The Unknown Errors of Our Lives by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

of executing those gestures, delicate and filled with power, like the movements of a Bharatnatyam dancer, which connect humans to the gods and to each other? Back in America, her life waits to claim her, unchanged, impervious, smelling like floor polish. In the dusty window, her reflection is a blank oval. She takes off her dark glasses to see better, but the features which peer back at her are unfamiliar, as though they belong to someone she has never met.

THE LOVE OF A GOOD MAN
    WHEN I WAS growing up in Calcutta, my mother had a saying she was fond of:
The love of a good man can save your life.
    It’s not an exclusively Indian sentiment. Here in San Jose, California, too, I’ve heard women saying the same thing, even women I admire. But somehow, whenever I heard it, the voice would be overlaid with my mother’s cultured Bengali accent. And I would be back with her at one of the engagement ceremonies that occurred with daunting frequency in our large extended family, though now that Father was gone, we attended fewer of them. It embarrassed me terribly, the way she wiped delicately at her eyes with her white lace handkerchief before pronouncing the words. I was a teenager and easily embarrassed, and if there were people around whose opinion I valued—the glamorous cousins who lived on Hungerford or Park Street and wore European makeup, or school friends with older brothers who knew to whistle the latest Beatles tunes—my embarrassment turned to rage.
How the hell would you know
, I’d long to shout into her face, which was still beautiful in its resigned, aristocratic way, and curiously untouched.
    No, I never gave in to that longing.
    Where I grew up, you didn’t talk to your mother that way, not even when she’d lost what was most important in her life and thus ruined yours. And though my mother and I conversed about many things—my college professors, a new movie, the rising price of Ilish fish—we rarely spoke about what we really thought. We buried our hurts inside our bodies, like shrapnel. We’d been trained well by generations of grandmothers and widow-aunts whose silences weighed down the air of the crumbling ancestral home where we still lived, though now it was too large for the two of us.
    There was another thing. I loved my mother, although I would never have admitted it then. Even as I promised myself I wouldn’t ever be like her, staking my happiness on a man’s whims, I held myself wire-taut to protect her from harm.
    In believing I could do this, I was my mother’s daughter—sentimental, stubborn, foolish. Exactly how foolish my mother showed me by slipping from my grasp into death.
    SHE DID THIS the way she did everything (everything unrelated to my father, that is)—gracefully, with the illusion of ease, like a swimmer entering a warm pool. As though it didn’t hurt at all.
    FOR OVER A year after my mother’s death, I couldn’t stand to hear her name. Then one day I found myself thinking of her without the blood slamming around inside my skull. I was thinking of the saying she had liked so much, and how, ironically, her death had proved its corollary: the loss of love, even if it’s not a good man’s, can kill you. That was what it had done, the cancer which wove its insidious tendrils through her lungs, and which she had managed to keep secret from me almost until the end. The cancer that had begun, old Dr. Biswas told me unwillingly when I confronted him after her death, two years back.
    Which was when my father had abandoned her—and me—for a new life in America.
    MOTHER USED TO say,
The stars are the eyes of the dead
.
    I think of this sometimes when, after tucking Bijoy into his crib, Dilip and I go out onto our night porch. We slump into the railing with the pleased exhaustion familiar to lovers and to parents of young children. Dilip’s arm is cool against mine, and smooth as eucalyptus wood. The sprinklers come on, we hear invisible arcs of spray rising and falling, moving