The Unknown Errors of Our Lives (3 page)

Today, just as she is about to turn away, out of the corner of her eye Mrs. Dutta notices a movement. At one of the windows a woman is standing, her hair a sleek gold like that of the TV heroines whose exploits baffle Mrs. Dutta when sometimes she tunes in to an afternoon serial. She is smoking a cigarette, and a curl of gray rises lazily, elegantly from her fingers. Mrs. Dutta is so happy to see another human being in the middle of her solitary day that she forgets how much she disapproves of smoking, especially in women. She lifts her hand in the gesture she has seen her grandchildren use to wave an eager hello.

The woman stares back at Mrs. Dutta. Her lips are a perfect-painted red, and when she raises her cigarette to her mouth, its tip glows like an animal’s eye. She does not wave back or smile. Perhaps she is not well? Mrs. Dutta feels sorry for her, alone in her illness in a silent house with only cigarettes for solace, and she wishes the etiquette of America had not prevented her from walking over with a word of cheer and a bowl of her fresh-cooked alu dum.

MRS. DUTTA RARELY
gets a chance to be alone with her son. In the morning he is in too much of a hurry even to drink the fragrant cardamom tea which she (remembering how as a child he would always beg for a sip from her cup) offers to make him. He doesn’t return until dinnertime, and afterward he must help the children with their homework, read the paper, hear the details of Shyamoli’s day, watch his favorite TV crime show in order to unwind, and take out the garbage. In between, for he is a solicitous son, he converses with Mrs. Dutta. In response to his questions she assures him that her arthritis is much better now; no, no, she’s not growing bored being at home all the time; she was everything she needs—Shyamoli has been so kind—but perhaps he could pick up a few aerograms on his way back tomorrow? She recites obediently for him an edited list of her day’s activities and smiles when he praises her cooking. But when he says, “Oh, well, time to turn in, another working day tomorrow,” she is racked by a vague pain, like hunger, in the region of her heart.

So it is with the delighted air of a child who has been offered an unexpected gift that she leaves her half-written letter to greet Sagar at the door today, a good hour before Shyamoli is due back. The children are busy in the family room doing homework and watching cartoons (mostly the latter, Mrs. Dutta suspects). But for once she doesn’t mind because they race in to give their father hurried hugs and then race back again. And she has him, her son, all to herself in a kitchen filled with the familiar, pungent odors of tamarind sauce and chopped coriander leaves.

“Khoka,” she says, calling him by the childhood name she hasn’t used in years, “I could fry you two-three hot-hot luchis, if you like.” As she waits for his reply she can feel, in the hollow of her throat, the rapid beat of her blood. And when he says yes, that would be very nice, she shuts her eyes and takes a deep breath, and it is as though merciful time has given her back her youth, that sweet, aching urgency of being needed again.

MRS. DUTTA IS
telling Sagar a story.

“When you were a child, how scared you were of injections! One time, when the government doctor came to give us compulsory typhoid shots, you locked yourself in the bathroom and refused to come out. Do you remember what your father finally did? He went into the garden and caught a lizard and threw it in the bathroom window, because you were even more scared of lizards than of shots. And in exactly one second you ran out screaming—right into the waiting doctor’s arms.”

Sagar laughs so hard that he almost upsets his tea (made with real sugar, because Mrs. Dutta knows it is better for her son than that chemical powder Shyamoli likes to use). There are tears in his eyes, and Mrs. Dutta, who had not dared to hope he would find her story so amusing, feels gratified. When he takes off his glasses to wipe them, his face is oddly young, not like a father’s at all, or even a husband’s, and she has to suppress an impulse to put out her hand and rub away the indentations the glasses have left on his nose.

“I’d totally forgotten,” says Sagar. “How can you keep track of those old, old things?”

Because it is the lot of mothers to remember what no one else cares to, Mrs. Dutta thinks. To tell them over and over until they are lodged, perforce, in family lore. We are the keepers of the heart’s dusty corners.

But as she starts to say this, the front door creaks open, and she hears the faint click of Shyamoli’s high heels. Mrs. Dutta rises, collecting the dirty dishes.

“Call me fifteen minutes before you’re ready to eat so I can fry fresh luchis for everyone,” she tells Sagar.

“You don’t have to leave, Mother,” he says.

