The Unknown Errors of Our Lives (4 page)

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 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 particularly 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?

MY MOTHER’S LETTER
distressed me, but it was distress of a peculiar, blurred kind. I knew how serious the situation in Calcutta was, but somehow the tragedies Ma spoke of weren’t
real
, not like my own problems. The pain of my daughter’s swollen gums as her first teeth came through; the smell of our apartment which, no matter how much I scrubbed, stank of stale curry; the arguments I seemed to have every evening with Sandeep and which were resolved, inevitably, the only way we knew how: by the uneasy press of our bodies against each other in bed, his mouth tasting of cloves, making me drunk, making me temporarily forget. Inescapably mundane, these things loomed so large in my world that they forced everything else to recede. A few months later, when Tarun would arrive in Vermont and call me, his voice over the phone line would be edged with a sharp, silver need. But it, too, would belong to that other plane of existence, like a flash of lightning far up in the night sky.

I hated this change in myself, this shrinking of sensibility, this failure of intelligence. But I didn’t know what to do about it. Did anyone else suffer from such a disease? I was afraid to ask Sandeep, who was the only person I knew well enough in America to ask.

I kept my mother’s letter for a long time at the bottom of my jewelry case, under the thick gold wedding bangles that I no longer wore because they were too elegant for my pedestrian Sacramento life. I wasn’t sure if I should send it to Tarun, if that would be disloyal to my mother.

And then during a move to a new house, I lost the letter. By then it was too late, anyway.

THE FIRST FEW
months after moving to this country, Tarun called me almost every day. He hated cooking for himself. Hated coming home in the evenings to an empty room. It was so cold in Vermont, he felt he was slowly freezing, one organ at a time. I forced myself to ignore the pleading in his voice. Sandeep was dead against any family—his or mine—coming to live with us.
Landing on my head
was the term he used. So I would offer Tarun a variation of We-all-went-through-the-same-thing, before-you-know-it-you’ll-get-used-to-this-lifestyle. It was hard to think of anything more profound to say with the baby screaming in my ear or the dal boiling over and Sandeep, like most husbands brought up in India, no help at all. Tarun would be silent for a moment. Then he would say good-bye in a quiet voice.

FOR A LONG
time I didn’t know about the rift between Ma and Tarun, although I wonder now whether it was more that I didn’t want to know. I’d had my second baby by then, and Sandeep and I were finally falling in love. It seemed such a precarious miracle, our little house of kisses. I was afraid that even one careless word would topple it.

So when I rang up India and Ma would say that it had been a long time since she had heard from Tarun (she was too proud to say any more), could I call him and make sure he was okay, I wouldn’t let myself take it seriously.
Oh, Ma!
I’d say, my gay voice drowning out her hesitant words,
Quit worrying! He isn’t a baby anymore
. I’d leave a brief message on his answering machine telling him to write home, and add something cheerful about all the naughtiness his nieces had been up to. Those days, I worked hard at being cheerful because Sandeep had informed me that men disliked gloomy women.

Still, one night after Ma had been more insistent than usual, I spoke to Sandeep. I waited till after lovemaking, when he was usually in an expansive mood, and then I asked if we could have Tarun stay with us for the summer holidays.