The Unknown Errors of Our Lives (10 page)

Now I bend over Bijoy’s crib, thinking how easily my body assumes this familiar stoop, how easily an old tune out of my childhood,
Chhele ghumolo, para jurolo, Baby sleeps, the neighborhood is peaceful at last
, hums itself from my throat. I stroke my son out of his nightmare and into sleep again, until his muscles soften under my hand.

I want one of my mother’s sayings, something that will encapsulate this moment of parenthood in its exact glow, but what comes to me is quite different.

I HAVE PRESENTED
myself inaccurately as the lone connoisseur of Shakespeare in my family.

Long ago, before a husband’s desires and a child’s needs usurped her life, my mother had gone to college. Like me, she had studied English, though she had quit uncomplainingly, good daughter that she was, when it was time for her to marry.

I had forgotten this. Or perhaps, self-absorbed as children alone can be, I had never really believed that my mother had an existence of her own before I was born.

This is how I was reminded:

When our relatives knew that Father had left, they descended upon us in hordes, armed with sympathy and suggestions which made me smart for days. The worst was Ila Mashi, mother’s cousin. “How could you let him go?” she’d say. “
Now
what’s going to happen to you two? He hasn’t been sending money either, has he?” Or “Monisha should write him a letter begging him to come back, or at least to arrange for your green cards.”

I refused to give her the satisfaction of a response. But after she left, I’d berate my mother bitterly. Did she have no self-respect? No backbone? If I were her, I wouldn’t let Mashi into my house again.

“What to do,” Mother said. “Sometimes you have to forgive people.”

“Forgive!
Forgive
! Next you’ll be telling me you’ve forgiven my father for what he did.”

“I haven’t,” said my mother. “But I keep trying. I have to, more for you and me than for him.”

I wasn’t sure what she meant by that last part, but I didn’t like it. “Keep me out of it,” I said. “And let me tell you something. That man doesn’t deserve forgiveness.”

She’d stood up straight then and looked at me, earnest in her desire—the desire of all mothers, I know that now—to give her child something vital to navigate her life by.

“Give every man what he deserves,” said my mother, pulling the half-remembered words haltingly out of her youth, that time when everything had seemed graspable, “and who shall ’scape whipping.”

BIJOY SLEEPS CURLED
on his side, knees drawn up, hands tucked under his chin. Watching him, I marvel again at the uniqueness of it. Neither Dilip nor I sleep this way. Once Dilip told me that probably lots of babies did that, we were just too inexperienced to know. I nodded, but I wasn’t convinced. I knew my son was special.

I could stand here all night watching him, this child already with secrets to his life, dreaming things I’ll never know. But I think of having to face my father at breakfast. I’m going to need all the rest I can get. I cover Bijoy with his quilt and close the door.

That’s when I notice the light coming from the guest room.

No, I say to myself. No, Monisha. Let things be. But already I am walking down the corridor.

WHAT DO I
want as I walk to the room where my father lies sleepless?

The answer: I wish I knew.

I have a vague notion of confrontation, accusation, of perhaps tears. (His, not mine.) My head is congested with images I need him to see: my mother’s face, gaunt with sickness; the broker bringing strings of prospective buyers to the house; the day I sent the servants away because there was no more money; my hand setting the pyre alight, those jasmines burning.

All the things he walked away from, leaving them for me.

ONCE AGAIN I’VE
misjudged. My father is not tossing, guilt-ridden, on his bed of thorns. He’s asleep. He just hasn’t switched off the lamp.

I venture closer to see why. He’d been reading when sleep struck him down, so suddenly that he didn’t have a chance to remove his glasses or cover himself. The red cloth-bound book splayed by the pillow looks just like the holy texts mother used to read before she died.

There’s an irony in this somewhere, but as I try to figure it out, my eyes fall on my father’s face. How different it seems in repose, the tension melted out of it. I see that he’s been afraid of this trip as much as I have. Maybe that’s why he hasn’t removed the vase of jasmine from the bedside table but merely pushed it all the way to the edge.

The night has grown colder, and my father sleeps curled on his side with his knees drawn up. Denuded of fear, his face could be an adolescent’s, soft-chinned and self-willed.

And for a moment I’m looking into the core of my father’s existence, who he was. Is. The boy-prince I read of in the old tales, his face always turned toward adventure. The prince who never grew up, who, trapped by the mundane demands of a household, believed he could free himself with a single, graceful slash of his sword.

