The Unknown Errors of Our Lives (6 page)

More accidents followed, in spite of the fact that she was not a particularly physical child. They blur together in Leela’s memory like the landscape outside a speeding car’s windows. She fell from her bike in front of a moving car—luckily the driver had good reflexes, and she only needed a few stitches on her chin. She sat in the passenger seat of her mother’s van, and a stone—from who knows where—shattered the windshield, filling Leela’s lap with jagged silver. A defective electrical wire caught fire at night in her bedroom while she slept. Her mother, up for a drink of water, smelled the smoke and ran to the bedroom to discover the carpet smoldering around the sleeping Leela’s bed. Do all these close escapes mean that Leela is lucky? Or is her unlucky star, thwarted all this time by some imbalance in the stratosphere, waiting for its opportunity?

She thinks finally of the suicide attempt which, since she arrived in India, she has quarantined in a part of her mind she seldom visits. Can it be classified as an accident, an accident she did to herself? She remembers the magnetic red gleam of the round pills in the hollow of her palm, how unexpectedly solid they had felt, like metal pellets. The shriek of the ambulance outside her window. The old man who lived across the hall peering from a crack in his door, grim and unsurprised. The acidic ache in her throat when they pumped her stomach. Leela had kept her eyes on the wall of the emergency room afterward, too ashamed to look at the paramedic who was telling her something. Something cautionary and crucial which might help her now, as she steps warily along this beautiful glacial trail, watching for crevasses. But for her life she cannot recall what it was.

EACH NIGHT THE
pilgrims are assigned to different tents by the head guide, according to some complicated logic Leela has failed to decipher. But tonight, when she finds herself in Mrs. Das’s tent, her bedroll set down next to the older woman’s makeshift one, she wonders if it is destiny that has brought her here.

All her life, like her parents, Leela has been a believer in individual responsibility. But lately she finds herself wondering. When she asked Aunt Seema yesterday, she touched Leela’s cheek in a gesture of amused affection. “Ah, my dear—to believe that you control everything in your life! How absurdly American!”

Destiny is a seductive concept. Ruminating on it, Leela feels the events of her life turn weightless and pass through her like clouds. The simplistic, sublunary words she assigned to them—
pride, shame, guilt, folly
—no longer seem to apply.

“Please,” Mrs. Das whispers in Bengali, startling Leela from thought. She sits on the tarpaulin floor of the tent, propped against her bedroll, her legs splayed out crookedly from under her sari. “Could you ask one of the attendants to bring some warm water? My feet hurt a lot.”

“Of course,” Leela says, jumping up. An odd gladness fills her as she performs this small service. Aunt, who was less than happy about Leela’s tent assignment tonight, had whispered to her to be sure to stay away from Mrs. Das. But Aunt is at the other end of the camp, while destiny has placed Leela here.

When the water comes in a bucket, Mrs. Das surreptitiously removes her shoes. They are made of rough leather, cheap and unlovely. They make Leela feel guilty about her fleece-lined American boots, even though the fleece is fake. Then she sucks in a horrified breath.

Freed of shoes and socks, Mrs. Das’s feet are in bad shape, swollen all the way to the calves. The toes are blistered and bluish with frostbite. The heels weep yellowish pus. Mrs. Das looks concerned but not surprised—this has obviously been going on for a couple of days. She grits her teeth, lurches to her feet, and tries to lift the bucket. Leela takes it from her and follows her to the opening of the tent, and when Mrs. Das has difficulty bending over to wash her feet, she kneels and does it for her. She feels no disgust as she cleans off the odorous pus. This intrigues her. Usually she doesn’t like touching people. Even with her parents, she seldom went beyond the light press of lips to cheek, the hurried pat on the shoulder. In her Dexter days, if he put his arm around her, she’d find an excuse to move away after a few minutes. Yet here she is, tearing strips from an old sari and bandaging Mrs. Das’s feet, her fingers moving with a deft intelligence she did not suspect they possessed, brown against the matching brown of Mrs. Das’s skin. This is the first time, she thinks, that she has known such intimacy. How amazing that it should be a stranger who has opened her like a dictionary and brought to light this word whose definition had escaped her until now.

