The Unknown Errors of Our Lives (17 page)

In Ajit’s bed, no matter what I attempted, I remained myself, caught in my unresponsive flesh like the seed inside a hard, green mango. When finally he took my face in his hands and said, trying to mask his disappointment, “It’s okay, Mira, stop now. We’ll try again another day,” I closed my eyes, shamed by his generosity. I knew there wouldn’t be another day.

The water sends a welcome shock of heat through me as I climb in. I should be soaping myself clean, but I’m too tired. I lie there and watch the ripples of reflected light on white porcelain, on wet brown skin. In the stillness, it is easy to drift into other waters. Orange peels floating down, humid air that clogs the throat. When the knocking begins, I have to put a hand over my mouth to stifle my scream.

But it is only one of the downstairs girls. “Sorry to disturb you so early,” she says. “But I heard the water running, so I knew you were up. Do you know Radhika’s in the hospital?” She nods to confirm the question in my eyes. “Yes, another suicide attempt. Late last night, in Malik-ji’s apartment. She took his sleeping pills this time. Luckily they found her before it was too late. Listen, you better sit down, you don’t look so good. . . .”

THE WAITING ROOM
of the hospital is unbearably cheery with pastel printed sofas and posters of baby animals peering from behind unlikely objects. I sit on a bench out in the corridor, taking comfort in its plain hardness, in the way my back begins to ache after a while. Sooner or later they must allow visitors to see Radhika.

“Are you family?” the nurse had asked. I tried to say yes. But I’m only good at lying to myself.

“Sorry,” said the nurse.

Radhika must have called Malik late that night, saying she felt better. She asked him to send the limo, to meet her at his apartment, as they always did. After it was over and he left for his other home—his real home, the mansion up on the hills where his wife and sons slept—she must have done it then. She reached under the bathroom sink where he kept the pills, and smiled a bitter smile. She knew all his secrets now. She looked out the window at his Porsche, its ruby lights receding into fog—but she was the one who was leaving, who was gone already. Out of my life, taking the honorable way, enduring this final night with Malik so I wouldn’t have to be the one to find her body. She had planned it all—except that when she said to the limo driver, “Take me back to my apartment tomorrow, I’m too tired right now,” he had called Malik to check if that was all right.

AFTER THE GIRL
from downstairs had left, I went back into the bathroom. I let the water out of the tub and watched its downward spinning, at once lazy and urgent. I wiped my wet footprints and righted the wastebasket, picking the wadded sheets off the floor. On an impulse I smoothed them out.

There were three of them. One said,
Mira
. . . One said,
I never expected
. . . The last was a poem of sorts.

In the desert of my heart,

you, cactus flower,

blooming without thorn.

When she wrote those words, I was dancing. I twirled on tiptoe, making myself tall. My hair wild with abandonment, I let Ajit pull me into his chest, into the possibilities of my new American life.

I THINK NOTHING
of the footsteps, muffled on hospital carpeting, until they stop in front of me. Then I look up and it is Malik. His eyes are swollen and I see, with wonder, that he’s been weeping. When he speaks to me, the words glow with hate.

“We were happy until you got here, until you put your sick ideas into her head. I should have gotten rid of you right at the first, when she started acting different. But I didn’t—wouldn’t—believe that she could . . .” A spasm shakes him and he looks away. When he turns back, his voice is cool and serrated. “I’m giving you twenty-four hours to leave.”

I watch him as he walks down the hallway, his right leg dragging a little in a limp I had never noticed. It comes to me that the stories about him are true. But I am too full of other emotions to feel fear. How ironic that of the three of us, he was the one to first smell the change in the air. He brought Ajit over to the cash register, he made the manager give me the evening off for my date.
Maybe that’s what she needs
. I had thought, naively, that he was talking about me. But he was talking about the woman he loved in spite of himself, the one person who had shown him how, while you tighten your fist around a life, the heart can slip away.

IT TAKES ME
only an hour to pack my belongings. I should leave for the bank now, get out what little money I have. Then the Greyhound station, where I need to check the schedule, decide on my destination. Instead I wander through the apartment, touching a table mat Radhika painted, the roses—now dying—that she arranged in a brass vase. I think how I’ve turned out to be all that I dreamed of on the bus—burning wind, bramble bush, things that scorch and scrape. But none of them is what I imagined. It had not struck me that a lit fuse must burn itself first, before setting the world on fire.

Finally, because I must, I go into Radhika’s bedroom.

