The Unknown Errors of Our Lives (21 page)

THREE YEARS AFTER
her marriage. Five years after her father’s death. That was when the daughter finally managed to persuade her mother to come and visit her. But from the first it was a mistake. Her mother, an inviolable presence in the village, moving galleon-like inside the voluminous white yardage of her widow’s sari, had turned fearful and querulous in America. Things the daughter saw as inconsequential—the burglar alarm, the answering machine, the knobs on the dishwasher—loomed like huge, barbed obstacles on her daily horizon.

They fought about silly things—how to make a cauliflower curry, what is better for hair, shampoo-and-conditioner or coconut-oil-and-ritha pulp. They argued bitterly about events from years back. Her mother claimed she had taken the daughter to the Alipore zoo on a particular birthday, waking early to fry luchis for lunch, taking the train all the way to Calcutta. The daughter remembered none of it. She insinuated that her parents had never engaged in fun activities as a family. Fun! her mother scoffed. What a foolish American notion! Families were not for fun. They were for feeding and clothing and teaching children, so that they would, in turn, be adequately equipped to feed and clothe and teach
their
children. At the ends of these arguments, one or the other of them would flounce from the room on the verge of tears.

I can’t believe we’re behaving like this, fighting over such trivial things, the daughter told her husband at night in vexed disbelief. It’s like she’s turned me into a child again. But of course what they were fighting about was not trivial—it was an entire geography (real and imagined), endangered by the knowledge of new things, by the transformation of desire.

Her husband listened attentively, fixing her with his dark, calm gaze (he had not inherited his mother’s blue eyes, which would surface only in his children). He was sympathetic, and often drove his mother-in-law to the homes of other Bengalis with older relatives. Otherwise, he wisely refrained from offering advice. Born in America, what could he have said, anyway? His filial duties were few, and geometric in their clarity. His parents lived forty miles away in their own home. They were both in good health and drove themselves wherever they needed to go: the grocery, the Rotary Club, concerts at the Julia Morgan Theater. They had already picked out a senior citizens’ facility they both liked, within walking distance of the beach, in Santa Cruz. He and his wife met them each Sunday for brunch at Mumtaz, which offered an excellent but not too spicy Indian buffet, but if something else came up, his parents didn’t mind rescheduling. Even his father, who in recent years had reverted to a number of Indian habits, such as not wearing shoes in the house and eating rice with his fingers, was relaxed that way.

Coming home from work, the daughter would, each day, call out to her mother. One day there was no answer. Concerned, she ran up to the guest room and found her mother lying on her side, eyes closed, breathing shallowly. The skin on her face, leached of its usual almond sheen, was puffy and whitish, like the skin of an ocean creature that has been removed from its habitat. The daughter put her hand on her mother’s feet. They were very cold. Mother, she called again, this time in fear. Her father had died like this, turning on to his side one afternoon after lunch, a year after she left for America. Mother! Finally, without opening her eyes, her mother said, Khuku, send me home.

The daughter sat by her mother for a long time, massaging her feet. They did not talk, though they wept a little. They were coming to terms with erosion, how it changes the balance of a landscape. Perhaps it was something all parents and children undergo as they grow older. But in their case, they had stepped into a time machine named immigration, and when they fell from its ferocious spinning, it was into the alien habits of a world they had imagined imperfectly. In this world, they could not inhabit a house together, in the old way. They could not be mother and daughter in that way again.

THE CHILDREN’S FATHER
has, miraculously, arrived. But how did he find his way from the Calcutta airport to this village, which, though loved by its inhabitants, is after all small and undistinguished? I gave a man some money to be my guide, he says. The visitors—the room is full of them, male and female, young and old, relatives and neighbors—suck in their collectively horrified breath. Durga! Durga! He could have been led astray and mugged, maybe even killed. Because in spite of his brown skin anyone could see he was a foreigner, with his pockets full of dollars. He nods, clearly not understanding, and smiles a trusting, foreigner smile.

