PART II
CHAPTER ONE
“Mom. Mom.”
“What?”
“That man has no legs.”
“Don’t stare, Kieran.”
“What happened to his legs?” The man sat on a makeshift cart with wheels and pushed himself along with his knuckles. Dreadlocks fell down his naked back.
“Was it from the war?”
“What war?”
“You know, the Vietnam War.”
Viji laughed out loud for the first time in days. “What are they teaching in that school?” They followed their porter, a boy no older or taller than the triplets, as he carried one suitcase on his head and pulled the other along behind him. They passed a wall of brown faces, eager, staring, smiling, looking past them for relatives who were due to file out of the arrivals hall. “Hurry,” she urged. She wanted to get home, but the children moved so slowly, gazing around, stopping, staring, wasting time. She hurried to the waiting taxi to make sure the porter didn’t “accidentally” leave one of their suitcases on the ground. A five rupee tip for his services. What could anyone possibly do with five rupees? Fifty rupees. The porter locked eyes with her and grinned, then galloped away before she could change her mind.
Madras after midnight. They drove past black-andwhite-striped barriers that divided the city’s main avenues. Low huts lined the streets, and trees sprouted from piles of debris. Atop the piles women squatted, sorting through the rubble, while men hacked at the larger rocks with pickaxes. It was cool after midnight, a better time to work. Lanterns lit the piles around them, and from the car Viji could see the mosquito clouds that gathered around each light. They sped by ghostly gray skeletons of buildings, great gaping beehives still missing their windows and doors. Around them, spindly towers of scaffolding rose like scarecrows into the sky. She was in a world half-finished. Billboards flashed past as the car picked up speed: cinema heroines with fair skin and dangerous eyebrows, hair thicker and blacker than the ocean. Heroes with mustaches, villains with mustaches. The children had fallen asleep.
As soon as they were on the outskirts, freed from the nocturnal throat of the city, the quiet residential areas began to look familiar. Even under the haze of night she recognized the signposts, the low walls that lined the road, plastered with cinema posters and government warnings to POST NO BILLS. Yes, this signpost was familiar, this house with the Ganesh carved into the side; she knew that stone walkway, this fenced-in park with the grass and coconut trees. She recognized the rhythm of the bumpy road, the groaning tires told her she was close to home. Verandas and high balconies in green-pink-beige-white-yellow, houses like frosted cupcakes.
The taxi slowed to a halt. She knew this house. This was hers. A bare lightbulb over the veranda switched on when the driver turned off his engine. Elsewhere on the street, veranda lights switched on and people emerged in doorways and stood in clusters to watch. She shook the children awake and pulled them from the car. They walked hunchbacked with sleep, whimpering.
The door opened and Shanta emerged. Viji ran down the walkway and dropped her bags, pushed past the children, and forgot to pay the driver. Her sister stood waiting. Warm arms, home.
With dawn came the first drumbeats of the day, the clopping of a bullock cart, the squeak of the neighbor’s gate, the perpetual bark of a local dog. The shrieking dog was still alive. She’d heard it every day growing up, a cry that shredded the mist like a woman’s scream. Now Viji heard it in her dream. She opened one eye to the hazy morning. The bark came again. She opened the other eye, this one crusted with sleep. The digital clock on the dresser flicked over to 4:23. She was wide awake now and still swollen from the flight. Around her, the bed was littered with triplets. Kieran and Babygirl on either side, Avi at the foot. They’d wandered in during the night and now they lay with arms outstretched, making the air even muggier.
This was her bed, though it seemed smaller now. This was the bed she’d fallen into every night of her life, the same bed she’d tossed on for hours after those first meetings with George. She’d lain hot and wide-eyed between these sheets, content that she’d escaped another punishment, happy to sacrifice another night’s sleep to her wandering thoughts.
