The Prayer Room

by Shanthi Sekaran

  Of all the things Stan brought with him—stinking cigar smoke, talky neighborhood ladies, alfresco urination— Viji was glad for one of them. One Sunday morning, washing crusty pots from the previous night’s dinner, she saw something she hadn’t thought existed in Maple Grove. Walking up the long cement drive, wearing a red jogging suit and sneakers, with painted nails and a satisfied smile, was another Indian woman. Viji froze midwash and stared. She was unmistakably Indian, even with her tidy short hairdo. In her hand was a plate, covered loosely by a napkin.

  The sides of the yellow napkin flapped in the breeze, threatening to fly off and reveal what the plate held.Viji continued to stare, even as the woman rang the doorbell. She’d always felt like an elephant who’d moved to the city; she’d never dreamed she would see another of her kind again. But here one was, on the doorstep like a dream, holding her plate, tapping on the kitchen window, smiling at Viji, calling yoo hoo and laughing. Viji threw the pot down and ran to the door. She wiped her wet hands on her trousers.

  Kamla Mehta had lived in Maple Glen for eight years, in a house on Ladino Lane that couldn’t be seen from the road. Viji remembered it now from her evening walks: the snaking driveway that led to invisibility, bordered on both sides by dense oleander.

  “And what does your husband do?”Viji asked. Kamla’s face grew cold and still. Her husband had been an anesthesiologist. He was still an anesthesiologist. He was no longer her husband. They’d divorced three years earlier, and Kamla had kept the house. He now lived in Arizona with his new wife, a nurse from his old hospital. They had one child, a daughter, who lived with Kamla. She would have to come over sometime to meet the triplets.

  Though Kamla had come to meet Grandad Stan, she stayed to drink tea with Viji. Stan was away, off somewhere with that maid, and Viji was grateful for it. Kamla laughed a great deal, sometimes over nothing detectable. But Viji liked this. She wanted a friend who laughed, and who would make her laugh. She liked the way Kamla leaned against the kitchen counter and crossed her ankles. She liked her pretty face—the sharp Gujarati nose, the wide smile and lips that were clean and neatly formed, free from the fleshy excesses of Tamil mouths. Kamla had skin that glowed from beneath. Strange, Viji thought, for a divorced woman to be so happy. It must be the exercise.

  George walked into the kitchen as Kamla finished her tea. “Why hello!” he said.

  “Hello there!” she replied. They both glanced at Viji.

  “I’m glad you finally stopped by,” George continued. “I’ve been wanting you to meet Viji.” So they knew each other. Viji looked from one to the other, wanting to know how this had happened, not wanting to ask.

  “I heard we had a visitor in the neighborhood, so I wanted to stop by.” She reached over and squeezed Viji’s hand. The questions subsided.

  “You must come over again,” Viji said. She knew her voice sounded plaintive.“Would you like to stay for lunch?” And Kamla did.

  George was acting shy. Viji found it funny and strange that he came in from his study, made himself a sandwich from the items strewn on the counter, and disappeared again. But with Kamla in front of her, she didn’t want to think about George.

  Where do you come from? What language do you speak? How long have you been here? Why did you come here? Are you ever going back? They ran through the usual questions, setting down the details to finalize their bond, tilting their heads for yes, biting on cardamom pods for their tea. Kamla was from Gujurat, and knew little of Tamil Nadu. Viji was from Tamil Nadu and knew nothing about Gujurat, except that Gujus were good businessmen and Gandhi was from there. And really, how long could they talk about Gandhi? But it didn’t matter. By the time they’d finished their sandwiches, Kamla held Viji’s hand across the table. They were like lovers in a restaurant, minus the dripping candle, minus the plate of spaghetti and the man with the violin.

  In bed that night, the question came back.

  “So you’ve already met Kamla?”

  She crept into the dip between George’s shoulder and chest.

  “I have. I’d guess about five years ago. She and her husband were out walking.”

  “She’s pretty, isn’t she,” Viji said.

  “Sure.”

  “More beautiful than me?”

  “Of course not.”

