The Unknown Errors of Our Lives (20 page)

It was a betrayal, doing it like this. The girl knew it, and her parents, too. They spoke of it bitterly after the headmistress left. There was shouting, accusations, her mother implored her to reconsider. Finally she was sent to her room. She lay in bed, her mouth dry, her head pounding, staring up at the ceiling. Her life was shifting—tectonic plates colliding, fissures opening up. The evening light was grainy and saffron, a color she’d never noticed because she’d never lain idly in bed at this time of day. Downstairs, she could hear her mother weeping. There was a noise like a door being slammed. The sounds distressed and elated her at the same time. She knew her parents couldn’t go back on their word to the headmistress. She would go to college, she would live with guilt. That was okay. Guilt was easier to live with than regret.

Now she blinks, disoriented by heat and recollection. Where are the boys? For a moment so frightening that her voice is frozen in her throat, there are only striations of wind on water. She plunges in to her waist, her hands shaking as they search the water, which is blacker and colder than she’d imagined. But they’ve surfaced already to the side of her, all three of them, from some kind of submarine game, blowing out great mouthfuls of water like whales, laughing.

Boys! she gasps. Out! Right now! She grasps each of her sons by his bony forearm and gives him a shake. She glares at the servant boy. You were supposed to keep them safe, she tells him, not make more trouble. And, boys, didn’t I say over and over, no pond water in your mouth? Why do you think your grandma’s been boiling water for you every day, even to brush your teeth? It’s germy, that’s why. Full of little, slimy germs too small to see.

All the excited joy drains from her sons’ bodies. Their blue eyes—so disconcerting in their sun-browned faces—fill with tears. She hates herself for this, but she can’t stop. And worms, she says, teeny, tiny worms with hooks that dig into your flesh. Her wet sari clings to her legs as she starts for home, it rasps her skin with its edge of gathered gravel. Ahead of her, the boys’ backs shake with suppressed sobs. What a witch she is, worse than the baby-eating rakkushi in the stories her mother tells them. She touches their bony boy-shoulders with compunctious fingers, she wants to gather them back inside her, into her own childhood, she wants time to reverse and simplify itself. She wants to tell them they are loved. Instead she hears herself saying, And mosquito eggs, too, which are probably hatching right this minute in your stomachs.

IN THE EVENINGS
, they held court.

When a garnet sun had slipped behind the black spikes of bamboo, and the veranda had been sprinkled with water to cool it for the guests, the maidservant would set off for Kesto’s Sweet Shop to fetch fresh-fried jilipis and singaras. The children were allowed to go with her, but only after they promised they wouldn’t eat anything offered to them by the street vendors. It was hard. All along the bazaar, men would smile and beckon, speaking a mix of Bengali and broken English, words they’d picked up from the movies, Come, come, little American babus, try one-two sandesh, free for you, try pani-puri, I make for you no chilies, try very sweet lozenges. The candy gleamed up at them like happy jewels from their tray of dusted sugar. The pani-puris were precariously balanced brown balls, crisp, light as air. Oh, it was too cruel to have to leave it all behind. When they had children, the boys promised each other, they would never do this to them.

The first visitors to arrive were always the widows. They perched on folding chairs on the cooled veranda. In their hushed white saris, they were like great moths. They balanced their teacups expectantly on their knees and took slow sips. They had all the time in the world. Then came the older wives who had daughters-in-law at home to make dinner, fresh from their evening shower, smelling of Cuticura talcum powder. Stacks of gold bangles, generations of dowry, clanked on their arms. The red marriage mark in the cleft of their hair gleamed like a triumphant wound. Finally, a few men with canes and flashlights, mostly the great-uncle’s friends, who had to break their singaras into little pieces and gum them for a long time. Once the younger boy paused his game with his Batman and Robin action figures to ask why all the men were so old. The mother put her hand over his mouth. Later she explained it was because it was not proper for young men to visit a woman whose husband wasn’t there. The older boy scrunched his forehead and drew in a fierce, interrogative breath, but she forestalled him. That’s just how it is in the village, she said.

The visitors asked many questions about America. Usually they were the same ones. Is it true you have machines that do all your housework? Is it true that a pound of mangoes can cost as much as a watch from Taiwan? Is it true everyone drives a car, even the old people? Is it true that when the old people can’t drive their cars anymore, their children put them into nursing homes?