SOMEONE IN THE
tent must have talked, for here through the night comes the party’s doctor, his flashlight making a ragged circle of brightness on the tent floor as he enters. “Now what’s the problem?” he asks Mrs. Das, who attempts a look of innocence. What problem could he be referring to? The doctor sighs, hands Leela his torch, removes the sari strips, and clicks his tongue gravely as he examines Mrs. Das’s feet. There’s evidence of infection, he says. She needs a tetanus shot immediately, and even then the blisters might get septic. How could she have been so foolish as to keep this a secret from him? He pulls a thick syringe from his bag and administers an injection. “But you still have to get down to the hospital at Pahelgaon as soon as possible,” he ends. “I’ll ask the guide to find some way of sending you back tomorrow.”

Mrs. Das clutches the doctor’s arm. In the flashlight’s erratic beam, her eyes, magnified behind thick glasses, glint desperately. She doesn’t care about her feet, she says. It’s more important for her to complete the pilgrimage—she’s waited so long to do it. They’re only a day or so away from Shiva’s shrine. If she had to turn back now, it would kill her much more surely than a septic blister.

The doctor’s walrus mustache droops unhappily. He takes a deep breath and says that two extra days of hard walking could cause gangrene to set in, though a brief uncertainty flits over his face as he speaks. He repeats that Mrs. Das must go back tomorrow, then hurries off before she can plead further.

The darkness left behind is streaked with faint cobwebs of moonlight. Leela glances at the body prone on the bedding next to her. Mrs. Das is completely quiet, and this frightens Leela more than any fit of hysterics. She hears shufflings from the other end of the tent, whispered comments sibilant with relief. Angrily, she thinks that had the patient been anyone else, the doctor would not have been so adamant about sending her back. The moon goes behind a cloud; around her, darkness packs itself tightly, like black wool. She pushes her hand through it to where she thinks Mrs. Das’s arm might be. Against her fingers Mrs. Das’s skin feels brittle and stiff, like cheap waterproof fabric. Leela holds Mrs. Das’s wrist awkwardly, not knowing what to do. In the context of Indian etiquette, would patting be considered a condescending gesture? She regrets her impetuosity.

Then Mrs. Das turns her wrist—it is the swift movement of a night animal who knows its survival depends on mastering such economies of action—and clasps Leela’s fingers tightly in her own.

LATE THAT NIGHT,
Mrs. Das tries to continue up the trail on her own, is spotted by the lookout guide, apprehended and brought back. It happens quickly and quietly, and Leela sleeps through it all.

By the time she wakes, the tent is washed in calm mountain light and abuzz with women and gossip.

“There she was, in the dark on her own, without any supplies, not even an electric torch, can you imagine?”

“Luckily the guide saw her before she went beyond the bend in the mountain. Otherwise she’d be in a ravine by now. . . .”

“Or frozen to death . . .”

“Crazy woman! They say when they caught her, she fought them tooth and nail—I’m telling you, she actually drew blood! Like someone possessed by an evil spirit.”

Leela stares at Mrs. Das’s bedroll, two dark, hairy blankets topped by a sheet. It looks like the peeled skin of an animal turned inside out. The women’s excitement crackles through the air, sends little shocks up her arms. Are people in India harder to understand because they’ve had so many extra centuries to formulate their beliefs? She recalls the expression on Dexter’s face before he slammed the door, the simple incandescence of his anger. In some way, she had expected it all along. But Mrs. Das . . . ? She curls her fingers, remembering the way the older woman had clasped them in her dry, birdlike grip.

“Did she really think she could get to the shrine all by herself!” someone exclaims.

Leela spots Aunt Seema and tugs at her sari. “Where is Mrs. Das now?”

“The guides have put her in a separate tent where they can keep an eye on her until they can send her back,” Aunt says, shaking her head sadly. “Poor thing—I really feel sorry for her. Still, I must confess I’m glad she’s leaving.” Then a suspicious frown takes over her face. “Why do you want to know? Did you talk to her last night? Leela, stop, where are you going?”

MRS. DAS, WHOM
Leela finds in a small tent outside which a guide keeps watch, does not look like a woman who has recently battled several men tooth and nail. Cowled in a faded green shawl, she dozes peacefully against the tent pole, though this could be due to the Calmpose tablets the doctor has made her take. Or perhaps there’s not much outside her head that she’s interested in at this point. She has lost her glasses in her night’s adventuring, and when Leela touches her shoulder, she looks up, blinking with dignity.

