The Unknown Errors of Our Lives Read Online Free PDF Page B

girlfriend!” To my annoyance I found that I’d switched over to English, too. “You never told me you had a girlfriend, especially a white one! What is Ma going to say when she finds out!” I hated the shrill sisterly note in my voice, the banality of my response. It wasn’t what I had meant to say.
    Tarun shrugged. In the light of the bedside lamp, his face was as polished as an egg, as empty of guilt or concern.
    “You can have the bed if you like. I’ll sleep on the sofa.”
    For a moment, before I forced the image from my mind, I saw the girl’s red hair spread over the pillow. Her pale arms tight around my brother’s brown back. “No, no, it’s all right,” I said. “I’ll be very comfortable on the sofa.”
    “I thought you might say that,” Tarun said. The look in his eyes could have been amused, or sardonic, or merely polite.
    “Are you going to let Ma know about her?” I blurted out.
    It was a stupid question. Tarun hadn’t written to our mother or replied to her letters ever since he came to this country. But sometimes stupidity is all we’re left with.
    “There’s a nice movie at the Empire tonight. Want to go?”
    This time I had no trouble reading my brother’s eyes. They were bored.
    WHAT I REMEMBER most clearly of Tarun from his childhood are his eyes. They were very bright and very black. If I brought my face close to his, I could see myself reflected in them, tiny and clear and more beautiful than I really was. Maybe that was why I loved him so much.
    Everyone called Tarun a good boy. He never got into trouble like the other neighbor kids who talked back to teachers, or got into fistfights, or stole lozenges from the Sarada Debi All Purpose Store. Coming back from school, he rarely joined the raucous game of cricket in progress on the empty field across from our house. He preferred being with mother and me. Even when he was a teenager, he’d come into the kitchen where we were fixing dinner and knead the dough for her, or help me slice the bitter gourd. If asked, he would give us an obedient description of his day (theorems in maths class, essay test in English, atoms and molecules in science). But what he liked best was listening to my mother’s stories—tales her mother had told her—of princes and princesses, wondrous talking beasts, and jewels which, touched to the walls of caverns, made secret entryways appear.
    When they came to visit, our women relatives would compliment Ma on bringing him up so well. (They thought me too talkative, too flighty, always flipping through the foreign magazines I’d borrowed from wealthier classmates.) “And all by yourself too, a widow-woman like you,” they would add, in between mouthfuls of pakoras.
    “Actually, I think he’s too quiet,” Ma would say, frowning a little. “He spends too much time with just the two of us. I’d rather he went out and made more friends. Learned more about the world and how to feel comfortable in it. After all, I won’t always be around, and his sister will soon get married and go into a different household.”
    “Really, Malabika!” the women would tell her, patting their mouths delicately with their handkerchiefs. “Like they say, You don’t appreciate a good thing until you lose it!”
    Now, with so many things slipping from my grasp, I understand the truth of that saying.
    If I’d been an artist, this is what I would have painted, to keep it safe from loss—and from change, which is perhaps crueler than loss. This is what I would have brought to Tarun today: that dim kitchen, our own cave, with its safe odors of coriander and fenugreek; the small blue glow of the gas stove in the corner; three people, cross-legged on the cool cement, making food for each other while the stories wrapped us in their enchantment.
    ON THE BOAT the wind yanks at my long hair, whipping it into knots that will take me hours to untangle. Across the deck from me, a group of young men in dull green parkas are joking