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

that never ended. Who would have thought she’d feel so at home here?
    So when Aunt Seema said, “You want to see the real India, the spiritual India? Let’s go on a pilgrimage,” she agreed without hesitation.
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    THE TALK STARTS at the end of the first day’s trek. In one of the women’s tents, where Leela lies among pilgrims who huddle in blankets and nurse aching muscles, a voice rises from the dark.
    “Do you know, Mrs. Das’s bedroll didn’t get to the camp. They can’t figure out what happened—the guides swear they tied it onto a mule this morning. . . .”
    “That’s right,” responds another voice. “I heard them complaining because they had to scrounge around in their own packs to find her some blankets.”
    In the anonymous darkness, the voices take on cruel, choric tones. They release suspicion into the close air like bacteria, ready to multiply wherever they touch down.
    “It’s like that time on the train, remember, when she was the only one who got food poisoning. . . .”
    “Yes, yes . . .”
    “I wonder what will happen next. . . .”
    “As long as it doesn’t affect us. . . .”
    “How can you be sure? Maybe next time it will. . . .”
    “I hate to be selfish, but I wish she wasn’t here with us at all. . . .”
    “Me, too . . .”
    Leela wonders about the tent in which Mrs. Das is spending her night. She wonders what people are saying in there. What they are thinking. An image comes to her with a brief, harsh clarity: the older woman’s body curled into a lean comma under her borrowed blankets. In the whispery dark, her thin, veined lids squeezed shut in a semblance of sleep.
    STRUGGLING UP THE trail through the morning mist, the line of pilgrims in gay woolen clothes looks like a bright garland. Soon the light will grow brutal and blinding, but at this hour it is sleepy, diffuse. A woman pauses to chant.
Om Namah Shivaya, Salutations to the Auspicious One
. The notes tremble in the air, Leela thinks, like silver bubbles. The pilgrims are quiet—there’s something about the snowy crags that discourages gossip. The head guide has suggested that walking time be utilized for reflection and repentance. Leela finds herself thinking, instead, of accidents.
    She remembers the first one most clearly. It must have been a special occasion, maybe a birthday or an out-of-town visitor, because her mother was cooking. She rarely made Indian food from scratch, and Leela remembers that she was snappish and distracted. Wanting to help, the four-year-old Leela had pulled at a pot and seen the steaming dal come at her in a yellow rush. It struck her arm with a slapping sound. She screamed and raced around the kitchen—as though agony could be outrun. Long after her mother immersed her arm in ice water and gave her Tylenol to reduce the pain, she continued to sob—tears of rage at being tricked, Leela realizes now. She’d had no intimations, until then, that good intentions were no match for the forces of the physical world.
    More accidents followed, in spite of the fact that she was not a particularly physical child. They blur together in Leela’s memory like the landscape outside a speeding car’s windows. She fell from her bike in front of a moving car—luckily the driver had good reflexes, and she only needed a few stitches on her chin. She sat in the passenger seat of her mother’s van, and a stone—from who knows where—shattered the windshield, filling Leela’s lap with jagged silver. A defective electrical wire caught fire at night in her bedroom while she slept. Her mother, up for a drink of water, smelled the smoke and ran to the bedroom to discover the carpet smoldering around the sleeping Leela’s bed. Do all these close escapes mean that Leela is lucky? Or is her unlucky star, thwarted all this time by some imbalance in the stratosphere, waiting for its opportunity?
    She thinks finally of the suicide attempt which, since she arrived in India, she has quarantined in a part