The Unknown Errors of Our Lives (13 page)

The next afternoon when we returned from school, Mother did as Lakshmi-aunty had instructed. We helped her with the homemade exorcism, chanting and sneezing as the acrid smoke rose from the pot and the mustard seeds began to sputter. We said nothing to Father.

For a while after that, there were no more disappearances. By the time they started again, Mother had worse problems to worry about.

FATHER HAD FALLEN
foul of the foreman. It wasn’t unexpected. At each of his jobs he found someone to hate, someone who, he believed, was out to get him. (Why does he always have to fight with people? my brother asked once. Mother sighed and said he always was a free spirit, he never did take kindly to being ordered around.) It was only a matter of time before the chance remark exploded into a fistfight or worse. In the last town he’d gashed an overseer’s arm with a broken bottle, and the police had taken him away for a while. Then we would be packing again, looking up railway timetables, deciding what to leave behind.

At dinner Father ate sullenly, muttering curses at the foreman, not noticing what kind of food Mother put in front of him. He held tightly to the neck of a bottle, raised it to his mouth in one glinting arc. Mother would rub his arm, a gesture which sometimes calmed him. From the table in the corner where we did our homework, we could see the muscles of her back through the thin fabric of her blouse, bunched with tension. Just try to avoid him, please, she’d whisper. Why don’t you ask for a transfer to another shift? Think of the children—they’re just beginning to settle down, to catch up in school. Times are so bad, what if you don’t find another job. You’re not getting any younger either. . . .

Some nights he would merely shake his head and say, You’re right, Mother, that whoremonger isn’t worth the spit out of my mouth. Or he would swat her entreating hands away, growling, Leave me alone, woman, don’t interfere in things you know nothing about. But there were those other nights. Bitch, we’d hear him bellow, and we’d melt into the moldy shadows under the porch. Here I am, killing myself to feed all of you, and all you do is nag at me. Sound of a slap, a pan clanking onto the floor, spilling the dal that was to have been our lunch tomorrow. A breathless grunt. We knew how it felt, that fist slammed into the side of the head, turning everything black for a moment. The kick against the ribs that left you knotted and gasping on the floor. And the pain. We knew about pain. How it rose like a wall of water and crashed over you. We gripped each other’s hands, afraid even to sob, hating ourselves for not trying to stop him. We held our breath and plunged into our other fantasy, the one we shared without ever having spoken it, where our father was dead, dead, dead.

I never asked Mother why she didn’t leave him, though I often wondered. Why didn’t she run away with us to her parents’ village? She sometimes described it wistfully as a peaceful cluster of huts under emerald coconut trees filled with singing birds. (I didn’t know then that she had eloped with Father and, in the traditional Indian scheme of things, had shut that door behind herself forever.) Was it that she feared Father was just too powerful? That wherever we went, he would smell us out, like the ogre in a fairy tale?

No. There was something else, which I couldn’t quite put into words. It had to do with my father’s broad shoulders, the muscles that rippled along his arms like playful snakes when he swung us up. The way he could make us feel safe even when we were high in the air. The way he could make us forget. Maybe it was the sun woven into his thick black hair, the fresh smell of ritha in it on holidays after Mother had washed it for him. He’d burst into snatches of song (he had once taken lessons, Mother said), his voice rising as unhesitant as light—
Mehbooba, Mehbooba, my dearest darling
—until it came up against the words he had forgotten. Then he’d throw himself at Mother’s feet like a hero out of a Hindi movie, arms flung out, until she couldn’t stop herself from laughing. Or he would come home with a package tied with the flat red string used by sari shops. He would gather her to him and thrust it into her hands. And while her trembling fingers tugged at the knots and a blush rose up from her throat (my mother was unusually fair, with skin that bruised easily), he would drop a kiss on the top of her head or play with the ends of her long braid.