The father is wearing loose white pants and a white kurta belonging to the great-uncle, a fact which fills the children with hilarity. There is a whole posse of them in the corner, his older son, the servant’s boy, a neighbor’s child, two girls belonging to his wife’s cousin-brother. They whisper breathlessly about how, when he received the telegram, he hadn’t taken the time to pack anything except two cases of 7-Up and three boxes of Nabisco saltine crackers (a baggage that has already begun to take on the status of legend) for his sick child. That’s why he’s wearing the great-uncle’s clothes, they explain to each other. They observe him with wide, wondering eyes as though he were a minor god.

The younger boy is much better now. He sits on his father’s lap and accepts the attention that is lavished on him like a prince who has been discovered while traveling incognito. When he looks up at the geckos on the wall, his eyes gleam a startling blue. In a few minutes he will squirm away to play Chu-kit-kit with the others, and a casual onlooker, gazing out on the courtyard, will not be able to tell his black head from theirs. Is his improvement due to his father’s presence, or to the 7-Up, several cans of which he has drunk already, or to the puja that has been performed in his name at the Durga temple? Each visitor has his or her own view on this, and expresses it loudly and simultaneously. There is, in the room, a general air of holiday, aided by the many cups of tea that have been consumed, along with a very hot chanachur mix made of fried lentils, flattened rice, and a combination of spices that is known only to the grandmother. The visitors exclaim with amazed pleasure at how the jamai (that’s what they all call him, jamai, son-in-law) munches this lethal snack like a born Bengali, how he pours his steaming tea into his saucer to cool it—just like they would have done, had they not been restrained by his presence.

The mother sits in a corner and observes all this with mingled happiness and chagrin. After all her worrying, how easy her husband is in her childhood home. He has charmed the grandmother, she could see that when he rose to take from her hands the cup of tea she had brought for him. He dipped his head in a little bow—a gesture of old courtesy rarely seen nowadays, and the grandmother flushed with pleasure and said, Long life to you, baba. How intently he listens to the men, who discuss convoluted Calcutta politics, lapsing often into fist-pounding Bengali. How carefully he holds his son and strokes his cheek from time to time. A great and pleasant tiredness has come upon her, and she welcomes it. She could sleep for weeks—she
will
sleep for weeks, now that her husband is here. She feels—as she sometimes does after she has drunk a glass or two of good wine—that she is being borne up inside a rainbow-colored bubble from which she can sense, only remotely, the vibrations of activity around her.

Then her husband turns to her and says, It’s such a nice evening, you’ve been shut up in the house so long, why don’t you go with your cousin for a spin on his scooter?

BY THE TIME
they finally get away, after the children have been appeased by being taken for rides around the pond, the sun has dwindled to a few slivers of light among the bamboo. But never fear, the cousin-brother informs her. He has a head lamp. And off they go with a roar, raising more dust than an entire herd of cows.

Though the mother has, in her wild, premotherly past, been bungee-jumping and even skydiving, she has never had the occasion to ride on a scooter. She feels nervous and bashful as she sits sideways, the way the cousin has instructed, her feet precariously balanced on a tiny footrest, her sari tucked tight between her knees. She grips the back of his seat with both hands. The wind hits her face in great, cold sheets, making her eyes water. She is afraid that the shawl she has borrowed from her mother to drape around her shoulders will fly off and be lost. There are ruts in the road. Whenever they hit one, which is often, the scooter bounces up, then lands with a thump that jars her backbone. But she is enjoying this, an adventure she didn’t plan for. She wants to say something about its serendipitous charm, but how can anyone think in all this exuberance of noise and dust and mongrels chasing after them and children yelling and passers by staring in envious disapproval!

They have taken a route she does not know, a wide, tarmac road curving along the far circumference of the village. The cousin slows down and points at a structure. Tractor shop, she hears him announce above the sputtering of the scooter. Mine. She stares at a large, locked shed with an assortment of machines that hulk inside the wire fencing. Above, in bright red Bengali letters is written
JAI KALI TRACTOR FACTORY
. Are most of the fields cultivated by tractors now? she asks. He nods vigorously. But what happened to the buffaloes? He shrugs. His shrug implies that only those who come from Coca-Cola Land can afford to ask such esoteric questions. All the tractor owners in the area must come to him for maintenance, he goes on to explain with some pride. He’s the only game in town.

