The Unknown Errors of Our Lives by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

with Bijoy any of the things they promise.
    For a moment I see myself as he must: the daughter who carries a mountain of grudges on her shoulder, vengeful as any evil fairy in a childhood tale, and as filled with power. Can I say he is entirely wrong?
    The thought is a jolt, so sharp and physical that it makes me drop the bowl I have been soaping. Glass shatters loudly all over the sink.
    “Are you okay, Mona?” Dilip asks. “Did you cut yourself again?”
    I barely hear him. It’s my father’s gaze I’m aware of, the eyes which have widened slightly at that
again
. Under their scrutiny I dwindle, no evil fairy but a clumsy teenager once more, left behind because I’m not worth taking along. I mumble something about being just fine, about getting the rubber gloves for cleanup, and escape down the corridor.
    ON THAT LAST day in Calcutta I stood on the veranda next to my mother, ready to tell my father something suitably acerbic that I’d been rehearsing all day. I would call this out when he turned to wave us good-bye, I’d decided, and it would humiliate him into staying. But he hadn’t turned.
    As he walked toward the taxi with that ridiculously small suitcase, my father’s whole body leaned forward in terrible eagerness, as though he were a patient discharged from a hospital he never thought he’d live to leave.
    When the taxi took off with a belch of black fumes, my mother moaned softly. It was an eerie, nonhuman sound. I felt it taking shape in my own throat, the way one wolf might as it watches another one howl.
    It was my duty as a daughter to comfort my mother. A part of me longed to do it. But what could I say to a woman brought up on sayings like
The husband is God
? Whose elders had blessed her since childhood by saying,
May you never become a widow
. Who believed—as I, too, did on some unacknowledged level—that tragic though widowhood was, abandonment was worse.
    I said to my mother, in my coldest voice, “For heaven’s sake, pull yourself together.” I turned on my heel and walked away.
    I’M NOT SURE how long I spend in the bathroom, staring at the cleaning supplies. By the time I come out, the family room’s surprisingly quiet. I peer around the corner, taking care not to be seen.
    Bijoy’s fallen asleep in Dilip’s lap, limbs flung out in the uncaring absoluteness of sleeping children. The two men are watching him. From time to time they speak in whispers.
    My father puts out his hand and rubs Bijoy’s foot. I know how it feels, the soft, unblemished sole, the budlike toes, the smooth fit of that ankle in the curve of a palm. What I haven’t counted on is how
I
feel, this swift welling of a joy I don’t fully understand.
    My father is speaking slowly, slurredly, each word a stone placed on his tongue. “People do things, you know. They want something so badly, every minute feels like they’re being held down underwater. Then years later they look back and can’t believe they could ever have felt anything so strongly. . . .”
    I’m suddenly furious. What he did, no amount of talk can make it right. He’d taken my mother’s life, precious and fragile as this silk I am wearing, and ripped it apart. And now he wanted the easy solace of confession.
    I clatter down the passage, purposely loud. Maybe I’m afraid, too, not ready to hear something that might confuse my loyalties. So I busy myself with picking Bijoy up.
    “I’ll put him in his crib and then go to bed myself,” I say. “I’m exhausted. I’ll clean up tomorrow. Good night.” I say all this very quickly, so that my father will not have a chance to complete what he started to say.
    But as I carry Bijoy away, breathing in his milk-and-talcum smell, clean and uncomplicated, I hear him behind me.
    “Except regret,” says my father.
    SINCE BIJOY’S BIRTH I’ve learned to wake at his first cry, to be at his crib before he can replenish his lungs. Sometimes I smile at the irony of it, I whom my mother used to tease about