Not so different from me, slashing through life with anger as my weapon of choice, after all.

I lift the glasses from his face, shake out a blanket over him. I’m careful not to touch him. But his eyes flutter open. I hold my breath until I realize that he’s still mostly asleep. Even if he saw, it would only be a blur of white and red, my mother’s sari which I am wearing.

I lift the jasmines from the vase and hurry toward the door intent on escape.

Then I hear my father call out a sleep-softened word. Is it my mother’s name? Someone else’s? I wait for the prickly heat to rise up under my skin, but there’s just a slight tingling. When did the answer cease to matter as much?

It’s only a little thing. I cannot call it forgiveness.

My mother would have disagreed. She’d have said,
Ocean is nothing but water drop upon water drop
. And if I said, I don’t know if I’ll ever have more than this one drop to give, she’d have smiled.

My father sighs and turns, tucking his hands neatly, familiarly, under his chin.

I switch off the lamp and close the door. In my grasp the jasmine stems are tough and knuckled, like fingers. I think I will start collecting sayings of my own.
Invisible flowers spread greater fragrance. Home is where you move fluently through the dark
. In our bedroom Dilip is lying awake. When I reach him, I’ll begin to tell him about my mother. How she died. What she lived by.

It’s a story that has waited a long time.

WHEN HER WATER
breaks, Aparna is standing on a chair in the baby room, hanging up the ceramic flying-fish mobile Umesh and she had purchased the day before. As the wetness gushes out of her, warm and unpleasantly sticky, she notes for one wondering moment the instinctive reactions of her body—the panic drying her mouth, the legs clamping together as though by doing so they could prevent loss. Then terror takes over, sour and atavistic—just what she had been determined not to succumb to, all through the carefully planned months of doctors visits and iron pills and baby-care books and Lamaze classes. It floods her brain and she cannot think.

She drops the mobile and hears it hit the tile floor with a splintery crash. Somewhere in the back of her mind there is regret, but her body has suddenly grown clumsy, and all her energies must go into getting down from the chair. She negotiates the newly dangerous floor to the kitchen where Umesh is fixing an omelette just the way she likes it, with lots of onions and sliced green chilies. She can smell their crisp, buttery odor. She opens her mouth to say he’s the best husband—No, it’s something else she must tell him, only she can’t recall what.

But already he’s abandoned the omelette and rushed across the room.

“Aparna, sweetheart, are you okay? You look awfully pale.” And then, as she holds her stomach, the words still lost, “No, it can’t be! It’s only July—three weeks too early. Are you sure? Does it hurt?”

His face is so scrunched up with anxiety, his eyes so eloquent with guilt, she has to laugh. His fear lessens hers. She puts out her hand to him and the flood in her brain recedes, leaving only a few muddy patches behind. “I’m fine,” she says. “My water broke.”

She likes the way he fusses over her, making her lie down on the sofa, arranging pillows under her feet. Her long hair falls over the edge of the sofa, glossy and dramatic, hair that might belong to the heroine of a tragedy. Only this isn’t a tragedy, it’s the happiest event in their lives. Maybe it’s a comedy—the way, in his hurry, he misdials the hospital number, getting a Texaco instead. He’s sweating by the time he gets the labor ward, shouting into the phone. She smiles. In her mind she’s already making up the story she will tell her son.
Do you know what your father did, the day you were born?
She thinks of the hospital bag, has she packed everything the Lamaze instructor listed? Yes, even the sourballs she is supposed to suck on during labor—she picked them up on her last trip to the grocery, just in case. She feels pleased about that.

All through the ride to the hospital the sky is a scrubbed-clean, holiday blue, echoing the Niles lilies that fill the neighboring gardens. She allows her mind the luxury of wandering. Panic comes at her in waves, but she makes her body loose, the way a sea swimmer might, and feels it pass beneath her. How is it she’s never noticed all these roses, red and white and a golden yellow the same shade as the baby outfit that lies folded in tissue at the bottom of her hospital bag? She chose green sourballs, lime flavor. They make her mouth pucker in pleasant anticipation. The air is soft against her face, like a baby’s cheek.

Later she would wonder, was it better that way, not knowing when death looked over your shoulder? Was it better to confound its breath with the scent of roses? To take that perfect moment and squander it because you were sure you had a thousand more?

