The Unknown Errors of Our Lives (15 page)

A lot of women killed themselves after the Bombay riots. People were shocked, but not surprised.
For centuries of Indian women
, the editor of a Hindu newspaper wrote,
it has been the honorable way. Remember Queen Padmini of olden times, who, along with her attendant women, threw herself into the fire rather than become her Muslim captor’s concubine?

In modern Bombay, death by hanging, a noose made from a sari, was the most common. Those who had connections and money bought sleeping pills. A few women swam out into the ocean.

“She didn’t die,” Priya says, “luckily.” Her voice wavers over the word, unsure if it’s the right one. “Malik-ji must have felt terribly guilty, because he transferred the building to her name, yes, the whole thing, she owns it all, they say it’s worth a million and a half, maybe more. I think he really loves her, but of course he can’t divorce his first wife because of the children. Every Friday night he sends his limousine for her—oh, you must see it, I’ve heard it even has a TV and a fridge inside. And she’ll come down the steps in a silk sari and diamonds, with tuberoses in her hair, beautiful, but in a sad kind of way, like Jaya Bhaduri in
Silsila
, you remember? When she finds out that Amitabh has been having an affair with Rekha? You’ll see when you meet her. . . .”

My mother used to wear tuberoses. After my father died, she gave up the habit as a vanity. But she would place bowls of the slim, fragrant flowers on tables and windowsills, so that a visitor, coming in from the bustle of the city, would be faced with cool whiteness. When I allow myself to think of it, I like to believe that she was one of the women who swam out to sea.

“Just two more months left,” Priya says as she begins to wipe off her makeup, “for my wedding. He’s in India. My parents have set everything up. I’ve been saving all my money for the trousseau.”

My mother would have swum through the warm salt—we had done it many times together—her sari growing heavy with it. Maybe she would have loosened the cloth and let it drift from her so she could move more freely. The waves were silver, like flying fish. They bore her up, they sang in her ear. Behind her the charred mass of the city drifted away, terror and loss. Did she look back in the direction of our house?

“How about you?” asks Priya. “What are you saving for?”

I don’t reply.

“Never mind,” says Priya kindly, patting my shoulder. Her lips glisten like wet plums. “Things will work out. You’re so pretty, you’re sure to find a husband soon.”

THE TROUBLE STARTED
about a month after I arrived in Dallas, in my sister-in-law’s house. But there were signs earlier. Hushed consultations in the corners of parties, telephone conversations that turned innocuous when I entered the room. Appraising glances. Little questions here and there, sharp as ant bites.

“Mira, dear, what did you think of Mr. Advani, the man in the maroon Adidas T-shirt who brought us drinks—most attentive, wasn’t he?”

“Don’t you just love Ashok’s jokes, Mira? The one about the sardarji today—oh, I laughed so much I thought I would burst.”

“He was most attentive,” I would say. “That joke was hilarious.” Then I would go to my room.

On this day, just as we started dinner, my sister-in-law said, “Mira, you’ll never guess what happened this afternoon. Arpan Basu called your brother at work. He wants to marry you!”

She waited for excitement, delight, coy confusion at the very least—Arpan was eminently eligible; he owned his own company, something to do with bathroom cleaners.

“I don’t want to get married,” I said.

“Why not?” asked my sister-in-law. “So he has a slight receding-hairline problem. What does that matter when he’s so enthusiastic about the match?”

I didn’t reply.

“What, you think you’re too good for him, for all our friends?”

“Please—” said my brother.

“Ask your sister,” said my sister-in-law to my brother, “if she doesn’t want to get married, what
does
she want? Now if she had a brilliant career, instead a job selling pots and pans at Sears—”

“Please,” said my brother, putting his hand on her arm. “Don’t you remember how it was for you when you first came here? Mira’s been through a lot. She needs time.”

My sister-in-law bit her lip and was silent. When she spoke again, her voice was different. For just a moment it made me see that all our lives have depths which strangers can never chart. And that’s what we were to each other, strangers.

“Unfortunately,” she said, “time doesn’t wait for women to recover. Today the men are buzzing around Mira. Tomorrow, who knows?”

