The Unknown Errors of Our Lives by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Read Free Book Online

sound over on my tongue, trying to figure out the various tenses in which such a word might exist. The smell of my children’s damp heads after they’ve come in from play? Sandeep’s aftershave, the way it lingered in our first bedsheets? A dim cement-floored alcove in Calcutta, the smell of frying bitter gourd, the marvel in a listening boy’s eyes?
    Is there ever a way back across the immigrant years, across the frozen warp of the heart?
    “Look!” Tarun is pointing to a white blur on a nearby ice floe. I wipe at my eyes, hoping they haven’t turned their usual telltale red, and try to show some interest. Will this miserable boat ride never end? “Look!” It’s some sort of a large bird, red-beaked, with slim red legs. It isn’t native to this region, judging from the comments of the parka-clad young men, but it doesn’t appear to be lost. As the boat chugs closer, it spreads its white wings and looks toward us with cool self-possession. I’ve seen a bird like this somewhere, sometime, but I can’t quite remember.
    “Didi, doesn’t it look like a sharash?”
    Yes, indeed, it does look like the marsh crane of the Bengal countryside. But I am more startled by the Bengali name for the bird, so unexpected in my brother’s mouth. That, and the childhood endearment which he hasn’t used in years. Didi. A small flash of a word, potent as any enchanted jewel from my mother’s stories.
    IT IS SOON after my father’s death. I am eight, my brother three. My harried mother, hoping for a brief respite, has sent us to visit Third Uncle, out in the country. We are homesick and miserable, suspicious of shuffly night noises, terrified of the huge spiders studding the dark walls of the outhouse. We do not fit in with our cousins, who know how to milk cows and swim across the pond. We scrape our knees when we try to climb trees with them. They jeer if we cry.
    But, today, after a morning filled with rain, the sun glimmers around the edges of black monsoon clouds, and the puddles are so inviting that we can’t resist jumping in them. We’re muddy from head to toe, but we don’t care, even though we know Third Aunt will give us a yelling when she sees our clothes. Defiantly, we run and run—all the way past the rice mill, past the irrigation ditch, past the sugarcane fields with their breathy swishing sounds. We are running toward the rail lines. Perhaps we can jump on to a passing train and make our way back to our mother in Calcutta? Then abruptly we come across them, a whole flock of sharash feeding in the flooded rice fields. My brother lifts his delighted hands,
Look, Didi!
as the birds fly up, an arc of silver air. For a moment the sky is full of wings. Whiteness and possibility. We stand with our arms around each other until they disappear.
    THE FERRY IS closer now, and everyone is looking at the bird. Even the raucous young men are quiet. The bird’s eyes shine like beads of blood. It looks back at us. At me. I am sure of this. It has flown all the way from Bengal, out of the old tales, to bring me a message that will save us—if only I can hear it.
    Some illusions are essential. We need them to live by.
    Through a gap in the clouds the sun hangs so low over the lake that if I reached out, I could cup its burning sweetness in my palm. Lake Champlain, the name comes to me all at once. Before I returned to the States, I begged my mother to come and live with me. She refused.
I want to die in the house where your father died, where you were born, you and Taru
. Some days, the pain medication confused her.
    What can I do for you, Mother? What will make you happy?
    Seeing my children before I die.
    But I
am
here, Mother.
    Seeing my children before I die. Seeing my children . . .
    All of us groping in caverns, our fingertips raw against stone, searching for that slight crack, the edge of a door opening into love.
    Suddenly I am glad about the girl with the red-gold hair.
    The bird takes off, beating its powerful