  “You’re lying.”

  George laughed and scooted down to bring his face level with Viji’s.

  “How could I be lying?”

  She shrugged.

  “Look at your eyes. They’re ludicrous.” Coming from George, this was flattery. “Pools I could fall into and drown. And your hair. Who has better hair than you? And this mole here, below your eye. It’s ever so slightly raised, so that even in the dark I know it’s there. And your belly. What in the world could be better than your belly?”

  He kneaded, with his palm, the two soft mounds of her belly. They’d been there always, even before she’d had children. He ran his finger along the line of fur that trailed from her navel. His fingers moved softly around her.

  “She had a divorce, you know.”

  Viji still said “dye-vorce” rather than “divorce.” But she knew George would never poke fun.

  “You seem to like her,” he said.

  “Yes, I do.”

  She felt him smiling in the dark. A long silence followed. Viji thought George might have fallen asleep.

  “Maybe you should spend more time with her,” he said.

  “Yes, George.”

  In an attempt to find Viji friends, George had set her up with other wives in the neighborhood, for tea parties and craft days, for afternoons volunteering at the local Loaves & Fishes, all of them long and torturous affairs. No playdates this time. Kamla would be her friend alone.

  CHAPTER SIX

  There might have been jasmine, Viji thought, gazing from the family room window to the rosebushes at the end of her yard. They were still full and tall, but fading from fuschia to pink. They were losing their vigor, tired from staring into the fierce summer sun. Soon their petals would detach, spinning like propellers to the ground or falling in a single swoop, a silent rose-voice calling Geronimooooo, like Avi when he jumped off the diving board. It was jasmine she missed, such a heavy scent from the most delicate petals. Why had she so thoughtlessly planted roses?

  Regardless, American jasmine was no good, the way the flowers poked from their stems like daggers, petals rolled so tightly, never to open. Pink-tipped. Thin and stingy. She wanted real jasmine, the kind you find in temples and market stands, strung together to be pinned into hair. That jasmine was luminous, with full round bulbs, pure white petals that let the sun shine through. Precious and plentiful.

  She went out without her slippers, forgetting to take a basket or scissors. The cement around the pool burned her feet, and she had to step quickly and leap onto the grass. Only the best roses could be taken—no brown spots or wilting petals. Without scissors, she had to use her fingers. Thorns bit her, no matter how carefully she avoided them. She wasn’t supposed to smell the roses; until her morning puja was over, their scent belonged to God. But the perfume was pungent, almost alcoholic, and it sprayed the air every time she pinched a rose from its stem. She couldn’t help but breathe it in. She inhaled deeply.

  There had been jasmine that night, looped around her braid and hanging a few inches past it, brushing her bare neck when she moved, like cool fingers on her skin. There had been a few white students at the reception, like the young man with brown-blond hair—golden under the lights, dark when he stood by the piano. He wore an Indian kurta with trousers. It was a strange combination, but the material skimmed his chest and he looked almost regal. She recognized him from her History of Art lecture. She tried not to stare.

  A professor at the University of Madras had published a new book, and this was why they had gathered—not to sip gin or whiskey or whatever it was that sloshed in her glass and was making her thirstier. Mostly there were old men in suits, their faces clean-shaven. She didn
’t know why she’d come. The book, the celebrated book, sat forlornly on a corner table. Opened, flipped through by half-distracted fingers, and left alone to gape at the ceiling. Viji stood next to it and turned its pages. Slick photographs of temple sculptures, some writing, but not too much. Not enough to distract from the black stone women with V-shaped grins, breasts like coconuts, hips twisted at comical angles, plump thighs and feet jumping, dancing. She felt it was more important to look at art that she couldn’t find around the corner at her local temple. She’d come to university hearing of Manet and Monet and so many others. Yet they always returned to this, didn’t they? Indian sculpture, Indian paintings, Indian everything. India had invented the world, it was generally understood. She wondered if the white students knew. Everything comes from nothing, everything returns to nothing, her mother liked to say. India had invented nothingness, and then filled it to the brim.