Mrs. Dutta smiles her pleasure but doesn’t stop. She knows Shyamoli likes to be alone with her husband at this time, and today in her happiness she does not grudge her this.

“You think I’ve nothing to do, only sit and gossip with you?” she mock-scolds. “I want you to know I have a very important letter to finish.”

Somewhere behind her she hears a thud, a briefcase falling over. This surprises her. Shyamoli is always so careful with her case because it was a gift from Sagar when she was finally made a manager in her company.

“Hi!” Sagar calls, and when there’s no answer, “Hey, Molli, you okay?”

Shyamoli comes into the room slowly, her hair disheveled as though she’s been running her fingers through it. A hectic color blotches her cheeks.

“What’s the matter, Molli?” Sagar walks over to give her a kiss. “Bad day at work?” Mrs. Dutta, embarrassed as always by this display of marital affection, turns toward the window, but not before she sees Shyamoli move her face away.

“Leave me alone.” Her voice is wobbly. “Just leave me alone.”

“But what is it?” Sagar says in concern.

“I don’t want to talk about it right now.” Shyamoli lowers herself into a kitchen chair and puts her face in her hands. Sagar stands in the middle of the room, looking helpless. He raises his hand and lets it fall, as though he wants to comfort his wife but is afraid of what she might do.

A protective anger for her son surges inside Mrs. Dutta, but she leaves the room silently. In her mind-letter she writes,
Women need to be strong, not react to every little thing like this. You and I, Roma, we had far worse to cry about, but we shed our tears invisibly. We were good wives and daughters-in-law, good mothers. Dutiful, uncomplaining. Never putting ourselves first
.

A sudden memory comes to her, one she hasn’t thought of in years, a day when she scorched a special kheer dessert. Her mother-in-law had shouted at her, “Didn’t your mother teach you anything, you useless girl?” As punishment she refused to let Mrs. Dutta go with Mrs. Basu to the cinema, even though
Sahib, Bibi aur Ghulam
, which all Calcutta was crazy about, was playing, and their tickets were bought already. Mrs. Dutta had wept the entire afternoon, but before Sagar’s father came home she washed her face carefully with cold water and applied kajal to her eyes so he wouldn’t know.

But everything is getting mixed up, and her own young, trying-not-to-cry face blurs into another—why, it’s Shyamoli’s—and a thought hits her so sharply in the chest she has to hold on to the bedroom wall.
And what good did it do? The more we bent, the more people pushed us, until one day we’d forgotten that we could stand up straight. Maybe Shyamoli’s doing the right thing, after all. . . .

Mrs. Dutta lowers herself heavily on to her bed, trying to erase such an insidious idea from her mind. Oh, this new country where all the rules are upside down, it’s confusing her. Her mind feels muddy, like a pond in which too many water buffaloes have been wading. Maybe things will settle down if she can focus on the letter to Roma.

Then she remembers that she has left the half-written aerogram on the kitchen table. She knows she should wait until after dinner, after her son and his wife have sorted things out. But a restlessness—or is it defiance?—has taken hold of her. She’s sorry Shyamoli’s upset, but why should she have to waste her evening because of that? She’ll go get her letter—it’s no crime, is it? She’ll march right in and pick it up, and even if Shyamoli stops in midsentence with another one of those sighs, she’ll refuse to feel apologetic. Besides, by now they’re probably in the family room, watching TV.

Really, Roma
, she writes in her head as she feels her way along the unlighted corridor,
the amount of TV they watch here is quite scandalous. The children too, sitting for hours in front of that box like they’ve been turned into painted Kesto Nagar dolls, and then talking back when I tell them to turn it off
. Of course, she will never put such blasphemy into a real letter. Still, it makes her feel better to say it, if only to herself.

In the family room the TV is on, but for once no one is paying it any attention. Shyamoli and Sagar sit on the sofa, conversing. From where she stands in the corridor, Mrs. Dutta cannot see them, but their shadows—enormous against the wall where the table lamp has cast them—seem to flicker and leap at her.

She is about to slip unseen into the kitchen when Shyamoli’s rising voice arrests her. In its raw, shaking unhappiness it is so unlike her daughter-in-law’s assured tones that Mrs. Dutta is no more able to move away from it than if she had heard the call of the nishi, the lost souls of the dead on whose tales she grew up.

