The Unknown Errors of Our Lives by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Page A

in predetermined rhythms across the garden. His skin smells like the watered earth. If she were really looking down on us, my mother would be pleased to see that over the years I’ve come to accept much of what she tried to teach me. That saying, for example, about a good man’s love.
    I guess I have to thank Dilip for that.
    By the time I met him in graduate school, I had decided I was never going to get married. A good time, yes. Affairs, yes. I already had a few to my credit. But
I
would be the one in control, I warned the men I went out with, the one to say good-bye. When they asked why, I shrugged. Sometimes, the way one presses on a broken bone to check its healing, I told them briefly of my father’s departure. About my mother I did not speak. I watched that slight shift in their gaze which signaled pity—or a new and sudden desire, and smiled as a tourist might, just passing through.
    But Dilip said, “Monisha, what your father did, why does it have to affect us?”
    We were standing under the coppery brightness of a streetlamp outside my apartment building. I looked into his face, its perplexity, and felt that perhaps he was right. That perhaps happiness, which I’d given up on, was an uncharted possibility, a brave geography worth the long effort of exploration.
    I DIDN’T ALWAYS disagree with Mother’s sayings. Here’s one I knew intuitively to be true long before my life proved it so:
Out of bluest sky, lightning strikes
.
    So I’m not really surprised when one morning in our calm California kitchen, as I’m feeding Bijoy, Dilip puts his hand over the mouthpiece of the phone and says, “It’s your father.”
    What does surprise me is the hate, welling up from someplace in me I didn’t know was there. Since he left us, I had only heard from my father once, a letter, five years back, when I was about to get married. How he found the address of the apartment I shared with two other students I never did discover. I guess in America there are ways, if you have enough money. He wanted to attend my wedding. I wrote back a polite, definite no. The sophisticated tone of my refusal convinced me that I had overcome the rage of my adolescent years.
    Now my hand shakes so hard that I have to put down the spoon.
    “Monisha,” Dilip says. “He wants to visit his grandson. For his first birthday.”
    “No,” I say, and I pull Bijoy’s cereal-sticky hands over my ears so I will not have to hear any more.
    But of course I hear. I hear Dilip, courteous as always, say, “I’ll have to get back to you, sir.” Hear him coming across the kitchen floor toward me.
    “No. No. No,” I shout.
    “It’s okay, Mona,” Dilip says. “Shhh, it’s okay.” He puts his hands on mine.
    I sit there in my kitchen, streaks of cereal drying on my cheek, holding on to my husband’s hands as if he could save me. And I cry as I haven’t cried since that day at Nimtola crematorium when I watched mother’s body burn.
    But I’m not crying for her. I’m crying because all this time I believed I had cured myself of shame—only to have my father show me, with a single phone call, that it wasn’t so.
----
    IT IS MY favorite time, just after lovemaking, when darkness petals around our bed, holding us in its center. Our moist breaths are mingled; our damp limbs have fallen where they will, unselfconscious, as though we are one body.
    Then Dilip says, “He’s an old man.”
    There’s a taste in my mouth like rust and illness.
    I make myself run my fingertips in little circles over his chest. Perhaps if I act as though I didn’t hear, the moment can be salvaged, a little.
    But Dilip says, “Mona, listen to me. Bijoy is his only grandchild. He wants to see him before he dies. Surely you can understand that.”
    I jerk my hand away and pull up the bedsheet to cover me.
    “I know you blame him for the hardships you had to go through after he left. And you have the right to—”
    You bet I do
, I want to shout. The sheet is thick