Leela opens her mouth to say she is sorry about how Mrs. Das has been treated. But she hears herself saying, “I’m going back with you.” The dazed expression on Mrs. Das’s face mirrors her own inner state. When after a moment Mrs. Das warily asks her why, all she can do is shrug her shoulders. She is uncertain of her motives. Is it her desire to prove (but to whom?) that she is somehow superior to the others? Is it pity, an emotion she has always distrusted? Is it some inchoate affinity she feels toward this stranger? But if you believe in destiny, no one can be a stranger, can they? There’s always a connection, a reason because of which people enter your orbit, bristling with dark energy like a meteor intent on collision.

TRAVELING DOWN
a mountain trail fringed by fat, seeded grasses the same gray as the sky, Leela wants to ask Mrs. Das about destiny. Whether she believes in it, what she understands it to encompass. But Mrs. Das grips the saddle of the mule she is sitting on, her body rigid with the single-minded terror of a person who has never ridden an animal. Ahead, the guide’s young, scraggly-bearded son whistles a movie tune Leela remembers having heard in another world, during an excursion with Aunt Seema to some Calcutta market.

Aunt Seema was terribly upset with Leela’s decision to accompany Mrs. Das—no, even with that intense adverb,
upset
is too simple a word to describe the change in her urbane aunt, who had taken such gay control of Leela’s life in the city. The new Aunt Seema wrung her hands and lamented, “But what would your mother say if she knew that I let you go off alone with some stranger?” (Did she really believe Leela’s mother would hold her responsible? The thought made Leela smile.) Aunt’s face was full of awful conviction as she begged Leela to reconsider. Breaking off a pilgrimage like this, for no good reason, would rouse the wrath of Shiva. When Leela said that the occurrences of her life were surely of no interest to a deity, Aunt gripped her shoulders with trembling hands.

“Stop!” she cried, her nostrils flaring. “You don’t know what you’re saying! That bad-luck woman, she’s bewitched you!”

How many unguessed layers there were to people, skins that came loose at an unexpected tug, revealing raw, fearful flesh. Amazing, that folks could love one another in the face of such unreliability! It made Leela at once sad and hopeful.

WALKING DOWNHILL, LEELA
has drifted into a fantasy. In it, she lives in a small rooftop flat on the outskirts of Calcutta. Mrs. Das, whom she has rescued from the women’s hostel, lives with her. They have a maid who shops and runs their errands, so the women rarely need to leave the flat. Each evening they sit on the terrace beside the potted roses and chrysanthemums (Mrs. Das has turned out to be a skillful gardener) and listen to music—a tape of Bengali folk songs (Mrs. Das looks like a person who would enjoy that), or maybe one of Leela’s jazz CDs to which Mrs. Das listens with bemused attention. When they wish each other good night, she touches Leela’s arm. “Thank you,” she says, her eyes deep as a forest.

They have come to a riverbed. There isn’t much water, but the boulders on which they step are slippery with moss. It’s starting to rain, and the guide eyes the sky nervously. He pulls at the balking mule, which stumbles. Mrs. Das gives a harsh, crowlike cry and flings out her hand. Leela grasps it and holds on until they reach the other side.

“Thank you,” says Mrs. Das. It is the first time she has smiled, and Leela sees that her eyes are, indeed, deep as a forest.

“BUT, MADAM!” THE
proprietor at the Nataraja inn cries to Leela in an English made shaky by distress. “You people are not to be coming back for two more days! Already I am giving your rooms to other pilgrim party. Whole hotel is full. This is middle of pilgrim season—other hotels are also being full.” He gives Leela and Mrs. Das, who are shivering in their wet clothes, an accusing look. “How is it you two are returned so soon?”

The guide, who has brought in the bedrolls, says something in a rapid Pahari dialect that Leela cannot follow. The clerk pulls back his head in a swift, turtlelike motion and gives Mrs. Das a glance full of misgiving.

“Please,” Leela says. “We’re very tired, and it’s raining. Can’t you find us something?”

“Sorry, madams. Maybe Mughal Gardens in marketplace is having space. . . .”

Leela can feel Mrs. Das’s placid eyes on her. It is obvious that she trusts the younger woman to handle the situation. Leela sighs. Being a savior in real life has drawbacks she never imagined in her rooftop fantasy. Recalling something Aunt Seema said earlier, she digs in the waistband of her sari and comes up with a handful of rupee notes which she lays on the counter.