“It’s easy for you to say ‘Calm down.’ I’d like to see how calm
you’d
be if she came up to you and said, ‘Kindly tell the old lady not to hang her clothes over the fence into my yard.’ She said it twice, like I didn’t understand English, like I was an idiot. All these years I’ve been so careful not to give these Americans a chance to say something like this, and now—”

“Shhh, Shyamoli, I
said
I’d talk to Mother about it.”

“You always say that, but you never
do
anything. You’re too busy being the perfect son, tiptoeing around her feelings. But how about mine?”

“Hush, Molli, the children . . .”

“Let them hear. I don’t care anymore. They’re not stupid. They already know what a hard time I’ve been having with her. You’re the only one who refuses to see it.”

In the passage Mrs. Dutta shrinks against the wall. She wants to move away, to not hear anything else, but her feet are formed of cement, impossible to lift, and Shyamoli’s words pour into her ears like smoking oil.

“I’ve explained over and over, and she still keeps on doing what I’ve asked her not to—throwing away perfectly good food, leaving dishes to drip all over the countertops. Ordering my children to stop doing things I’ve given them permission for. She’s taken over the entire kitchen, cooking whatever she likes. You come in the door and the smell of grease is everywhere, in all our clothes. I feel like this isn’t my house anymore.”

“Be patient, Molli, she’s an old woman, after all.”

“I know. That’s why I tried so hard. I know having her here is important to you. But I can’t do it any longer. I just can’t. Some days I feel like taking the kids and leaving.” Shyamoli’s voice disappears into a sob.

A shadow stumbles across the wall to her, and then another. Behind the weatherman’s nasal tones announcing a week of sunny days, Mrs. Dutta can hear a high, frightened weeping. The children, she thinks. It’s probably the first time they’ve seen their mother cry.

“Don’t talk like that, sweetheart.” Sagar leans forward, his voice, too, miserable. All the shadows on the wall shiver and merge into a single dark silhouette.

Mrs. Dutta stares at that silhouette, the solidarity of it. Sagar and Shyamoli’s murmurs are lost beneath a noise—is it in her veins, this dry humming, the way the taps in Calcutta used to hum when the municipality turned the water off? After a while she discovers that she has reached her room. In darkness she lowers herself on to her bed very gently, as though her body is made of the thinnest glass. Or perhaps ice, she is so cold. She sits for a long time with her eyes closed, while inside her head thoughts whirl faster and faster until they disappear in a gray dust storm.

WHEN PRADEEP FINALLY
comes to call her for dinner, Mrs. Dutta follows him to the kitchen where she fries luchis for everyone, the perfect circles of dough puffing up crisp and golden as always. Sagar and Shyamoli have reached a truce of some kind: she gives him a small smile, and he puts out a casual hand to massage the back of her neck. Mrs. Dutta demonstrates no embarrassment at this. She eats her dinner. She answers questions put to her. She smiles when someone makes a joke. If her face is stiff, as though she has been given a shot of Novocain, no one notices. When the table is cleared, she excuses herself, saying she has to finish her letter.

Now Mrs. Dutta sits on her bed, reading over what she wrote in the innocent afternoon.

Dear Roma,

Although I miss you, I know you will be pleased to hear how happy I am in America. There is much here that needs getting used to, but we are no strangers to adjusting, we old women. After all, haven’t we been doing it all our lives?

Today I’m cooking one of Sagar’s favorite dishes, alu-dum. . . . It gives me such pleasure to see my family gathered around the table, eating my food. The children are still a little shy of me, but I am hopeful that we’ll soon be friends. And Shyamoli, so confident and successful—you should see her when she’s all dressed for work. I can’t believe she’s the same timid bride I sent off to America just a few years ago. But, Sagar, most of all, is the joy of my old age. . . .

With the edge of her sari Mrs. Dutta carefully wipes a tear that has fallen on the aerogram. She blows on the damp spot until it is completely dry, so the pen will not leave an incriminating smudge. Even though Roma would not tell a soul, she cannot risk it. She can already hear them, the avid relatives in India who have been waiting for something just like this to happen.
That Dutta-ginni, so set in her ways, we knew she’d never get along with her daughter-in-law
. Or worse,
Did you hear about poor Prameela, how her family treated her, yes, even her son, can you imagine?