Once when I woke late at night and went to the kitchen for a tumbler of water, I found them sitting at the table, their backs toward me. Perhaps it was one of those times when the electric company had cut off our power because we couldn’t pay, for there was a small kerosene lamp on the table between them.

Shanti, my father was saying in a small, choked voice, I’ve only made you unhappy. Sometimes I wish we’d never met. Or that I were dead. On the wall his shadow hunkered, anguished, against her slim silhouette. My very own Beauty and the Beast. Mother put her hand over his mouth, and her voice, too, was choked. Hush, Swapan (it was the first time I heard her call him by his name), don’t say that. How could I live on without you?

I tried to back away silently, but Father saw me. I couldn’t breathe. He would be furious now. I’d spoiled it all. But he held out an arm, and when I edged over, he sat me on his lap and stroked my hair. His hand was awkward with the unaccustomed motion and his calluses caught in my hair, but I didn’t want him to stop. Mother leaned her head against his shoulder. The planes of her face were angular and lovely in the flickering light. Her eyes were tightly shut, as though in prayer. I breathed in their blended odor—his Teen Patti tobacco, her sweet Neem soap—and in that way I came to know something of love, how complex it is, how filled with the need to believe.

WE CAME HOME
from school and the black trunk was in our bedroom. Its lid was open and some of our clothes had already been thrown inside. They formed small wadded lumps at the bottom of the box. When I looked at them, I wanted to cry.

We went to find Mother, who was in the kitchen emptying the rickety wire cabinet where she kept the spices.

We’re leaving day after tomorrow, she said. She didn’t offer any explanation and we didn’t ask. There were new lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth, as though someone had lifted the skin off her face, crumpled it, and then replaced it carelessly. We went back to our room, and I emptied out the trunk to pack it right, shoes and books at the bottom, clothes on top, folded into neat squares, like I knew from all those other times.

Come and help me, I said to my brother, but he lay on his mattress and stared at the cracks in the ceiling until it grew dark and the cicadas outside started their buzzing. He spoke only once, when I tried to pack his clothes. Don’t touch my things, he said. His voice was decisive in its viciousness, like a grownup’s.

When I woke in the morning, he was gone.

WHERE IS HE
? Father yelled again. Spittle from his mouth struck my cheek and I flinched, though I tried not to.

Leave the poor girl alone. Mother’s voice rose up from behind, startling me with its brittle, unusual loudness. Her hair, come undone from its neat knot, hung wild about her face, and her sari was splotched with mud from the ditch behind the house where she’d been searching, calling my brother’s name. There was an unmoored look in her eyes. She’s been telling you all day that she doesn’t know. Why don’t you bike down instead to the bus station in the bazaar and ask if anyone saw him?

I drew in a sharp breath and stiffened in readiness, but perhaps Father was as taken aback as I was. He got on his cycle and left.

Once my father’s silhouette, wavery black against the setting sun, disappeared around the bend, Mother slumped down on the kitchen floor. She did this jerkily, in stages, as if a series of springs inside her were snapping, one by one. Surrounded by the cheap aluminum pots and chipped dishes that summarized her life, she put her face in her hands and began to cry. It was a sound like cloth tearing. Not even the time when she had to go to the clinic to have her arm set had she cried like this. I went and put my arms around her. My chest felt as though it was tearing, too. I almost told her then.

Mother looked up as though she could sense my thoughts. She wasn’t crying anymore.

You know where he is, don’t you, she said. She caught me by the elbows. Please tell me, please. Her voice sounded as though it were pushing its way past something that had broken and stuck in her throat. I promise I won’t let your father do anything to him.

I bit down on my lips because I didn’t want to hurt her further. But I couldn’t stop myself. You always did before, I said. What’s so different about this time?

Something passed over Mother’s face. Was it sorrow, or a cloud of shame? She took a deep breath, as though preparing for an underwater journey, then cupped my face in her hands. Her nails were broken and dirt-caked, but her fingers were long and cool. I’ll protect my baby, she said quietly. I swear it on my dead mother’s soul.