George. George would have found her note, would have read it once and then again, then sat down and read it again and then looked around the room for clarification the way he always did. He would want to phone her, to demand to know what was going on, but he wouldn’t have a number. She’d said that she would phone him as soon as she could. She would put this off and put this off, not wanting to look through the neighborhood for the STD, the international calling center. But when she did speak to him, his voice would be calm and measured. He would ask her questions and expect to be answered. She felt ashamed now, and childish for running away. A grown woman would have told him the truth of what she felt, in person and eye to eye. A grown woman would have at least bid him a proper farewell.
But really, given the opportunity, what would she say? Over the past few weeks, every time she thought of speaking frankly, she stopped herself. Words were liabilities, capable of skidding out of control and giving things away. Like the fact that she was going to India and wasn’t sure about returning. Like the fact that as she kissed George at the airport and felt his confidence course through her, she wanted nothing more than to shatter it. How could she tell this man, who stood before her clutching half a cinnamon bun, that she might be leaving forever? There’d been a quiet moment, just after dawn, when Viji would have liked to say goodbye. But he had been asleep, and all she could do was brush the hair from his eye. How soft he had looked while sleeping.
Now she rose and navigated her way past sleeping arms and legs. Stone stairs cool and ashy beneath her feet, Viji went down to the kitchen.
Kuttima was a servant lady who’d been with them since both she and Viji were children. She’d come to them motherless, shorter than the broom she held, with arms as thin as blades of grass. She stayed with the family through her teenage years, through learning to read and write, through her marriage and motherhood and widowhood. In this time she’d graduated from sweeper to errand girl to kitchen helper to head chef. She was the central cog that held their house together. Now, she sat on a straw mat spread over the kitchen floor, chopping plantains with what looked like a Saracen’s sword.
It had once belonged to Old Krishnan, the cook Viji’s mother had hired when the family had enough money to hire such people. It had chopped leathery mutton and potatoes for curries heavy with starch and ghee. But when Old Krishnan was found drunk and dead outside a city brothel, the knife had passed over to Kuttima. And there lay the secret of Kuttima’s rise within the household—not in the knife, but in the wonders through which it sliced. With Old Krishnan went the stodgy sameness of local food, and into the void he left, Kuttima brought the gentle cuisine of the Kerala coast. It came from her without instruction, as instinctively as dancing or laughing. For breakfast, there were banana curries and spongy coconut pancakes with thick middles, chewy and faintly sweet, the frenzied patties of vermicelli noodles, steamed and soaked in coconut milk and sugar, sending up hot vapors before they cooled on the table. Kuttima could tell which fish vendors sold good meaty pieces, and which sold the gritty bracken from the bottom of the net. She used to say she could tell by their faces. See him, she warned Viji, Mister
Smiley-Smiley? Selling shit, that one. Him with the beady eye? Look at him, how greedy he is, he doesn’t want to give it up. Let’s go to him. Viji thought of Kuttima’s fried chili fish, and her stomach twisted with longing.
“Well, well,” Kuttima chimed. “Sleeping Beauty’s decided to join us, I see.” She looked around the empty room for agreement. “Had a good sleep, Sleeping Beauty?” In the distance, the dog shrieked.
“Yes, good enough.” It felt strange to speak Tamil again. Either sleepiness or lack of practice had turned Viji’s tongue thick and foolish. Kuttima barely looked at her, just chopped away at her plantain, as if Viji h
ad always been in this house, hadn’t married a foreigner, hadn’t disappeared for twelve years and then turned up with three children and suitcases, wild-eyed with jet-lag, too groggy even for a bath. “Where is everyone?”
“Asleep in their beds, like you.” She hacked at a plantain and the tip went flying. Viji picked it up for her. “Only Kuttima gets up this early. Only Kuttima makes the breakfast and boils the coffee and reminds the rooster to crow.”
Viji smiled. “Without you, we’d all be eating street snacks.”
She grunted. “There was a time when you would have liked that. Home food was never good enough for Sleeping Beauty.”
“That’s not true!”
“It is. Street Goat, that’s what we called you. Always coming home with a belly full of fried stuff and no room left for dinner.”