  “You must be bored with those.” He stood beside her, not looking at her, looking at the page between them. She couldn’t decide what to say. “Yes” would be inaccurate. “Well, I’ll never tire of them,” he said. His voice swaggered and the liquor scent was faint on his breath. But when she looked up, he seemed nervous. He stared intently at the page. If she had been in a film, she would have glanced up and said something clever.

  “You like them, then,”was what came out. “Very much.”

  “Is that why you came here?”

  He didn’t answer, only sipped at the drink in his hand.

  She sipped hers. She could feel the heat off his shoulder. If this were a film, he would have touched her hand and they’d be dancing now in Kashmiri hills, him chasing her around patient trees until it started raining and she slowed to let him catch her, to let him hold her at the waist and guide her dripping to the shelter of a willow. But this was no film. They stared at the sculptures on the page. Suddenly, the breasts were too big, the smiles hysteric. Viji had said the wrong thing, or the boring bland thing, and he was disappointed. She closed her eyes and sipped her drink. He was going to walk away from her. She would be alone again with this book.

  “This one’s from the Madurai temple, isn’t it?” He hadn’t gone. He looked at her now. When she spoke, his gaze hovered on her cheek, and she could tell he wasn’t listening.

  Viji was glad for the house’s cool. It was late August, and still the sun was ruthless. The children were swimming at the Bauers’ and the house was empty. In the puja room, she gathered yesterday’s flowers and put them on a separate tray to be thrown out. She lit the small oil lamps on each shelf. After she recited her prayers, she dabbed her finger in the pot of vibhuti and pressed a dot of the gray ash to her forehead. She did the same with the pot of red powder. Then she turned to her mother’s picture. This one always came first. She pressed red powder to the photo’s forehead, where years of morning pujas had left a dense crimson stain.

  “You were thinking about that night again, weren’t you?” the photo asked. Viji was startled but not shocked to hear her mother’s voice. She tried to ignore her. “There’s nothing wrong with reminiscing, my girl.”

  Viji closed her eyes and nodded.

  And then her mother did something she’d rarely done when she was alive. She giggled. “How frightened you were! How surprised!”

  Viji smiled in spite of herself. She pressed red powder to the foreheads of other photos: her uncle, George’s mother, Anjali.

  “Like a guilty little girl, caught stealing sweets from the kitchen.”

  It wasn’t that night, Amma.

  “Whichever night it was. That night, the next night, who knows how many nights there were!”

  When her mother died, so many miles away, the news tore through her like a firestorm. She hadn’t known at the time that people came back. Now, sometimes, she wished they’d leave for good.

  “So stubborn you are. You never listened. No! You listened very carefully, and then you did exactly the opposite.”

  When her mother died, grief took over, as it was expected to. But even stronger was the slow-brewing realization that home was just a house now, tucked into a corner of Madras, containing tables and chairs and beds. It also contained two aunts and her sister, Shanta, stubborn-lipped, slant-nosed, and very far away. The letters between Viji and Shanta never stopped, no matter how long Viji stayed away. They coursed with empty reassurances that all was well. They contained nothing but the scant news of daily comings and goings, talk of the weather and the triplets’ progress at school. Shanta had no family of her own, so her letters spoke mostly of their aunts, spinsters themselves with little besides arthritis and resentment to fill their days. Gone was Shanta’s teasing, her unsolicited advice. Sterilized by time were Viji’s probing questions, her demands for gossip. But as years passed and the oceans widened between them and the continents stretched long and dry, the letters continued, proving to each of the sisters that the other still existed.

  Viji spooned water from the silver cup into her palm and sipped it.

  “I suppose you’re happy with the way your life has turned out.”

  From Amma’s death had grown the first tendrils of a birth: there and then her life with George began. It started as a collection of cells, sewing themselves together inside her, forming systems, organs, transparent limbs. Before this, she had loved George in frantic climaxes. Now her love was a growing thing.

  Viji looked straight at her mother. I think I should be happy. Shouldn’t I?

  Between her legs, up inside her now, fire. Her mother didn’t answer.

