Viji was a placid new mother, despite her daughter’s crying—even the nurses noticed it. Her boys were handed to her and she smiled, as if she’d always known how they would be. But then she saw her daughter and began to weep. The nurses passed this off as the mild shock of seeing an undersize infant, something they’d grown accustomed to. George assumed Viji was just feeling what he felt—the enormous realizations that new parenthood brings. There was so much contained in this pink hospital blanket, this cawing bundle of pointed limbs. Yellow, small, and angry. Not even the blanket could soften it. It would take a while—longer than Viji would admit—before “it” became a “she.”
Photos were taken. They turned out as well as most newborn pictures. No matter how George arranged and rearranged the three bodies, it was impossible to disguise how small the girl looked next to her brothers, like a larva next to butterflies. The photos were sent to family members and friends, enclosed in cards. From India, jubilant letters returned, penned on soft blue aerograms, addressed invariably to Mr. and Mrs. G. Amritraj.
Girls were supposed to be beautiful. They were unprepared for theirs, and it took them seven days to name her. Until they did she was Baby Girl Armitage, property of the hospital, princess of the incubator. She was still puny when she finally came out, fully baked, but her color had turned normal. Around her, hospital people smiled and wished Viji well. They were happy for her, but not with her—and why should they have been? She was only a patient, another mother with the same questions and seeping fluids as any other mother. And beside her, almost constantly, was George.
The boys, they’d named themselves, but they didn’t have a name ready for the girl. Viji sent a telegram to her mother in Madras. CHILDREN BORN TWO BOYS KIERAN AND AVINASH AND ONE GIRL. PLEASE AMMA SEND NAME FOR GIRL. It was traditional for elders to do the naming in her family. It was also traditional for hospitals to not let babies leave until they’d been officially named. Viji prayed the first night for a swift response to her telegram, and for a good name. There were some awful names out there—the Aniyoras and Bishakas and Fulkis of the world. She said a quiet prayer for those little girls, but she didn’t dare think of them for too long, lest the fates snatch such a name from the air and stamp it on her baby. The next afternoon, a telegram arrived. NOW YOU WANT MY OPINION. SO GOOD AT MAKING OWN DECISIONS NAME THE BABY YOUR-SELF. The telegram was a swift slap. That her mother would spend so much money to spite her, even now, was what pained her most.
But she was right—it had been Viji’s decision to be with George, and to stay with George, and to cling to him even as her mother had tried to beg-plead-scream him out of her. George would be her downfall, her mother had said. Viji accepted this downfall, continued to sneak from the house to see him, to lock herself into George’s room despite his hesitation. And when her mother saw that she had no choice, the wedding was arranged and the entire event became Amma’s idea, framed for neighbors and friends as a step up for Viji’s family, a prestigious match to a European scholar. This was sufficient explanation for most of their friends, a class-conscious set that still considered the English to be superior. But between Viji and her mother, the truth of the matter stayed put. George had been but a minor player in it all.
More than her mother’s approval, Viji wanted to leave the hospital. So she chose Neha. It was a name that sounded like air, like a sigh released, a free-blowing life that couldn’t be harnessed to the earth.
With three children and two breasts, Viji had to devise a system of feeding. First, she learned to spread cold butter on her nipples each night; it relieved the painful chafing of three greedy mouths. Second, she learned to be systematic and fair. The boys were fussy if they weren’t fed first. They howled, their eyes creased shut, their mouths stretched into rectangles of fury. The noise made her daughter nervous and kept her from feeding. So she took care of the boys first, propped them onto pillows and towels, and let them feed together. They would clamp onto her nipples, small proprietary hands on her breasts and tugging at the neck of her blouse. Focused from the start, the girl would watch her brothers nurse. Their small mouths moved like machines. Their focus was impregnable.
Viji’s love for her daughter broke early one morning, when she woke to the sun’s glare on her bedside clock. George was awake already. He held his daughter over the bedspread so that her legs dangled and her feet lay gingerly on the bed, as if she were standing.