Viji studied the woman, trying to work out if she was younger or older than Viji. Kuttima had always been miniature, hence her name. Her doe eyes and crooked teeth gave her the air of a small girl. But now she was hunched and graying. Fatty hills of flesh peeked from the back of her sari blouse.
“And what would Sleeping Beauty like for breakfast?”
“Anything.”
“Anything. What do you eat over there? Hmm? Cawn fa-lake?” She tried the words and hooted, shaking her head. “Go sit,” she ordered. “I’ll bring your coffee.”
“No, I’ll do it.” From a pot clattering on the stove, Viji poured boiling water into a steel cafetière. She could smell the chicory in the coffee as she waited for it to filter. Behind her, she could feel her mother, ready to shout an order, filling the kitchen with her voice and her belly and her loud laugh. Hot breath whispered against Viji’s neck and she turned. Nobody there, but her ear still tingled.
With a cup of milky sweet coffee, she passed from the kitchen to the sitting room. Above her a ceiling fan ticked over slowly. Low divans stretched along the four walls, covered now in clear plastic. She sat, straight-backed. She felt formal, a guest in her own home with no host to receive her. The plastic groaned when she slumped back and let her knees splay open. How they would have scolded her, if anyone could see.
The room hadn’t changed at all. Its scant array of objects still hung in the same places—the cuckoo clock above the door (brought from Switzerland by her uncle), her grandmother’s framed needlepoint, a weathered calendar of painted flowers that changed every year but always looked the same. On the wall behind her was an oil painting of a village woman, her sari draped over her hair, a brass pot resting on the dramatic curve of her hip. It was painted in shades that were typically Indian, mustard and brown and wild, muddy green. She turned away. There was a television in the room now, with a doily and a small clock on top of it. That was the only change.
The clock on the television clicked to five. Her sister would be up soon. Her two aunts still lived upstairs as well. Viji drank her coffee and waited for them to come down, to fill her world and make it recognizable. The ceiling fan released a sigh, then ticked louder. It stirred no air at all.
“Vijaya,” her sister’s voice came softly from the stairs. She stood like a painting, hand on the banister, in a crisp blue cotton sari. Shanta came to the divan, sat down with Viji, stroked the hair on her sister’s temple. In her eyes Viji saw love, yes, but beyond this, in the dense black of the pupil, lay more than she could read, eyes ponderous with truth and age. Shanta had never married, and, of course, by this point she never would. She was of this house, born here and sewn into it forever, like the nuns in their convent school who’d been wed to the musty classroom walls and the cool wooden pews of the chapel.
Shanta had softened in some way, like newspaper left out in the damp. She didn’t crackle the way she used to. Old Shanta would have been in the kitchen, shouting orders and clanging pots just for the noise of it, and calling Viji a dirty dog for having not bathed yet. New Shanta sat heavily on the divan and stroked Viji’s arm, two fingers from wrist to elbow, purposefully, as if trying to smooth away the years of their separation. Sleep washed over Viji and she rested her head on her sister’s shoulder. The ceiling fan ticked off the seconds.
Shanta found a gray hair on Viji’s temple and pulled it out. Viji squealed and rubbed the itch away. Shanta giggled, “Krishna, see what happens when you leave us so long?” The gray hair sprung giddily from between her fingers and landed somewhere on the floor. “What shall we feed you first, ha? Some idli?” Viji shook her head. Shanta grasped her wrist. “Something sweet, then?” Viji looked down and smiled. Her sister shook her wrist. “Something sweet. Still the same.”
“È Shanta!” Kuttima called from the kitchen.
“Ha,” her sister called back, eyes fixed on Viji’s face. Shanta’s face had grown plump around the bend in her nose, the depression in her cheek. One eye was half-closed, stuck in the middle of a wink, at the start of a sneeze.
“Shanta!” Kuttima yelled this time.
“Sit,” Shanta whispered. “We’ll make you something sweet.”
