her horn-rimmed glasses and earnest, temple-gong voice as she spoke of the girl’s talent and what a crime it would be to waste it, especially now that she’d been awarded a government scholarship, such a coup for their little village school. No, no, the parents with their old-fashioned notions mustn’t stand in her way.