“Where are the boys?” Viji asked. The baby looked to her left when she heard her mother’s voice.
“Asleep still.”
George lowered himself to the bed and brought the baby with him. With a hand supporting her back, he propped her up to sit, legs spread, facing him. Viji watched the baby from behind, seated, looking at George. Her head rested squarely on her shoulders, her neck tucked away beneath a fleshy fold. Her fine hair whorled around the back of her head. There was barely enough of it to cover her scalp, aside from a thick, dark tuft at the nape of her neck. She couldn’t look away from the girl, who sat so definitely, contented to be only what she was. Round, without pretense, open, and wholly vulnerable. If George moved his hand, she would flop to the mattress.
“Give her to me.” She wanted nothing in the world but to hold the warm weight of the baby—this baby— against her body. The feeling left her tight-chested and more terrified than she’d been when the scrawny girl was first placed in her arms. For the first time in her short life, Neha possessed her mother completely, pushing the boys away and leaving Viji disoriented, unable to shake her daughter’s grip. Solid and soft, with warm breath puffing from small and perfect lips, she was precisely right. From that point, Viji knew she would never love her children equally.
The children were like nothing Viji had seen before. Soon, Neha weighed as much as her brothers. The three browned gently over the first few weeks of their lives, their skin so soft it almost wasn’t there. Their hair turned chestnut, with streaks of blond, a confusion of their parents’ colors. To Viji they were caramel and chocolate. Sometimes, alone with them in the afternoons, she succumbed to temptation and lifted a chubby toffee arm to lick it, or stuck a baby fist into her mouth and sucked at the sweetness. Often, lying side by side by side, the triplets did nothing but look at her. They could spend an hour simply watching, sucking their lower lips and waiting to see what she would do. It made sense to Viji. She’d spent nine and a half months expecting them; it was their turn now to wait for her.
Avinash Armitage was the first boy born and the first to walk. When he was nine, he smacked his head on the edge of the pool’s diving board and nearly drowned. George, who had been watching, managed to pull his son out of the water. He held his hand to the wound at the back of Avi’s head, where the trickle of blood was growing sluggish. His other two children looked on as Avi squinted up at George.
“He’s lost a lot of blood,” Avi’s sister observed.
Although Baby Girl Armitage had become Neha Armitage, Neha soon turned into Babygirl. And by this name, in certain corners of her universe, she would always be known. She had grown by this time to match her brother’s height. She was the only one of the three who looked more like George than like Viji.
“Will he be anemic now?” Kieran Armitage leaned over, caramel hair dripping onto his brother’s chest, and felt his wrist for a pulse.
“No, sweetheart, he won’t be anemic.” George held a towel to Avi’s head until the bleeding stopped. He would wash the wound with pool water before Viji saw them.
Kieran kneeled and looked into his brother’s eyes.“Do you feel at all dizzy?”
“I don’t know.”
Kieran Armitage, named after George’s late uncle, quickly outgrew his brother. At the age of ten, he fell into the overweight category on his pediatrician’s growth chart, and began a strict regime of diet and exercise, one that he would maintain throughout his life. He took to counting his steps and insisted that George teach him to measure his own pulse. He’d read in Pearson’s Guide to Health and Wellness
that one should walk at least ten thousand paces a day. Generally, he lost count before the day was up.
Viji was a happy mother, though she sometimes didn’t know how to act with the triplets—whether to bend the rules or hold fast to them. Boundaries or freedom. Both, of course. But that didn’t help either. She was instinctively gentle with the boys and Babygirl. The only time she’d hit them was when they’d wandered away from her one afternoon, out of extreme boredom, at Macy’s. They were found after an hour, asleep in the stuffed armchairs of the front window display. Later in their lives, the children would remember a time when Viji got so fed up with their fighting that she pushed the three of them out of the house, wearing nothing but their underpants, and locked the door. Kieran claimed it was the middle of winter and Avi remembered that it was the front door she shoved them from, not the back. Viji remembered none of this, and resented her children for bringing it up so often.
