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

my love of sleep.
    Tonight when Bijoy cries, Dilip says, “I’ll get up. It’s been a hard day for you.”
    “No, thanks,” I say shortly. “You’ve done enough already.” I’m annoyed at how amiable my husband has been toward my father, and I want him to know it. Besides, I have no wish to give up these treasured night moments with my son.
    Now I bend over Bijoy’s crib, thinking how easily my body assumes this familiar stoop, how easily an old tune out of my childhood,
Chhele ghumolo, para jurolo, Baby sleeps, the neighborhood is peaceful at last
, hums itself from my throat. I stroke my son out of his nightmare and into sleep again, until his muscles soften under my hand.
    I want one of my mother’s sayings, something that will encapsulate this moment of parenthood in its exact glow, but what comes to me is quite different.
    I HAVE PRESENTED myself inaccurately as the lone connoisseur of Shakespeare in my family.
    Long ago, before a husband’s desires and a child’s needs usurped her life, my mother had gone to college. Like me, she had studied English, though she had quit uncomplainingly, good daughter that she was, when it was time for her to marry.
    I had forgotten this. Or perhaps, self-absorbed as children alone can be, I had never really believed that my mother had an existence of her own before I was born.
    This is how I was reminded:
    When our relatives knew that Father had left, they descended upon us in hordes, armed with sympathy and suggestions which made me smart for days. The worst was Ila Mashi, mother’s cousin. “How could you let him go?” she’d say. “
Now
what’s going to happen to you two? He hasn’t been sending money either, has he?” Or “Monisha should write him a letter begging him to come back, or at least to arrange for your green cards.”
    I refused to give her the satisfaction of a response. But after she left, I’d berate my mother bitterly. Did she have no self-respect? No backbone? If I were her, I wouldn’t let Mashi into my house again.
    “What to do,” Mother said. “Sometimes you have to forgive people.”
    “Forgive!
Forgive
! Next you’ll be telling me you’ve forgiven my father for what he did.”
    “I haven’t,” said my mother. “But I keep trying. I have to, more for you and me than for him.”
    I wasn’t sure what she meant by that last part, but I didn’t like it. “Keep me out of it,” I said. “And let me tell you something. That man doesn’t deserve forgiveness.”
    She’d stood up straight then and looked at me, earnest in her desire—the desire of all mothers, I know that now—to give her child something vital to navigate her life by.
    “Give every man what he deserves,” said my mother, pulling the half-remembered words haltingly out of her youth, that time when everything had seemed graspable, “and who shall ’scape whipping.”
    BIJOY SLEEPS CURLED on his side, knees drawn up, hands tucked under his chin. Watching him, I marvel again at the uniqueness of it. Neither Dilip nor I sleep this way. Once Dilip told me that probably lots of babies did that, we were just too inexperienced to know. I nodded, but I wasn’t convinced. I knew my son was special.
    I could stand here all night watching him, this child already with secrets to his life, dreaming things I’ll never know. But I think of having to face my father at breakfast. I’m going to need all the rest I can get. I cover Bijoy with his quilt and close the door.
    That’s when I notice the light coming from the guest room.
    No, I say to myself. No, Monisha. Let things be. But already I am walking down the corridor.
    WHAT DO I want as I walk to the room where my father lies sleepless?
    The answer: I wish I knew.
    I have a vague notion of confrontation, accusation, of perhaps tears. (His, not mine.) My head is congested with images I need him to see: my mother’s face, gaunt with sickness; the broker bringing strings of prospective buyers to the house; the day I sent