I watched them sitting across the table from me, a graying man, a woman tending toward plumpness. They meant well. How could I tell them that when I thought of a man touching me, I smelled the water tank: smoke and corroding metal. Below, the streets were filled with weeping, struggling women, their blouses ripped open, their bodies pinned down right there, on the pavement’s dirt. The mob yelling encouragement.

“A marriage might help her get over what happened,” my sister-in-law said.

THAT NIGHT IN
my room in my brother’s house I took down the atlas of the United States, opened it to the word that gleamed at the edge of the continent.
California
.

My mother and I had discussed California after my father’s death, when we received the first of my brother’s letters asking us to come stay with him. He included postcards from a trip they’d taken to Los Angeles: Hollywood, Universal Studios, a boardwalk somewhere with Ferris wheels against an unnaturally brilliant ocean. One particular card, titled
Mojave
, was all glinting rock and cactus.

“If I were a traveling kind of woman,” my mother had said, “I’d go one time, just to see California. They say there’s still gold in the deserts there. They say the beaches are more beautiful than ours in Bombay.”

We’d caught each other’s eye and laughed disbelievingly. Gold in desert sand? Beaches more beautiful than Bombay’s?

Now I closed the atlas and sank back against my pillow, its small comfort. Small comforts were all I had: a softness beneath my head, a place to go next.

All night as I slept for the last time in my brother’s house, California was the brightness that pulsed through the contracting chambers of my heart.

THE MORNING AFTER
Priya has told me her story, I see Malik’s second wife. I am about to go for a walk. She is emptying an apartment someone has moved out of, trying to pull a broken armchair through the doorway.

The sun is not yet up. The breeze is still cool. A hint of cloud floats like lace in the sky. Dressed in old sweats, a smudge of dust on her cheek, she is older than I am. By how much I can’t tell. Is she beautiful? I can’t tell that either. Already I’ve lost the distance you need in order to judge someone.

Because when she sees me she smiles crookedly, one side of her mouth quirking up a little, the way (is this memory or merely longing?) my mother once smiled.

I ask if she needs help, and she says, please. I hold the front door open so she can push the armchair out to the curb, only I miscalculate and let go too soon, and the door catches her wrist.

“It’s okay, no, really,” she says, over my apologies. “It doesn’t hurt.”

Later I’ll see the bruise, swelled purple over the wristbone. Even later, I’ll think of omens.

She takes me up to her apartment and makes me chai, boiled thick and red-brown and fragrant with cloves. To welcome me, she says. Pouring, she turns her wrist, and there it is, delicate and deadly as a bracelet sewn into her skin, the scar.

“My name is Radhika,” says Malik’s second wife, handing me a thin, gold-edged cup.

“Mine is Mira.”

Over soft tea steam we smile at our shared, ironic legacy, both of us named after women of myth, women whose lives men had tried to ruin.

THIS FRIDAY AFTERNOON
I sit on a chair in Radhika’s kitchen and feel the sun seep into my bones like the jabakusum oil she is rubbing into my hair. The room is filled with a sweet, sleepy smell out of my childhood. Her fingers make little circles on my scalp. They trace the small dip behind each earlobe.

I moved in here a week ago. Priya had gone back to India to get married, and a new family needed her apartment. Radhika had been asked to find me a room with someone else, but instead she said, “Why don’t you stay with me? I have more space than I need.” It had felt so right that I hadn’t even needed to ask if she were sure.

“Next page,” she says.

I’m holding a book in my lap, a big library book with a blue-and-gold cover titled
The Great Deserts of the American West
. I read, “The blooming season for cacti is very short, a few weeks at most in the spring. But during this time the barren and sere landscape is transformed by the vibrant coronets of hedgehog cactus, candy cactus and prickly pear that push out through the plants’ spiny armament.”

We do this a lot, look at books together. Radhika is hesitant in English, so usually I am the reader. But she is the interpreter of details I would have passed over.

“Look,” she says, pointing at a picture, and I see how, after their brief flowering, only thorns are left on the plants. I don’t know much about cacti; I have always imagined their thorns to be stinging, poisonous. But in this photograph the evening light has caught their fineness so that they shine, exalted, like the hair of infants.

I want to say something to Radhika about the unexpected, redemptive beauty of the world, but the phone rings.

“Yes?” she says.

I can hear the voice inside the receiver, tinnily obsequious. “Malik-ji will be sending the car eight
P.M.
sharp this evening, as usual, madam. Please to be ready downstairs.”