When they were eleven, both Avi and Kieran caught the chicken pox. Babygirl stayed healthy and was banned from her brothers’ bedroom. The boys spent their days in bed designing an underground nuclear shelter.
Avi bested his brother by designing a nuclear shelter camper home with brown racing stripes, to keep the family mobile in the event of global disaster. It was little more than an armored tank with enough room for beds and a kitchen.
George, on his nightly sickbed visits, examined the sketches. “What would we need a grenade launcher for?”
“To defend ourselves,” Avi replied.
“I thought the armored siding would defend us.”
“You never know.”
“Where’s the bathroom?”
Babygirl, not to be left out, sent messages to her brothers via her mother. Mostly, she sent drawings.
And the boys sent drawings back.
Two weeks later, Babygirl caught the chicken pox. Outside, it was summer; school had let out three days earlier. As she lay in bed, scratching with abandon, Kieran read the funnies aloud to her from outside her bedroom door. He wouldn’t go near her, though he was immune. He’d heard about mutant strains. He knew about shingles. Downstairs, the doorbell rang, eight deep chimes with one note missing in the middle.
He was reading a Peanuts cartoon to her when a man walked into the hallway. He was tall and gray-skinned, with a shock of white hair and a suitcase. “What’s the matter?” he asked. “Can’t she read?”
Kieran knew that this was his grandfather and that he was from England. An enormous suitcase sat at his feet. Judging from the size and fullness of it (peaks and mounds poked out against the fabric, as if he’d brought someone with him), Grandad Stan had come to stay.
On the day he arrived, Avi hovered at his side and Kieran hurled questions at him. Ruben Tashima had once told Babygirl that his grandmother smelled, but her knowledge of grandparents extended no further. So the arrival of Grandad Stan didn’t seem to warrant her brothers’ excitement. Babygirl stayed in her room to scratch.
In England, Stan had been a cabbie. He was used to talking loud, to the point, and facing the other way. Even now, in Viji’s kitchen, he spoke over the noise of a nonexistent engine.
“Well,” George said, “we certainly weren’t expecting you.”
He hugged his father and held him until Stan pushed away. “How long are you staying?”
“How long will you have me?”
George turned to Viji, who didn’t know what to say. She smiled after a moment and answered, “For as long as you can stay.”
When Stan went upstairs to wash, he paused at Babygirl’s room. “Catch the lurgie?”
“Pardon me?”
Stan walked on without a reply. From upstairs, Babygirl could hear Viji’s knife against the chopping board. It rapped hard against the wood and echoed through the house.
She cut the broccoli with a blunt knife, sending the odd sprout leaping to the floor. It was at times like these that Viji began to think of the small injustices of her life with George. The way George left his wet towels around the bedroom and never seemed to notice that she hung them for him, used her toothbrush instead of his own and consistently appropriated the new ones she bought, greeted other women by kissing their cheeks, though Viji could never bring herself to do the same with men, refused to throw out old appliances and crammed them, rusted and oozing liquids, into the corner of the garage. The way George seemed not to think about their anniversary until she dropped a very heavy hint. How he pretended to forget that Tuesday was trash collection day, overlooked birthday cards attached to gifts, spent all his time in his study while she had never had a study to go to, and seemed always to be right, even when she knew he wasn’t.
And now, probably through some fault of George’s, she would have an old man living in her home. An old man who stank of tobacco smoke and looked quizzically at Viji when she spoke, always taken by surprise, as if she were a cat who’d walked up and asked him for the time. An old man who, all those years ago, had told her she was an animal. The blade nicked her finger and she gasped. The flesh beneath her nail pooled with gathering blood. Heaven only knew why he was here, and how long he would stay. Worst of all, the pool house would become an in-law cottage, and she would never, ever have her sewing shed.
