The Unknown Errors of Our Lives (9 page)

Watching, I think I understand why my easygoing husband has been so insistent about my father coming to visit. It has less to do with my father than with the idea of fatherhood, what it means to him.

When there’s a moment of quiet I say, “He can come the week after Bijoy’s birthday. He can stay one night.”

Dilip half-rises, a startled movement. Bijoy loses his balance, bumps his head, and begins to cry. I pick him up and kiss him.

“Are you sure?” asks Dilip. “Maybe it’s best not to—”

“Dinner’s ready,” I interrupt. To Bijoy, who’s still sobbing, I give another kiss. “Everyone falls,” I tell him. “Everyone gets hurt. That’s the way it is.”

WHY DID I
change my mind?

I could say I did it for Dilip, but I suspect there is more to it. Did watching my husband and son at play remind me of a time when my father and I, too, had done the same? When he had carried me on his back around a veranda, shaking his head, making improbable horse noises? Had swung me around in the cool brightness of a garden while greens and yellows blurred into a stream of gold?

No. I have no early memories of my father at all. Whether this is because he was never around, or because I have, with a certain subconscious severity, wiped him from my mind, I am not sure.

But perhaps my first mistake lies in trying to find motive, in thinking of humans as rational beings whose actions spring from logical causes.

For years I tortured myself by trying to uncover the reason beneath my father’s leaving. He had grown tired of the trapped sameness of days in a house built by his great-grandfather, I told myself. He had been lured to America by visions of gleaming glass and steel. He had discovered that he no longer loved his wife—that he had never loved her. Or his daughter.

Now I think it might have been more simple than that. (But maybe it is a different word I am reaching for—
random
, or
mysterious
.) Could be, if I had asked him, my father wouldn’t have been able to give me an answer, even if he wanted to. Just as I cannot say why I am going against every instinct to let him back into my life.

I HAVE DECIDED
I will not go to any trouble to prepare for my father’s visit. I want him to know that I don’t care about impressing him. So when the doorbell rings that afternoon, my living room is in disarray, the carpet littered with baby books and teething rings, the window-glass sticky with small handprints just where the light hits it most.

Too late I see that I’ve done it all wrong. I should have covered the table in designer batiks. I should have dressed Bijoy in his embroidered birthday kurta. I should have put on my reddest lipstick and my highest heels, forcing my father to look up, amazed and vexed by the daughter who made a success of her life in spite of him.

But already Dilip’s key is rattling in the lock. Breathless, I reach for Bijoy.
My talisman
. But even as I think the words a terrible objectivity descends on me. For the first time I see my son as a stranger might: a thin, dark-skinned child, quite unremarkable, with a smudge of lunchtime ketchup on his chin.

Distressed, I kiss Bijoy over and over. You’re the best boy in the world, I whisper in fierce apology. But a faint bitterness, like seawater, will not leave my mouth.

Perhaps all parents go through this betrayal of vision. But for mine I blame my father.

LATER I WILL
try to remember how it felt, the moment when the door swung open, invading the room with the smell of jasmine, facing me with my father.

A note on jasmine: In Bengal, it is considered an erotic flower, a favorite at weddings. Summer evenings, after the day’s unbreathable heat, women sit on cool, washed terraces and braid it into their hair. Mother used to do that sometimes, though not after Father left, when there was no longer a reason for her to be beautiful.

Early in her marriage, Mother had had jasmines planted all through our garden. Even that last year, when the rest of the yard was choked by weeds, she’d go downstairs to pick the wilted flowers off the vines.

When she died, I ordered enough jasmine garlands to cover the entire funeral bed. Shocked relatives whispered their disapproval of such an inappropriate gesture—and so extravagant, too, from a girl who didn’t even have a dowry.

WHEN WE WERE
looking to buy this house, I told Dilip that the jasmine vines that covered the porch would have to go.

“But, Mona, that’s what makes the house so beautiful!”

“They have to go.” I knew how I sounded. Petulant. Pigheaded.

But maybe Dilip heard something else. “If it matters that much to you,” he said, “they can go.”

Once, in a letter I wrote Dilip but never gave him, I said, you have been the anchor of my sanity.