Radhika’s fingers tighten on the receiver. But no. I am mistaken. Her tone is as calm as always when she says, “Tell him sorry, I’m not well today.” When the voice, sounding unhappy, protests that Malik-ji will be bahut-bahut upset, she repeats the sentence patiently, as though to a child. Then she hangs up.

The silence bristles between us like a live wire. In the months we’ve known each other, she has talked of many things—but not Malik, or the Fridays when his limousine glides up silent as some submarine creature to the curb and opens its hinged jaw.

I know what I should ask now.
Why did you
? A question which ebbs like a wave back to that day at a village wedding when she grew aware of a man’s desirous eyes. A question which gathers itself to sweep forward to the hour when she opened a tap, mixed the warm and cold right, so it wouldn’t hurt, held the wrist just so under the gush of it.
Why did you
? A question that breaks over this moment now, the cool danger of her voice saying
no
, what it might mean.

But I’m afraid to ask. I’ve lost so much already. Besides, what would I say if someone knew to ask
me
why? As in
Why didn’t you insist that your mother remain with you that day on the terrace?

Radhika’s fingers are back in my hair, their circling unhurried, as though there had been no interruption. She nudges me with her hip. “Go on,” she says, saving me, and thankfully I turn the page.

AJIT IS A
regular at our restaurant. He used to come once in a while, but recently it’s every week, sometimes two or even three times. Which surprises me, because he’s not the kind of Indian man the place attracts. Our men are usually middle-aged, balding, a little down at the heel. H-1 visa holders whose shoulders slump under the hopes of wives and children waiting back in the home country. Who want a down-home meal that doesn’t cost too much and like to order the specials. (The younger Indians, the ones who want to impress their American girlfriends, go to Khyber Palace down the street, where they have Indian karaoke and disco bhangra on Saturday nights.) Ajit’s shoes are laced and eagerly polished, his shirts are the button-down kind with all the buttons firmly sewed on. And though he doesn’t have on a jacket or a tie, I get the feeling he’s just taken them off and placed them, carefully folded, on the passenger seat of his car. There’s a certain trustfulness about him that makes it clear he has never lived anywhere except America.

What I like about Ajit is the way he seems to be at home in a room full of people who are nothing like him. Perhaps he isn’t aware of how different he is from us? He jokes with the waiters—he’s wildly popular with them, and not just for the substantial tips he leaves behind—watches the other customers with unabashed curiosity, eats with gusto. Even Malik, the one time he dropped by, patted his shoulder and said, “Ah, Ajit, just the person I wanted to see!” He brought him up to the register and introduced us. “This is our Mira, a college graduate, just like you. Sharp as a needle. Hang around her and you’ll learn everything you want to know about India.”

I gave him a sharp-as-a-needle glance. Was he being sarcastic? If he was, it escaped Ajit. Or perhaps he was the kind of person sarcasm couldn’t touch. He shook my hand with a wide-open smile and said, “Delighted,” like he meant it.

Since then Ajit has taken to stopping at the register to chat before he leaves. I am a little astonished at his frankness. Are all second-generation Indians like this? Already I know that he’s in finance, that he’s been out here for two years working for a small start-up company. His mother is a schoolteacher and his father an engineer back in the little midwestern town where he grew up. He gets lonely for them sometimes, but thinks California is wildly exciting, mostly because of all the different kinds of South Asians he has been meeting. He doesn’t have a girlfriend yet, but is hopeful. When he leaves with a cheery “Take care!” I stare after him in envy.

IN HIS LETTERS
my brother asks if I like it here, if people are kind to me. My sister-in-law adds, Is the weather better than Texas? Have you been down to San Francisco yet? Now that you’ve settled down, what are your future plans?

I consider replying that I’ve found someone with whom to read books, who is more than kind. I think of different words to describe Radhika: friend, sister, mother. (But none of them are right.) The weather is humid and exasperatingly un-Californian. (But to admit this would be a defeat.) As for San Francisco and my future, I have left them both alone. I am happy with what I have: a brief reprieve in which I can float without thought, as in a warm bath. (Then I’m ashamed: I should have been more industrious and taken a day-trip on the Golden State Bus Line; I should have enrolled for a course at the University of California Extension.)