THEY’RE TALKING ABOUT
stocks, she can hear them quite clearly, although they’ve draped a curtain of sorts between her and them. Her gynecologist prefers the blue chip kind. IBM, he says as he starts cutting. The anesthesiologist, a young man with a jolly mustache who shook her hand before inserting the needle into her spine, disagrees. The thing is to invest in a good start-up before it goes public. “There’s a bunch of them right here in the Valley, right under our noses,” he says, and rattles off names.

“I hope you’re taking notes,” Aparna whispers with mock-seriousness to Umesh. “It’ll put the kid through college.” Then she shudders as the doctor slices into a particularly stubborn piece of tissue.

Umesh’s hands on her arm are slick with sweat. She can see the thin red traceries of veins in his eyes. He has been biting his lips ever since they said they’d have to operate, the baby’s heartbeats didn’t sound so good. She feels an illogical need to comfort him.

“Are you hurting?” he leans forward to ask. “Shall I ask them to do something about it?”

She shakes her head. Through all the pulling and cutting, her flesh being rent apart and then stitched together like old leather, there’s an amazing absence of pain. But the body knows, she thinks. You can’t fool the body. It knows what’s being done to it. At the right time, it will take revenge.

Now they’re laying the baby on her chest, the compact solidness of him, the face red and worried, like his father’s. But beautiful, not discolored and cone-shaped from being pushed out of the birth-tunnel as in the Lamaze videos, so that she feels a bit better about having the C-section. She thinks of the name she chose for him. Aashish. Blessing. Even though the spinal is wearing off and pain begins to flex its muscles, she holds on to that word.

Unlike the squalling infants in the birth videos she’s watched, her baby gazes at her with self-possession. She’s been told that newborns can’t focus, but she knows better. Her baby sees her, and likes what he sees. If only they would leave the two of them alone to get to know each other. But a uniformed somebody swoops him up out of her arms with foolish, clucking sounds. Umesh is saying something equally foolish about bringing him back when she’s rested. Can’t they see she’s quite rested and wants him
now
? She hates hospitals, she thinks with a sudden starburst of energy, always has. She can’t wait to get out of this one and never come back.

THE NIGHT SHE
returns home, Aparna wakes in the dark, early hours with a sentence running through her head.
I think of pain as the most faithful of my friends
. It takes her a while to place it. It’s from a diary, a woman writer she read in a long-ago class in early American literature. She didn’t trust that woman, forgot her name as soon as she could.

But now Aparna must admit she knows what the writer had meant. Pain is with Aparna constantly, lurking beneath the lavender-scented sheets of the king-size bed she and Aashish have taken over. Different from the ache she felt in the hospital, it gnaws at her like a giant rat.

“How lovely!” the visitors say. “Look at the roses in her cheeks! It’s wonderful to see someone so happy!”

She snaps at Umesh when he feels her hot, dry forehead and asks if he can get her something. When he calls, the doctor says pain is normal—just as normal as new fathers worrying too much.

She will conquer pain by ignoring it, Aparna resolves. For three shimmery days of learning to breast-feed Aashish, she focuses on the shape of him in the crook of her arm, the blunt tug of his gums on her swollen nipples. But one morning when she climbs out of bed to try to use the toilet, which is becoming increasingly difficult, she falls and cannot get up.

SHE WILL ALWAYS
remember the moment when she swims up out of delirium, which spreads around her like a bottomless lake, shining like mercury. It’s hard to focus her eyes, but driven by an unnamed fear she forces herself to do so. It’s evening. She’s in the hospital. In the very same room where she was before. Has all this in-between time been a dream, then? But the space next to her bed where the bassinet stood, against the cheerful peach wall, is empty.
Where’s my baby
, she screams,
what did you do with my baby?
The words come out as gurgles through the tubes in her nose and mouth. The nurse bends over her, so cow-faced in her ignorance that Aparna must shake some sense into her—until they tie down her hands and give her a shot.