Viji was upstairs again, shaking the triplets awake. Avi whined and swatted at her when she stroked his head. Kieran didn’t react at all, but lay heavy and limp and silent. Babygirl scooted away before Viji could even touch her and cocooned herself under the bedspread. The room was marshy with the smell of breath, a miasma of airplanes and upset stomachs. She watched them sleep and wondered if they had any idea where they were. They must have been imagining themselves at home in their beds, surrounded by white walls and carpet, the stark valley winter waiting at the window. What a shock it would be when they opened their eyes and saw this room, with its chalky blue paint, lacquered-wood furniture, and stone floors. How strange to discover that outside of this bed and their mother, they knew nothing and no one. Not even where the bathroom was, or how to get a glass of water, or where the road led that stretched past the veranda, or what that shrieking bark was, or who these women were, populating this house, old and older and oldest. She would let them sleep. And when they woke she would guide them through this world, infants again, showing them what to eat and where to walk and when to sit and how.
A second later, she was being shaken awake. Shanta stood over her. “What happened?” Viji asked. Shanta laughed and slapped her on the bum. Babygirl stirred, sat up in the swirl of bedspread. She looked at Viji, at Shanta, at the boys, and then at the cloudy mirror on the wardrobe.
“Good morning,” Shanta sang. Her English was bold and clearly pronounced. It was the English of the conventschool nuns. At the boom of her voice, Kieran kicked his feet, smacking Avi in the head, and both boys flailed awake. The clock read 12:15. Shanta pulled the triplets out of bed and sniffed affectionately at their foreheads, then grimaced at the smell. Bewildered and looking back to Viji, they were bundled out of the room and down the stairs. Shanta would wash them in the big bath downstairs, with the thoroughness of a mother. She would think nothing of seeing them naked, or letting them see each other naked. Viji didn’t stop her. They would see how things were done in her home. More importantly, she wouldn’t have to show them the toilets and watch their little American mouths fall open. Oh, the toilets, those hole-in-the-ground toilets that even the best houses had. The triplets wouldn’t understand that these were clean, cleaner than the Western kind. She lay back on the bed and dozed a while longer.
The bathhouse was in the garden, a small adobe hut with a thatched roof and gaps at the top of the wall where a very tall person might spy on whoever was bathing. The triplets followed Shanta like a trail of ducks. From the balcony, an old woman stood and watched them, rubbing her belly and thumping her cane. “Come on, come inside,” Shanta said in English. Avi looked at Babygirl, Babygirl and Kieran looked at Avi.
“All of us?”
“Come, come in.”
The bathing hut was dark and humid. Along its wall ran a stone bench, and beneath their bare feet the marble was veined with mud trails. They could still hear the old woman’s cane, thump-thump-thumping to the beat of the dripping tap.
&
nbsp; “Where’s the shower?”
Shanta turned a tap in the corner, and water thudded into a large tin pail. She gestured to them to remove their clothes.
“What?” Avi asked.
“She wants us to take our clothes off.”
“For real?”
“I think so.”
“Ha, yes,” Shanta coaxed. “Take the clothing off.” Because her voice was gentle, Kieran obeyed. Shirt off, shorts off, underwear off, he hung them from the hook on the door, then stood pale and soft in the shadows. Avi shrugged and whipped off his T-shirt and dropped it on the wet floor. Shorts off, underwear off, he looked thin and dark next to his brother. Now both boys were naked and holding their hands over their crotches, which made Shanta laugh when she saw.
Babygirl stood in the doorway, still fully clothed, watching the water gush into the pail. Behind her, the door opened and Kuttima came in. She carried a cauldron of steaming hot water, freshly boiled.
“Everyone is in here.” Babygirl murmured to her brothers.
“I know. It’s weird.”
“Neha,” Shanta called to Babygirl. She gestured to her to remove her clothes. Babygirl shook her head vigorously, waved her arms across her chest.
“No,” she said, “Uh-uh.”
“Just do it,” Avi urged, shifting from foot to foot. “It’s getting cold.”
Kieran looked sleepily at her. They were resigned to this, it seemed. “We won’t look, promise.”
The Prayer Room Page 15