The Museum of Failures

by Thrity Umrigar

All children believe that the world begins with their birth. But to be an adult was to acknowledge the endless circles of life that began before one’s time and would continue long after, to realize that one’s story was shaped and written by unknown others. His own history had begun so much earlier than his actual story began. Cyrus’s choices, made for reasons he wasn’t alive to defend or rationalize, had bled into his own.

This was the power of India: it whittled you down, stripped you, made you believe not in the promise of the future as America did, but in the firm hold of the past. In America, a man could become what he dreamed; in India, dreaming could undo a man.

Remy learned his first lessons in loss: That his sorrow was in proportion to the happiness he’d felt earlier in the evening. That you only miss what you value.

Because the only way to destroy the museum of failures is to burn every shameful secret that it has ever held.

This was what held the world together, this unsung army of silently suffering standing women.

Why did human beings need to invent heaven and hell? Remy wondered. It was all here on Earth: The stars and the gutter, paradise and inferno. All the contradictions of the world embodied in every single human being.

This was how destiny was formed, Remy decided, not by what was written in the stars by some distant god, but by human choice and effort and courage. All he had to do was be brave.