Later that afternoon, Stan leaned into the pool house and sniffed. He sniffed again. He kicked the doorframe, turned to George and Viji.“Mildew,” he said.“It’ll rot these walls to the core. What have you been doing with it?”
“It’s been our pool house,” Viji said.
“But it was meant to be a cottage,” George added, “for you.”
“For me!” Stan stepped in, hands on hips, and kicked at the wall. “No chance of me living here now, not until something’s done for these walls.” Stan was right. Viji looked sheepishly at the floor’s stained linoleum. She wouldn’t have let her own parents live here.
And so Stan would move into the boys’ room. Kieran and Avi would move into sleeping bags on Babygirl’s floor, and Babygirl would resent the change. That night, the moon lit the eucalyptus trees outside her window, and haloed her brother’s heads.
“Do you think Grandad ever fought in a tank?” Kieran asked. He and Avi lay on their backs in sleeping bags.
“Probably. I bet he’s killed someone, too.”
“That’s stupid,” Babygirl said. She scratched at her lesions, annoyed by the exaggeration. “Why would he have killed someone?”
Avi propped himself on his elbows. “He probably did, you know, when there was war. Practically everyone had to fight. Even the women.”
“That’s not true.”
“Is too”’
“Bullshit.”
Babygirl gasped at the word, and only a blanket crammed into her mouth could stop the laughter. Then she remembered the scab on her foot and curled under the covers to pick it.
“What’re you doing?” Kieran asked.
“Picking a scab.”
“Grody. If you pick a scab you have to eat it, you know.”
“Do not.”
“Do too. Or else your skin won’t heal. And you’ll turn into a walking festering wound.”
“Gross, Kieran.”
“I know.”
Babygirl placed the thin disc of skin on her tongue, felt it moisten, and thought again of the first spray of lesions to appear on her neck. Viji had seen her scratching and grabbed her hand. Chicken pox, she’d pronounced. It’s your turn now.
This was exciting. A week to watch TV and eat what she wanted. And more importantly, membership in the still small group of classmates who’d had it. There were only three others in her class, not counting her brothers.
A snore, like a distant car motor, drifted from the other side of the wall. It trailed off. It swelled. It faded again. This continued until the snore reached its full crescendo and tripped over itself. There was coughing. She heard the creak of bedsprings and the boys’ bedroom door softly opening. A few minutes later, she heard it close. Below her, arms crossed on their chests, her b
rothers were already asleep.
CHAPTER THREE
George awoke.
Where am I?
Home. Bedroom. This is your wife. You love her. Her lips are moving. She is trying to tell you something. George took out his earplugs.
“…an everyday matter, George. I think we should talk to him about it but really, I think you should talk to him about it.”
“What was that, darling?”
Viji looked at him in quiet disbelief before starting again. “Stan. Your father. He’s staying here, in this house. Do you remember? It wasn’t just a dream.”
George knew his father would give a reason for the visit in his own time, if such a reason existed. In the meantime, it was a bit rude to inquire directly as to why he had come. There were no whys or wherefores when it came to family. It was Saturday. He put the earplugs back in, smiled at the sound of nothing. He closed his eyes. He sensed Viji looking at him. He knew she was talking again; he could feel the sound waves bounce against his head. When George had hugged his father, he could smell their lounge in Nottingham, specifically the old red sofa, infused with aftershave and turpentine and Sunday dinners. Smells faded, seeped silently away before anyone knew they were gone. Like the last edge of a sunset. It must be down to natural selection losing one’s distinctive smell would make it easier to ingratiate oneself into a new tribe. He pushed the thought away, wanting only to sleep. But now came a twittering sound, like a bird. When he turned to it he saw Viji, her mouth moving rapidly, the wind of each syllable pinging off his forehead.
The Prayer Room Page 3