At my mother’s pyre, as the only family member present, I’d had to put the torch to her body. Burning, the jasmines gave out a smell like bitter oil.

The day after Dilip and I moved into our new house, I’d gone out to the garden armed with shears. But when I touched the leaves, their glossy, vibrating green, I couldn’t do it.

I like to think that my mother is happy about this when she looks down on our porch with her star-steadfast gaze.

BUT HERE IS
my father, standing on my doorstep after ten years. It is a moment I’ve dreaded and longed for, that I’ve daydreamed over and over.

In the dream my father looks just as he did on that last day, elegant in a pencil-thin mustache, wearing a navy blue suit so new its creases could cut your hands. He is about to step into the taxi that is to drive him to the airport. The reason he has to take a taxi is because Mother has given Hari Charan, our chauffeur, the day off. (Does she believe this will stop my father from leaving?) My mother, who has wept and pleaded since morning, now stands silent on the upstairs veranda. My father faces carefully ahead. Perhaps in his mind he is already gone. He has with him one small suitcase, even though Air India allows him two large ones, as if there’s not much that is worth taking from his old life into his new one.

I digress. All this is merely reality, not part of my daydream.

In the dream my father asks if he can come in. Certainly, I say, smiling graciously. Dangerously. He doesn’t notice. When he steps forward I slam the door—thwack of wood on flesh, crack of bone—in his face.

BUT THIS FATHER
, on this unsuitably beautiful spring day, ambushes me. How old he is, his head shiny with hairlessness, his loose-skinned face where I cannot find any traces of the man I hated. I stare at him as he leans on a cane and peers through thick glasses with the anxiousness of the aged. When he asks if he may come in, the words whirl around inside my head, dizzying me.

Then everything happens at once. Dilip appears, lugging two enormous suitcases. (Why? My father’s only supposed to stay a single night.) Bijoy squirms down from my grasp and takes a step—his first. Dilip says, “He walked! He
walked
, did you see that?” My father drops his cane and bends to catch Bijoy just as he loses his balance. “You smart, beautiful boy! How did you know to come to Grandpa?” A smile moves across his face, full and unhurried, like molasses, strengthening my sense that this isn’t really my father. I find that I, too, am smiling at this old man’s pleasure in my son.

Then he straightens and says, almost in surprise, “You’re beautiful too, and so much like—”

He bites his lip, but it’s too late. The unspoken words rise in a jagged line between us like the broken glass embedded into our compound walls back home to keep out thieves.

I HAVE NOT
been totally honest in stating that I’d done nothing to prepare for my father. I’d put a vase of jasmine on the bedside table in the guest room. And I’d ironed my mother’s sari to wear to dinner.

IT’S AFTER DINNER
and I’m at the kitchen sink, ostensibly doing dishes. I rattle spoons to create an impression of diligence, but in truth I’m watching my father.

At dinner he looked at the sari as though he’d never seen it in his life and complimented me on the chicken curry. He said the guest room was very pretty. Is my father tougher than I’ve imagined? Or—this possibility fills me with dismay—has he forgotten all I remember?

In the family room my father opens his cases and lifts out toys. Bright Snurf balls, Playskool blocks, Mattel trucks in every size, some operated by remote controls that look unnervingly like guns. He has brought batteries too, my father who believes in leaving nothing to chance, and now he triumphantly aims the remote at a red-and-white ambulance which comes to life with a screech and a flashing of lights.

I tighten my hands into fists to stop myself from covering my ears. The wail of the ambulance is a black hole through which I’m tumbling into the afternoon when I found my mother doubled over with pain in the easy chair on the veranda. I’d called for an ambulance at once. But there was a strike in Calcutta that day. Angry protesters marched along the street in front of our house, shouting, carrying placards demanding the resignation of some high-up official whose name I’ve forgotten. The ambulance was caught in the melee—I could see it from the veranda—its lights pulsing a rapid, futile red as its driver tried to navigate his way to our gate.

Bijoy loves his ambulance, though. He picks it up and hugs it, squealing with delight at the spinning wheels. Everyone smiles, even me. Then I notice the clothes. My father has brought a whole wardrobe, little playsuits and onesies and sailor shirts, but also big-boy clothes, neat, buttoned-down shirts a kid could wear on his first day at kindergarten, a baseball outfit complete with catcher’s mitt, a white jacket for a summer piano recital.

