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

claimed that the marriage wasn’t legal. They were filthy rich—the Dases of Tollygunge, you understand—they hired the shrewdest lawyers. She lost everything—the money, the house, even the wedding jewelry.”
    “No justice in this world,” Aunt says, clicking her tongue sympathetically.
    “She had to go to work in an office,” someone else adds. “Think of it, a woman of good family, forced to work with low-caste peons and clerks! That’s how she put her son through college and got him married.”
    “And now the daughter-in-law refuses to live with her,” Aunt says. “So she’s had to move into a women’s hostel. A women’s hostel! At her age!”
    The doctor’s wife shakes her head mournfully. “Some people are like that, born under an unlucky star. They bring bad luck to themselves and everyone close to them.”
    Leela studies the kaleidoscope of emotions flitting across the women’s faces. Excitement, pity, cheerful outrage. Can it be true, that part about an unlucky star? In America she would have dealt with such superstition with fluent, dismissive ease, but India is complicated. Like entering a murky, primal lake, in India she has to watch her step.
    LEELA’S HAPPIEST CHILDHOOD memories were of aloneness: reading in her room with the door closed, playing chess on the computer, embarking on long bike rides through the city, going to the movies by herself. You saw more that way, she explained to her parents. You didn’t miss crucial bits of dialogue because your companion was busy making inane remarks. Her parents, themselves solitary individuals, didn’t object. People—except for a selected handful—were noisy and messy. They knew that. Which was why, early in their lives, they had escaped India to take up research positions in America. Ever since Leela could remember, they had encouraged her taste for privacy. When Leela became a computer programmer, they applauded the fact that she could do most of her work from home. When she became involved with Dexter, another programmer whom she had met at one of the rare conferences she attended, they applauded that too, though more cautiously.
    Her relationship with Dexter was a brief affair, perhaps inevitably so. Looking back in search of incidents to remember it by, Leela would only be able to recall a general feeling, something like being wound tightly in a blanket on a cold day, comforting yet restrictive. Even when things were at their best, they never moved in together. Leela preferred it that way. She preferred, too, to sleep alone, and often moved after lovemaking to the spare bed in her apartment. When you slept, you were too vulnerable. Another person’s essence could invade you. She had explained it once to Dexter. He had stroked her hair with fingers she thought of as sensitive and artistic, and had seemed to understand. But apparently he hadn’t. It was one of the facts he dwelt on at some bitter length before he left.
    “You’re like one of those spiny creatures that live at the bottom of the ocean,” he said. “Everything just slides off of that watertight shell of yours. You don’t need me—you don’t need
anyone
.”
    He wasn’t totally right about that. A week after he left, Leela ended up in the emergency ward, having swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills.
    An encounter with death—even an aborted one (Leela had called 911 as soon as she finished taking the pills)—alters one in unaccountable ways. After having to deal with the hospital, the police, and the mandatory counselor assigned to her, Leela should have heaved a sigh of relief when she returned to her quiet, tidy apartment. Instead, for the first time, she found her own company inadequate. Alone, there seemed no point in opening the drapes or cleaning up the TV dinner containers stacked up on the coffee table. The place took on a green, underwater dimness. Her computer gathered dust as she wandered from room to room, sometimes with her eyes closed, trailing her