I believed her then, although she hadn’t answered my question. Perhaps it was because she wasn’t a woman who promised lightly. Or because her face was so like my brother’s with those same straight eyebrows, the same scattering of moles across the cheekbones. The face I loved most in all the world, after his. Or because finally, with the tarry night pressing itself down on us, I accepted what I’d always known in some vanquished part of myself: Fantasies can’t really come true.

HE WAS WHERE I
thought he would be, huddled against the far corner of the crawl space my parents had missed in their perfunctory search of the servant’s quarter. (They hadn’t believed he would choose such an obvious place, so close to home, to hide in.) When I pushed away the cot and lifted the trapdoor, his eyes glinted, feral, in the beam from Mother’s flashlight. There were crumbs around his mouth from the biscuits he’d been eating. Around his shoulders was bunched the old blanket he’d secreted away a long time back, believing in imagination. I reached down to help him up, but he shrank from me, his face heavy with hate.

MOTHER CARRIED MY
brother all the way back to the house, although he was really too heavy for her, holding him close to her chest as one would an infant. She asked me to walk ahead with the flashlight, so I didn’t hear what she was murmuring to him, but by the time they were in the kitchen, he had stopped struggling. He even managed a small smile when Mother fixed us mashed rice and bananas with hot milk and sugar, which used to be his favorite meal when he was little.

We had just started eating when we heard Father. He made his way up the porch slowly and noisily, and once it sounded like he bumped into the wall. We froze, my brother and I at the table, the food halfway to our mouths, Mother at the counter where she had been chopping bananas. Then he was in the kitchen, the kicked-open door banging against the wall, the hulk of his shadow falling on the table between my brother and me. His huge voice filled me, the echoes booming outward until I thought I would split open.

I remember the rest only in fragments, black-and-white frames that appear even now without warning, branding themselves across my vision, forcing me to abandon whatever I’m doing. I’m going to kill you today, you little shit-eater. Heavy clunk of a belt being unbuckled. My brother runs for my mother. She must have thrust him behind her, because he’s gone and instead I see her hands, the fingers stiffly splayed, pushing against Father’s chest. Her mouth’s open, she’s shouting something, she’s on the floor. The belt moves through the air in a perfect, lazy arc. Now it’s a cobra, striking, the metal fang gashing my brother’s cheek just under his left eye, gouging out a piece of flesh, the blood exploding from what is left. A thin scream that goes on and on. Mother you promised you promised you . . . She pushes me out of her way, grasps the edge of the counter to pull herself up. Her hand closes around the knife. And now the voice is screaming again. I listen. I have no control over the voice, which I recognize vaguely as my own. Father turns. The belt buckle catches mother’s wrist. A crack, as of a stick snapping. I hear the knife clatter down, each metallic unit of sound clear and disparate. A sound, half whinny, half gasp, reeling back into itself. They must both be on the floor, grappling for it.

But I can’t tell what’s going on back there because I’ve turned to watch my brother, who is running, who has made it through the door and past the porch and out to the bamboo grove. The sheltering dark gathers him in—elbows and knees, hands, the back of his head. Only his shirt glows in the moonlight like the snow we had imagined together, then disappears as he steps into shadow, then glows more palely farther ahead. There are fireflies everywhere tonight, pinpoints of light blurring into a luminous ooze. Perhaps to disappear is the next best thing to being forgotten. Am I crying from happiness because he has escaped, if only for now? Or is it regret at that thin scream (my final error?) which shot from my mouth like an arrow of blood? Is it because I know I cannot join him? That in a moment I (my mother’s daughter, bound after all by her genes of mistimed loyalties) must turn toward whatever is behind me, wheezing wetly, trying to get to its feet? All I know is that this is how I will remember my brother: a patch of dwindling white (melting, melting) as the bamboos shiver close. As the fireflies hover above him with their frail, fitful light.