Then Umesh is there, explaining that she was too ill to take care of Aashish, so he’s at a friend’s house while the doctors try to figure out what’s wrong with her. He understands her meaningless grunts and sobs. “Please don’t worry, we’ll all be fine,” he says, stroking the insides of her elbows, the thin ache of needles plunged in and taped over, until she stops trembling and her eyes don’t dart around as much. “Calm down, sweetheart, I’ll hold you till you sleep.” He tells her how well Aashish is doing, gaining weight every day, how he turns his head at sounds, how hard he can kick. She even smiles a little as she falls asleep in the middle of a question she wants to ask,
When can I go home
? In sleep she thinks she hears his murmured answer.
Soon, darling
. His voice is cool and breathable, like night mist. But when she wakes, she’s in the middle of the mercury lake. She flails her way up, there’s that gaping space by her bed again, and she screams.

APARNA HAS NEVER
been an angry person. It amazes her, therefore, when in the brief moments of clarity between panic and the dull cottony stupor of medication, she feels fury swelling her organs, as tangible as all the fluids her body has forgotten how to get rid of. She’s been here for two weeks now, with test after inconclusive test being run on her. Everything in this hospital enrages her. The gluey odor of the walls. The chalky liquid she has to choke down so machines can take a clearer picture of her insides. The pretty, polished faces of the young nurses who chose the obstetrics ward so they would have happy patients. Her gynecologist’s smile as he says they’ll soon have her good as new. Aparna wants to punch his teeth in. She wants a lawyer who’ll sue him for every stock he owns. She wants a hit man who’ll wipe that smile off the face of the earth.

When they tell her she has to have a second surgery, she cries in great, gulping sobs, letting the snot and tears mingle on her face. She’s too tired to wipe them away, and, besides, what’s the point? She’s ugly, she knows it, with her hair matted and smelly around her face. Ugly as sin, having to wear that hospital gown which exposes her backside. Having them hold her head when, periodically, she throws up bowlfuls of greenish scum. Having them clean her up afterward. That’s the worst, somehow, the dispassionate way in which a stranger’s hand moves over her body, doing its job. She’s defeated by pain, she finally admits it. That evening when Umesh comes to visit, she turns her head away and won’t look at the Polaroid photos he’s taken of Aashish being given his bath.

ALTHOUGH THE SURGERY
has been successful, and the intestinal adhesions that had caused all the problems have been removed, Aparna’s recovery is not going well. They’re worried about it. She knows this from the flurries of whispers when the doctors come to see her each day. There’s a whole team of them, her gynecologist, the surgeon who performed the second surgery, an immunologist, and even a social worker, a gnatlike woman who has informed Aparna that she is one of her cases now. They poke and prod, examine her stitches and her charts, ask questions which she doesn’t answer. Until they walk away, she keeps her eyes tightly closed against them. This way, if she ever gets better and meets them, say, in a shopping mall, she won’t know who they are. She’ll walk right past them with the polite, powerful unconcern only a stranger is capable of.

Once she hears the night nurse talking to Umesh about her. This nurse is an older woman, not foolishly chirpy like the others. In her pre-hospital days, when she had energy for such things, Aparna would have equipped her with a complete, imagined life: She had lost her family, husband and all four children, in the Los Angeles earthquake, and moved to the Bay Area, where she now worked nights because she couldn’t stand to be home alone. Or perhaps she’d been in Vietnam and seen things the young nurses couldn’t even imagine. That’s why she watched them with that slightly sardonic expression as they cooed over their patients, bringing cranberry juice and tucking down comforters. But the present, eroded Aparna only knows that the night nurse is comfortable with death. She knows it from the way the nurse sometimes comes in after lights-out and massages Aparna’s feet, leaning there in a dark that smells thick and sticky, like hospital lotion, without speaking a single word.

But now, outside the door, the nurse is speaking to Umesh. “She’s lost the will to live,” she says in her dour, gravelly way.

“But why?” asks Umesh. His voice is high and bewildered, like a child’s. “How can she, when she has so much to live for?”

“It happens.”

“I won’t let it,” Umesh says angrily. “I won’t. There must be something I can do.”

Aparna listens with faint curiosity, the way one might to a TV soap playing in the next room. Does the wise nurse have a solution which will revitalize the dispirited young mother and unite her once more with her caring husband and helpless infant?

“You must—” says the nurse. But what he must do is drowned in the excited exclamations of a family who arrive just then in the room next to Aparna’s to view their newest member.

SHE SHOULD HAVE
known what they were planning. But the medication has turned her mind soft, like butter left out overnight, so that the things she wants to hold on to—questions and suspicions—sink into it and disappear. Still, she shouldn’t have been so utterly shocked when her friend walked in carrying Aashish.