The mother didn’t know what to say. A simple yes or no, wrenched out of context, would give them such a wrong impression of America. It would be dishonest. How could she tell them about her blender and vacuum cleaner and clothes dryer without explaining how at the end of the day she rushed home from work (her computer with its psychedelic screen-saver at which she sometimes stared, zombie-eyed, for chunks of time), picking up the children on the way, stopping at the grocery if they were out of milk. How the boys insisted on hanging from the edge of the grocery cart in exactly the way the little red warning sign on it said not to. How they whined for Gummi Worms. Or how, late at night, the boys asleep and her husband also, she would get up to wash after sex—she was finicky that way, even when the sex was good—and hear the dishwasher running. Its squat, urgent hum pulled at something inside her. It made her walk all the way to the kitchen and lean into it. It throbbed under her palm. In all the world, she and it seemed the only things left alive.

This had always been her problem, the inability to explain to those back home the texture of an alien life. When her parents had asked how it was to live in the Manimala Debi Girls’ Hostel in Calcutta, she had wanted to speak of the dull oppression of the ancient gray building, its sweating cement walls, its unending rules. The way her dinner would be left for her on the kitchen table, drying rice, congealed dal, covered with a net mesh to keep the cockroaches out, if she stayed too long at the library. But what of the triangular terrace, its hot, hard canopy of sky? From this terrace she could see the junction of Shyam Bajar, the nonstop bustle of hawkers and pedestrians that filled the space between them and her with a sparking, combustible energy. Maimed beggars pulled themselves along on small wooden boards with wheels. At lunchtime they gathered in the shade of a movie billboard and made raucous jokes, pointing at the bosomy film stars that loomed over them. A pickpocket was caught and beaten up by the crowd. Schoolgirls in white and brown uniforms, carrying the tricolor flag, marched in a parade every August 15, followed amicably by a Communist group waving militant red banners and shouting, in call-and-response fashion,
Jyoti Basu zindabad, Congress Party murdabad
. Ambulances made their tortuous, clanging way through rickshaws and cows, bearing the dying who sometimes expired before reaching the hospital. Men protesting the hike in the price of tickets burned a bus; the smoke rose in chemical gusts as the red paint on its sides melted to black. In seeing, she became part of it all. It was as much her education as the classes and the books.

I like college, she had replied to her parents. I miss home. I have a quiet roommate. I have no trouble studying. I am careful not to miss curfew. You’ve seen my exam results, they’re good. She waited guiltily for them to chastise her for prevarication. But they nodded, went on to other matters. Amazed, she realized they hadn’t wanted to hear anything else.

So now she told the visitors, Yes, there were two cars in her family, one for her husband, one for herself. They nodded. We knew it, we knew it, they said to her mother. Land of gold. Your Khuku is living like a queen. They looked so happily envious, so vindicated in their rightness, that she didn’t have the heart to say anything about the high insurance rates, or the drivers who cut her off during rush hour, or honked and yelled, Fucking Dothead go home. The time she’d had a flat tire on the freeway and stood there, frozen by the deafening metallic shapes hurtling past her, meteorlike, for an entire half hour until an old Chinese man stopped to help her. How could she explain to them that she would have preferred to take buses—only, there weren’t any.

She liked it better when the visitors spoke about old times, times beyond her remembering. When the village was a small clearing among forests of mango and shal. Before the railroads even, before electricity, when the village doctor had to travel to his patients on a bullock cart with kerosene lamps dangling from it, and new brides were sent to their in-laws’ homes in covered palanquins. Sometimes a woman would disappear while washing clothes in the dighi, and it was whispered that the water spirit had taken her. During the independence movement the swadeshis hid from the British forces in the surrounding forests and built their bombs in an old brick pit less than a mile from here. Bandits lived in the forests too, and preyed on travelers. They wore gold earrings and painted their faces with lampblack to avoid being recognized. Because they didn’t really live in the forest. They lived right here in the village. They might have been your next-door neighbors. Once a brahmin went for a bath in the river and felt something scrape his arm, hard as teeth. Inspired by divine courage, he grasped it—it was a stone statue of Goddess Durga, the one you see in the temple by the bazaar, to whom children who are seriously ill are taken for blessing. But now, just look around, everyone and his brother has a TV antenna sticking out from his thatched roof, and the boys on the street are whistling tunes from American rock stars, even though they don’t understand the ingrezi words. Hai, where has our culture gone?