Radhika’s room reflects her neatness. The bedspread is creaseless, the photos of her parents hang straight and level with each other. Even last night, after getting ready, when there was no longer any need, she had put everything back in its place. Face powder, deodorant, perfume, hair oil. They stand lined up on her dresser, precise, giving nothing away. Comb, brush, filigreed hand mirror. Kumkum powder in a silver box. I pick each one up, try to think what she had thought. Then I see the book.

Splayed at the far end of the dresser, it is the only thing that is out of place.
The Great Deserts of the American West
, turned to the picture where the miner squinches her eyes against the glare of sun on sand.

I carry the book to Radhika’s bed. When I lay my head on her pillow, it seems I smell her hair.

Down at the Greyhound station, the drivers are starting the engines, lifting their feet off the brakes. The buses begin to roll down the highway, each taking you to a different destiny.

Did the woman in the photo take a bus the day she moved to the hills? How many people had spoken to her in my sister-in-law’s voice, saying what she was doing, it just wasn’t right, wasn’t natural?

She would have shrugged her shoulders, turned her face a little. Maybe she smiled that small, secret smile.

Who is to say? If a woman finds joy in the spare, pared flesh of the desert, if she finds joy in another woman’s sand-brown body, who is to say?

There are so many words I’m searching for, I who had stopped believing in their possibility. In the hospital, as I slip past the nurse’s station, as I look in each room for Radhika, I hope some of them will come to me. She will turn her head away; her earring will glint like an evaporation of dew. But this time around, I’ve learned insistence. On the long bus ride south, and later, in sand and rock, among the fierce momentary blooming of cacti, I’ll lean my head into her shoulder. I’ll run my fingers over her scar the way one reads Braille. Perhaps I’ll find them there, the words for my night with Ajit. The water tank. The women swimming out into the Bombay ocean. For my mother, who also believed that to save the one you love, you have to give up your own life.

On the way out, I glance at the book, the miner holding out her cupped palm, daring us to decipher what in it is sand, and what gold. I decide I know whom she is smiling at. It is her lover, the woman whose shadow has entered the photograph, and in doing so shifted the balance of light.

RUCHIRA IS PACKING
when she discovers the notebook in a dusty alcove of her apartment. It is sandwiched between a high school group photo in which she smiles tensely at the camera, her hair hacked short around her ears in a style that was popular that year, and a box of brittle letters, the sheets tinged with blue and smelling faintly of sweet betel nut, from her grandmother, who is now dead. For a moment she fingers the book’s limp purple cover, its squished spiral binding, and wonders what’s inside, it’s been that long since she wrote in it. Then she remembers. Of course! It’s her book of errors, from her midteens, a time she thinks back on now as her Earnest Period.

She imagines telling Biren about it. “I was a gawky girl with a mouth full of braces and a head full of ideas for self-improvement.”

“And then?” he would ask.

“Then I turned twenty-six, and decided I was perfect just the way I was.”

In response, Biren would laugh his silent laugh, which began at the upturned outer edges of his eyes and rippled through him like wind on water. He was the only person she knew who laughed like that, soundlessly, offering his whole body to the act. It made her heart feel like a popcorn popper where all the kernels have burst into neon yellow. She’d respond with a small smile, the kind she hoped made her appear alluring and secretive, but inside she’d be weak with gratitude that he found her so funny.

That, and the way he looked at her paintings. Because otherwise she doesn’t think she could have agreed to marry him.

TO THINK THAT
none of this would have happened, that she wouldn’t be sitting here this beautiful rainy morning, pale blue like jacarandas, packing, getting ready to move out of her Berkeley apartment into their newlywed condo in San Francisco in two weeks, if she hadn’t mumbled an ungracious agreement when her mother said, “Why don’t you meet him, Ru? Kamala Mashi writes so highly of him. Meet him once and see how you like each other.” Ruchira shudders when she realizes how close she had come to saying No, she wasn’t interested, she’d rather use the time to go to Lashay’s and get her hair done. Just because Aunt Kamala had written,
Not only is the boy just two years older than our Ruchira and handsome looking, 173 centimeters tall, and holds a fast-rising job in the renowned Charles Schwab financial company, he is also a nephew of the Boses of Tullygunge—you recall them, a fine, upright family—and to top it all he has intelligently decided to follow our time-tested traditions in his search for a bride
. It would have been the worst error of her life, and she wouldn’t even have known it. It saddens her to think of all the errors people make (she has been musing over such things lately)—the unknown errors of their lives, the ones they can never put down in a book and are therefore doomed to repeat.