The mother remembers snippets of overheard conversation. This cousin had graduated from college only to find—like so many of his generation in Bengal—that there were no jobs for him. He had spent some months lounging on the verandal of the library building, where frustrated young men gathered to curse the corruption of political leaders. It is a tradition that still continues. Even during this visit, the mother has seen a group of men leaning against the lime-washed library wall, arguing and spitting expertly into the drain. The smoke from their beedis had hung around them, gray as an old mosquito net. How had her cousin broken out of that ring of hopelessness? She tries to recall heroic moments out of their childhood games which might help her understand his transformed life, but all she remembers is the time when a lizard had slithered up his foot and caused him to burst into tears. How does one remake oneself, she wants to know. It is a skill she has need of. But she cannot think of an appropriate way of asking this in Bengali.

It is dark now, and the scooter’s headlight throws a single beam along the road’s brown spine. They are passing mustard fields, she can tell by the pungent odor. The smells of childhood stay with you all your life. Now the deep pink fragrance of madhabi flowers. They must be near the ruins of the Radha-Krishna temple. Now the dense, distinctive smell of manure, which signals a cow barn. She has brought her children halfway across the world to teach them these smells. But for them childhood will probably mean the scent of pepperoni pizza.

The village is changing, the cousin says. You must not think we live like simpletons. Every night my wife and I watch national news on the Door Darshan channel. We know about America, too. O. J. Simpson, Madonna, Monica Lewinsky. How your president sent bombers to the Gulf. The mother tries to figure out if he is chiding her, but his voice is friendly, informational. His hair smells familiar. It takes her a moment to recall the brand, Dabur Amla, the same medicinal oil her father used. Look, he says, here is a new go-down, refrigerated so stored crops will not rot in the monsoon. It has its own generator, in case of power failure. The mother looks obediently at the long, ugly concrete structure, lit at both ends by naked bulbs. A watchman, his nose and mouth wrapped in a faded plaid muffler, sits on a stool, dozing. Her eyes swim away toward the stars. They are a pale yellow, like sprinkled sandalwood powder. Her father used to know their names.
Ashwini, Bharani, Kritika, Rohini
. He had tried to teach her, but she was too busy trying to leave. A night fog is rising from the ground, so that they seem to be traveling between earth and sky. Above the phut-phut of the scooter, she thinks she hears the musky call of foxes. Why should the sound fill her with such elation? When her father died, her mother packed his books into a green trunk filled with mothballs and had it carried into the storage space under the staircase. Maybe there’s a book in there, listing the names of stars in Bengali and explaining how to identify them, which she can read to her husband and children. As soon as she gets home, she will ask her mother. She leans forward until her mouth is close to the cousin’s ear. Faster, she says. Faster.

PUBLISHED BY DOUBLEDAY

a division of Random House, Inc.

1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036

DOUBLEDAY
and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are trademarks of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.

The following stories have previously appeared and are reprinted by permission of the author:

“Mrs. Dutta Writes a Letter,”
The Atlantic Monthly,
1999 and
Best American Short Stories, 1999;
“The Forgotten Children,”
Sun,
1995 and
Gulf Coast,
2000; “The Love of a Good Man,”
Good Housekeeping,
1998; “The Blooming Season for Cacti,”
Zoetrope,
2000; “The Intelligence of Wild Things” (published as “Crossing”),
Weber Review,
1998; “The Unknown Errors of Our Lives,”
Prairie Schooner,
Spring 2001; “The Lives of Strangers,”
Agni,
April 2001.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Book design by Gretchen Achilles

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee, 1956—

The unknown errors of our lives : stories / by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni.—

p. cm.

Contents: Mrs. Dutta writes a letter—The intelligence of wild things—The lives of strangers—The love of a good man—What the body knows—The forgotten children—The blooming season for cacti—The unknown errors of our lives—The names of stars in Bengali.

1. United States—Social life and customs—20th century—Fiction. 2. India—Social life and customs—Fiction. 3. East Indian Americans—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3554.I86 U5 2001

813’.54—dc21

00-047509

Copyright © 2001 by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

All Rights Reserved

May 2001

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

eISBN: 978-1-4000-3279-2

v3.0