It comes to me that he is afraid this visit—his first—is also his last. The clothes are his hopes for his grandson’s life. He doesn’t expect me to allow him to return, to share with Bijoy any of the things they promise.

For a moment I see myself as he must: the daughter who carries a mountain of grudges on her shoulder, vengeful as any evil fairy in a childhood tale, and as filled with power. Can I say he is entirely wrong?

The thought is a jolt, so sharp and physical that it makes me drop the bowl I have been soaping. Glass shatters loudly all over the sink.

“Are you okay, Mona?” Dilip asks. “Did you cut yourself again?”

I barely hear him. It’s my father’s gaze I’m aware of, the eyes which have widened slightly at that
again
. Under their scrutiny I dwindle, no evil fairy but a clumsy teenager once more, left behind because I’m not worth taking along. I mumble something about being just fine, about getting the rubber gloves for cleanup, and escape down the corridor.

ON THAT LAST
day in Calcutta I stood on the veranda next to my mother, ready to tell my father something suitably acerbic that I’d been rehearsing all day. I would call this out when he turned to wave us good-bye, I’d decided, and it would humiliate him into staying. But he hadn’t turned.

As he walked toward the taxi with that ridiculously small suitcase, my father’s whole body leaned forward in terrible eagerness, as though he were a patient discharged from a hospital he never thought he’d live to leave.

When the taxi took off with a belch of black fumes, my mother moaned softly. It was an eerie, nonhuman sound. I felt it taking shape in my own throat, the way one wolf might as it watches another one howl.

It was my duty as a daughter to comfort my mother. A part of me longed to do it. But what could I say to a woman brought up on sayings like
The husband is God
? Whose elders had blessed her since childhood by saying,
May you never become a widow
. Who believed—as I, too, did on some unacknowledged level—that tragic though widowhood was, abandonment was worse.

I said to my mother, in my coldest voice, “For heaven’s sake, pull yourself together.” I turned on my heel and walked away.

I’M NOT SURE
how long I spend in the bathroom, staring at the cleaning supplies. By the time I come out, the family room’s surprisingly quiet. I peer around the corner, taking care not to be seen.

Bijoy’s fallen asleep in Dilip’s lap, limbs flung out in the uncaring absoluteness of sleeping children. The two men are watching him. From time to time they speak in whispers.

My father puts out his hand and rubs Bijoy’s foot. I know how it feels, the soft, unblemished sole, the budlike toes, the smooth fit of that ankle in the curve of a palm. What I haven’t counted on is how
I
feel, this swift welling of a joy I don’t fully understand.

My father is speaking slowly, slurredly, each word a stone placed on his tongue. “People do things, you know. They want something so badly, every minute feels like they’re being held down underwater. Then years later they look back and can’t believe they could ever have felt anything so strongly. . . .”

I’m suddenly furious. What he did, no amount of talk can make it right. He’d taken my mother’s life, precious and fragile as this silk I am wearing, and ripped it apart. And now he wanted the easy solace of confession.

I clatter down the passage, purposely loud. Maybe I’m afraid, too, not ready to hear something that might confuse my loyalties. So I busy myself with picking Bijoy up.

“I’ll put him in his crib and then go to bed myself,” I say. “I’m exhausted. I’ll clean up tomorrow. Good night.” I say all this very quickly, so that my father will not have a chance to complete what he started to say.

But as I carry Bijoy away, breathing in his milk-and-talcum smell, clean and uncomplicated, I hear him behind me.

“Except regret,” says my father.

SINCE BIJOY’S BIRTH
I’ve learned to wake at his first cry, to be at his crib before he can replenish his lungs. Sometimes I smile at the irony of it, I whom my mother used to tease about my love of sleep.

Tonight when Bijoy cries, Dilip says, “I’ll get up. It’s been a hard day for you.”

“No, thanks,” I say shortly. “You’ve done enough already.” I’m annoyed at how amiable my husband has been toward my father, and I want him to know it. Besides, I have no wish to give up these treasured night moments with my son.