But she had shown up at the Café Trieste, sullen in old blue jeans and a severe ponytail that yanked her eyebrows into a skeptic arch, and met Biren, and been charmed.

“It’s because you were so wary, even more than me,” she told him later. “You’d been reading—wasn’t it one of those depressingly high-minded Russians?”

“Dostoyevsky. Brought along for the precise purpose of impressing you.”

“And for the first fifteen minutes of our conversation, you kept your finger in the book, marking your place, as though you couldn’t wait to get back to it.”

“You mean it wasn’t my suave Johnny Depp looks that got you? I’m disappointed.”

“Dream on,” she said, and gave him a little push. Actually, she’d been rather taken by the stud he wore in his ear. Its small, beckoning glint in the smoke-fogged café had made him seem foreign and dangerous, set him apart from the Indian men she knew, at least the ones who would have agreed to meet a daughter-of-a-friend-of-a-distant-relative for late-afternoon coffee with matrimony in mind. But most of all she liked that he admitted up front to feeling sheepish, sitting like this in a café after having declared, for all those arrogant years (just as she had), that
he’d
never have anything to do with an arranged marriage.

“But the alternative—it doesn’t seem to work that well, does it?” he would say later, shrugging, and she’d agree, thinking back on all the boys she had dated in college, Indian boys and white boys and black boys and even, once, a young man from Bolivia with green eyes. At a certain point they had all wanted something from her, she didn’t know what it was exactly, only that she hadn’t been willing—or able—to give it. It wasn’t just the sex, though that too she’d shied away from. What throwback gene was it that stopped her, a girl born in America? What cautionary spore released by her grandmother over her cradle when Ruchira’s parents took her to India? Sooner or later, the boyfriends fell away. She saw them as though through the wrong end of a telescope, their faces urgent or surly, mouthing words she could no longer hear.

THUMBING THROUGH HER
book of errors, Ruchira thinks this must be one of life’s most Machiavellian revenges: one day you look back at your teenage self and realize exactly how excruciatingly clueless you were, more so even than you had thought your parents to be. And pompous to boot. Here, for example, is the quotation she’d copied out in her tight, painstaking handwriting:
An unexamined life is not worth living
. As if a fourteen-year-old had any idea of what an examined life was. The notion of tracking errors possesses some merit, except that
her
errors were so puerile, so everygirl. The time she told Marta that she thought Kevin was cute, only to have that information relayed back to her, with crude anatomical elaborations, from the walls of the girls’ bathroom. The time she drank too many rum-and-cokes at Susie’s party and threw up on the living room carpet. The time she believed Dr. Vikram, who wore maroon suspenders and gave her a summer job in his dental office, to be so cool—and then he made a groping pass at her.

She tosses the purple notebook onto the growing pile of things to be recycled. (Recycling mistakes, now that’s a thought!) She’s come to terms with misjudgments and slippages, she’s resigned to the fact that they’ll always be a part of her life. If there are errorless people in the world, she doesn’t want to know them. She’s certain they’ll be eminently disagreeable. That’s something else she likes about Biren—all the mistakes he has already admitted to. How he dropped out of college for a semester during his freshman year to play electric guitar with a band aptly named The Disasters. How late one night, coming back to the city from Sausalito, he gave a ride to a hitchhiker of indeterminate sex only to have him/her try to throw him/herself from the car and off the Golden Gate bridge. How, for a short time last year, he got involved with a woman who had a knife tattooed on her chest, even though he knew she did drugs.

Ruchira was shocked and enthralled. She wasn’t sure why he was telling her all this. To impress her? To start clean? To gain her (or was it his own) forgiveness? Small disquiets nipped at the edge of her mind like minnows; she let them slip away. Questions filled her mouth. What had he lost by jilting Tina Turner for Standard and Poor? What had he said to the hitchhiker to stop her—Ruchira was sure it was a woman—from jumping? (He
had
tried to stop her, hadn’t he?) What made him break up, finally, with the knife-woman?

She pushed the questions into a corner of her cheek like hard candy, saving them for later. Meanwhile, he was the most exciting man she knew. His was a geography of suicide bridges and tattoo parlors, night concert alleys and skyscrapers rising into the sky like blocks of black ice. A galaxy far, far away from the blandness of auto-malls and AMC cinemas which she’d never really escaped, not even by moving from her parents’ suburban house to Berkeley. But now conjugality would confer that same excitement on her.

