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

waking up,” Aunt Seema says from somewhere, her voice damp and wobbly like a cracker that’s been dunked in tea. But why is Leela thinking like this? She knows she should appreciate her aunt’s loving concern and say something to reassure her. But it is so private, so comfortable, behind her closed eyes.
    “Finally,” says the doctor’s voice. “I was getting worried.” Leela can smell his breath—it’s cigarettes, a brand she does not know. It smells of cloves. When she has forgotten everything else, she thinks, she will remember the odors of this journey.
    “Can you hear me, Leela?” the doctor asks. “Can you open your eyes?” He taps on her cheek with maddening persistence until she gives up and glares at him.
    “You’re lucky, young lady,” he says as he changes the bandage around her head. “You should be thankful you were hit by a piece of wood. Now if that had been a sheet of rusted metal—”
    Lucky. Thankful
. Leela doesn’t trust such words. They change their meaning as they swoop, sharp-clawed, about her head. The room is full of women; they wring their hands in gestures that echo her aunt’s. She closes her eyes again. There’s a question she must ask, an important one—but when she tries to catch it in a net of words, it dissolves into red fog.
    “It’s all my fault,” Aunt Seema says in a broken voice that baffles Leela. Why should Aunt feel so much distress at problems which are, after all, hers alone? “Leela doesn’t understand these things—how can she?—but I should have made her stay away from that accursed woman. . . .”
    “Do try to be quiet.” The doctor’s voice is testy, as though he has heard this lament many times already. “Give her the medicine and let her rest.”
    Someone holds Leela’s head, brings a cup to her lips. The medicine is thick and vile. She forces it down her throat with harsh satisfaction. Aunt sobs softly, in deference to the doctor’s orders. Her friends murmur consolations. From time to time, phrases rise like a refrain from their crooning:
The poor girl, Shiva have mercy, that bad-luck woman, oh, what will I tell your mother
.
    A commotion at the door.
    “I’ve got to see her, just for a minute, just to make sure she’s all right—”
    There’s a heaving inside Leela.
    “No,” says one of the women. “Daktar-babu said, no excitement.”
    “Please, I won’t talk to her—I’ll just take a look.”
    “Over my dead body you will,” Aunt Seema bursts out. “Haven’t you done her enough harm already? Go away. Leela, you tell her yourself . . .”
    Leela doesn’t want to tell anyone anything. She wants only to sleep. Is that too much to ask for? A line comes to her from a poem,
Death’s second self which seals up all in rest
. She imagines snow, great fluffy quilts of it, packed around her. But the voices scrape at her,
Leela, Leela, Leela
.
    The room is full of evening. Leela sees Mrs. Das at the door, trying to push her way past the determined bulk of the doctor’s wife. Her disheveled hair radiates from her head like crinkly white wires, giving her, for a moment, the look of an alien in a
Star Trek
movie. When she sees that Leela’s eyes are open, she stops struggling and reaches out toward her.
    Why does Leela do what she does next? Is it the medication, which makes her light-headed? The pain, which won’t let her think? Or is it some dark, genetic strain which, unknown to her, has pierced her pragmatic American upbringing with its sharp, knotted root? At times, later, she will tell herself,
I didn’t know what I was doing
. At other times, she’ll say,
Liar
. For doesn’t her response to Mrs. Das come from the intrinsic and fearful depths of who she is? The part of her that knows she is no savior?
    Leela sits up in bed. “Aunt’s right,” she says. Her teeth chatter as though she is fevered. “All of them are right. You
are
cursed. Go away. Leave me alone.”
    “No,” says Mrs. Das. But it is a pale sound,