  That night. She’d called it this ever since it had happened, because she didn’t know what else to call it. That night had been full of everything Viji had never known before. Uncertainty, when George offered to refresh her drink. She’d looked at the drained glass of ice in her hand. “What are you drinking?” he’d asked, expecting her to know. Uncertainty again, when he asked her if she wanted to meet his classmates, and brought her over to speak to the others. She had nothing to say, but they spoke and smiled at her, apple-cheeked. Embarrassment, when an old Englishman stumbled forward, peered into her face, and told her she looked like a goddess sculpture from the Kusana dynasty. Guilt, when George asked her if she wanted to come to his room for a cup of tea, as he had some books on Manet. She’d told her mother she’d be home by nine. Extreme guilt, when she accepted his offer. Weightlessness, as they walked across the campus green to his hostel. Silence, as she relinquished every voice, followed him upstairs, past staring male eyes, and into his room. An unexpected rush of blood to the head when she sat on his bed and he sat next to her, flipped through an art book, his arm pressed against hers. An unbearable, shrieking, ecstatic rush of blood through her entire being when he closed the book in her lap, slid his arm around her waist, and kissed her. Freedom, when she let go and felt herself plunge into the mattress.

  She had felt other things as well. But she preferred not to include them in her list. Calm, for example—a solitary, inhuman calm, as she gathered her sari from the floor and wrapped it around herself. The calm turned to shaking fingers that dropped the folded pleats and forced her to start again, two times, three times. Fear, walking downstairs with George, past staring male eyes, and into the night. Fear again, when she saw that it was ten o’clock and knew she would have to run home. Tingling, warm pain between her legs, where his hands had been, as she ran across the campus green. Relief, when she got home and found that her mother was still at the neighbor’s. And leaden fatigue, when she undressed herself, picked the mangled jasmine buds from her hair, and fell into bed. The evening was still hot on her skin; it rode against her neck and through her belly. She had smiled all night, in spite of everything, and kept herself awake, replaying every minute, until the first blue of dawn.

  If Viji had looked out the bay window that afternoon, she would have disapproved. Stan stood by the pool house, fishing hat cocked over his eyes, mug of tea in hand. The children, still in swimsuits, knelt by the bushes that clustered at the far end of t
he pool house, digging into the dark earth with their fingernails.

  “Hold on, I’ll get a stick,” Avi said, and ran toward the eucalyptus trees at the back of the property.

  “A stick won’t make a difference; we can dig better with our hands.” Kieran’s cheek and knees were smudged black, and a pile of soil collected at his feet as he raked palmfuls of mud out of the hole. Slowly, the mound grew higher.

  “How’d you manage to bury it in the first place?” Stan asked.

  “Dunno. I think we had a shovel then.”

  Babygirl leaned on one arm and scooped soil with the other. Avi returned.

  “Here it is!” Kieran shouted. He snatched the stick from Avi’s hand and struck into the hole with it. The stick thudded.

  Twenty minutes later, the treasure chest was freed from the soil. It was really just a shoebox, with a thin line of rope tied around it in a bow.

  HOW TO TIE A REEF KNOT HOW TO DIG A REFILLABLE HOLE HOW TO TELL A REAL DIAMOND FROM A FAKE ONE SOLD BY A DODGY MARKET JEWELER

  “It’s actually a time capsule,” Kieran said, “so scientists in the future will be able to see what life was like now.”

  “It’s not a time capsule, Kieran.”

  “Yes it is.”

  “It’s a treasure chest.”

  “We voted, two to one, remember?”

  “Well, go on, then, don’t matter what you call it,” Stan said. “Show us what’s inside.”

  In the time-capsule treasure chest: two AA batteries, a pair of earrings, a purple jelly bracelet, a book of wordsearch puzzles, Babygirl’s fourth-grade school photo (wallet-size), a calculator with a cracked display screen (stepped on by Avi), a white handkerchief, a rusted miniature racing car (thrown in the pool by Kieran), a square of Bazooka gum (dehydrated to the point of snapping in two), a Peanuts comic, a single silver cuff link, a napkin ring.