HE SAW THE
paintings when he came to pick her up for a concert. They’d discovered a common interest in classical Indian music, and Chaurasia was playing at the Zellerbach. She had not intended for him to come up to the apartment—she felt she didn’t know him well enough. She was going to meet him downstairs when he rang the buzzer. But one of the other tenants must have let him in because here he was, knocking on her door. For a panicked moment she thought of not opening it, pretending she wasn’t there, calling him later with a fabricated disaster.

He was severely suave in a jacket with a European cut and, although the sun had set already, dark glasses in which she could see herself, convex and bulbous-headed. She felt mortified. Behind her, she knew, paint rags were strewn across the floor. A cereal bowl left by the armchair, swollen flecks of bran drowning in bluish milk. A half-eaten packet of Cheetos on the counter. Jelly jars of turpentine with brushes soaking in them on the coffee table. The canvas she’d been working on (and which was totally wrong, she knew it already) was the only thing she’d managed to put away.

“Very nice,” he said, lightly touching the sleeve of her short black cocktail dress. But already he was looking beyond her at the canvases hanging on the wall.

“You didn’t tell me you paint,” he said accusingly.

This was true. She had told him a lot of things about herself, but they were all carefully chosen to be shielding and secondary. Her work as events coordinator in an art gallery, which she liked because the people she met had such intense opinions, mostly about other people’s art. Her favorite college class, “Myth and Literature” in junior year, which she had picked quite by chance because “Interpersonal Communication” was full. The trip she took two winters back to New Zealand to stay for a few nights in a Maori village—only to discover that it had water beds in the more expensive rooms and a Jacuzzi strategically positioned among the lava rocks. She felt bad now about her duplicity, her reluctance to give of herself, that old spiral with her boyfriends starting again.

He’d moved close to the wall and was standing very still. It took her a moment to figure out that he was examining her brushstrokes. (But only artists did that. Was he a closet artist, too?) Finally he moved back and let out a long, incredulous breath, and it struck her that she had been holding hers as well. “Tell me about your work,” he said.

This was hard. She had started painting two years ago, and had never talked to anyone about it. Even her parents didn’t know. When they came for dinner, she removed the canvases from the wall and hid them in her closet. She sprayed the room with Eucalyptus Mist and lit incense sticks so they wouldn’t smell the turpentine. The act of painting was the first really risky thing she had done in her life. Being at the gallery, she knew how different her work was from everything in there, or in the glossy art journals. Her technique was crude—she hadn’t taken classes and didn’t intend to. She would probably never amount to much. Still, she came back from work every evening and painted furiously. She worked late into the night, light-headed with the effort to remember. She stopped inviting people over. She made excuses when her friends wanted her to go out. She had to force herself to return their calls, and often she didn’t. She ruined canvas after canvas, slashed them in frustration and threw them into the Dumpster behind the building. She wept till she saw a blurry brightness, like sunspots, wherever she looked. Then, miraculously, she got better. Sometimes now, at 2.00
A.M.
, or 3:00, her back muscles tight and burning, a stillness would rise around her, warm and vaporous. Held within it, she would hear, word for word, the stories her grandmother used to tell.

Ruchira has seen her grandmother no more than a dozen times in her life, once every two or three years during summer vacation, when her parents visited India. She loves her more than she loves anyone else, more than her parents. She knows this to be unfair; they are good parents and have always done the best they can for her in their earnest, Quaker Oatmeal way. She had struggled through the Bengali alphabet, submitting to years of classes at that horrible weekend school run by bulge-eyed Mrs. Duttagupta, just so she would be able to read her grandmother’s letters and reply to them without asking her parents to intervene. When a letter arrived from India, she slept with it for nights, a faint crackling under her pillow. When she had trouble making up her mind about something, she asked herself, What would Thakuma do? Ah, the flawed logic of loving! Surprisingly, it helped her, although she was continents and generations apart, in a world whose values must have been unimaginable to a woman who had been married at sixteen and widowed at twenty-four, and who had only left Calcutta once in her entire life for a pilgrimage to Badrinath with the members of her Geeta group.

Someday she plans to tell Biren all this.

When her grandmother died two summers back of a heart attack, Ruchira spent an entire week in bed. She refused to go to India for the funeral, though maybe she should have, because she dreamed over and over what she had thought she couldn’t bear to look at. The hard orange thrust of the flames of the cremation pyre, the hair going first, in a short, manic burst of light, the skin warping like wood, the eyeballs melting, her grandmother’s face blackening and collapsing in on itself with terrible finality. It didn’t help that her parents told her that the event, which occurred in a modern crematorium rather than the traditional burning ghats, was quick and sanitary and invisible.