The mother fell into the tales, let their current take her. She wanted desperately to believe them, to believe that through them she was learning back her past, what to pass on to her children. What America had leached away from her. In the years of drought, the zamindar threw open his granary. His wife cooked khichuri for the starving peasants with her own hands. His daughters served them on banana leaf platters. The mother closed her eyes and smelled the feast, the peppery stew of rice and lentils, potato and cauliflower, raisins imported all the way from Afghanistan. If the tales were no truer than those woven about America, how you went there penniless and in two years you owned a chain of motels, she—not unlike her parents all those years ago—didn’t want to know.

THE YOUNGER BOY
has fallen sick. It begins as a pain in his stomach, a slight nausea, and the mother puts him on toast and bottled Limca, bought from the most expensive store in the village to guarantee that it hasn’t been adulterated. The nausea ends, but the stomachache is worse, and when he goes to the bathroom there are only spurts of flecked brown water. He cries constantly. Kaopectate doesn’t help, nor Immodium, and Children’s Tylenol only reduces him to a glazed whimpering. Worried, the mother starts him on antibiotics. The wrenching bowel motions continue; soon he’s too weak to run about. He lies on his side and stares at the barred rectangle of yellow light from the window. He hates the taste of Limca and cries for 7-Up and his father. From time to time, in a tone of exhausted anger, he demands pepperoni pizza.

At night, the mother can’t sleep. They’ve moved the sick boy’s mattress to the passage near the bathroom for easy access, and she lies next to him on a pallet, her hand on his clammy forehead, checking his temperature. Her older son has finally fallen asleep in her mother’s bed—after throwing a huge tantrum at being separated from his brother. She can hear her mother’s uneven breathing next door and knows that she, too, is awake, but she is too depressed to talk to her. The village doctor came earlier and replaced the American antibiotic with an Indian one. Better for our desi germs, he said. It is a bitter puce mixture, and her son keeps pushing it away. When it’s medicine-time, the maidservant has to hold his arms while the mother forces open his mouth and his brother, who has been sitting outside the door of the sickroom all day, sobs in outraged sympathy. Afterward, both boys look at her with loathing. The women are urging her to get a herb poultice from the medicine man in the next village. Also, she must take the boy to Durga’s shrine tomorrow, without fail. The goddess is very powerful. Kesto’s daughter had typhoid last year, baap re, what fever, the doctor said he couldn’t do anything more. Then they took her and put her at the deity’s feet—and the next day she was sitting up asking for food. But maybe she has become American and stopped believing in such things?

The mother wishes she knew the right thing to do. Uncertainties line her stomach like ulcers, a constant, dull ache. She doesn’t trust poultices, which she remembers from her own childhood as slimy, foul-smelling, and of little efficacy. She’s afraid the boy is too weak to be dragged to any temple. She isn’t convinced that Indian antibiotics are better than American ones. She wonders (yes, that’s how weak-minded she’s grown) if she called a curse down on her son that day by the pond, going on and on about hookworms and mosquito eggs. Oh, she should never have brought them to India, just to assuage the guilt she felt at depriving her mother of her grandchildren.

The mother wants to cry in great unrestrained sobs but knows she must not. Everyone in the house is depending on her—as though they were her children too, she thinks in sudden anger. For three days she’s been trying to call her husband, but the phone lines are not working. Finally she asked her second uncle’s son to go to the post office and send a telegram. Maybe it has gone to the wrong address. Maybe it hasn’t gone at all. Maybe the postal employee only pretended to send it and pocketed the money. Why isn’t her husband here, the one time she needs him, she thinks with a rage she recognizes as irrational. But she feels entitled to her irrationality, anyone would be, after four nights of no sleep, and almost no food. Her mother keeps nagging at her to eat, but how
can
she when her son is dehydrating right before her eyes, his arms turning into knobby sticks, the skin around his mouth dusty and brittle like the earth in a year of no rain? She casts around in her mind for someone to blame. None of this would have happened if her mother hadn’t been so stubborn about never visiting America again.