“Cross your heart and hope to die?”
“Stick a needle in my eye.”
Kuttima mixed the hot water into the cold and stirred it like a witch’s cauldron. And then, across the room came Shanta, impatient, with big hands to undo Babygirl’s buttons, to pull down her shirt, big hands dripping cold water.
“No!” she cried and ran out the door. She escaped. The boys heard her slippers slapping on the pavement, until they faded to silence. For a few minutes, the only sound in the yard was distant splashing and the trickle of water from a hole in the corner of the bathhouse.
Shanta bustled in now, her face a map of worry, and banged the first vessel on the table. This was normal, Viji knew. Brought up with servants they could no longer afford, Shanta didn’t fill the gap well. But she wouldn’t hire new servants, either, no matter how many times Viji offered to send the money. She said servants couldn’t be trusted anymore. The room buzzed with her sister’s anxiety, and Viji felt the old house returning. Eventually there would be difficulty, but it would build slowly at first. Viji would light the fuse with some small offense, and then each new, minute tangle would lead them further away from the harmony of that morning, closer to an explosion twelve years in the making.
Viji followed her back into the kitchen, and a rush of memory swept over her. The smell of mustard seeds needled the corners of her mouth. The chilies had burst in their frying oil, releasing themselves into Viji’s nasal passages and making her sneeze. When she closed her eyes she could feel her mother again, just behind, and hear the clank of her bangles as she unscrewed the money jar to send Kuttima for sweets. She opened her eyes to a gush of steam that poured from the stove, the smell of new-boiled rice. Shanta spooned it into a serving dish. She watched her sister, bending and reaching and stooping for this pan, that serving spoon, shuffling to the fridge for the stainless steel vessel of yogurt. She had softened and sweetened, like an overripe plum. Too old to pickle, too tender to pucker the lips of those who dared to bite.
“And Uma Athai and Pushpa Athai?” Viji asked. “What of them?”
“I haven’t seen them yet. Where are they?”
“Sleeping. That’s all they do now. Sleep, eat, sleep, eat. Like babies.”
“They’re old.”
“I’m old. They’re mad.”
Viji clicked her tongue and smiled. The boys entered the kitchen, smelling of sandalwood soap. Babygirl followed, still wearing her clothes from the airplane. They examined the black stone floors, and stared up at the brass pots that hung from the ceiling, and the dark shelves crammed with jars collected over decades. Seeing Babygirl, Shanta grabbed her hand and kissed the thumb. “Naughty one, hmm? Sweet and naughty, just like your amma!” Babygirl twisted away, embarrassed to smile, and scratched her nose.
Kuttima spooned fish from the frying pan into a colander, where the oil would drip away.“Go sit,”she ordered.
The family dining table was set now with four banana leaves and stainless steel pots that steamed from beneath their covers. Banana leaves were for special lunches. Shanta worked fast while the food was hot, spooning onto each leaf precise and modest mounds from every vessel. She would eat alone, a dutiful hostess, after the others had finished. Six different dishes, then seven, then eight. Viji tried to remember the last time she had cooked this much. Nine dishes in the end, the auspicious number. There were green beans fried with mustard seed, curried plantains, a dollop of homemade yogurt, tomato chutney, eggplant fried and swimming in cashew-nut gravy, a mound of fresh rice, a crispy puppadam, a teaspoon of garlic pickle, and finally, laid gently in the center, a chunk of fish fried in chili and coriander, swaddled in a crumbling crust. A feast for a daughter who’d been away too long. “Eat,” Viji heard her mother say from somewhere in the room. The clank of her bangles. But it was Shanta’s voice, and Shanta who poured boiled water into their glasses.
Viji peeled the flesh from the fishbone. Her hands trembled and, she felt short of breath, as if unfastening the buttons of a long-lost lover. A ball of rice, a pinch of fish, dipped just so in the garlic pickle, tinged lightly with the sour yogurt. The first morsel passed from her lips to her tongue. She began to cry.
“What’s wrong? Is it too hot?” Shanta asked. “It’s too hot. Kuttima, you made it too hot.”
“I made it the way I’ve always made it—stop talking nonsense.”
“It’s not too hot,” Viji said.
“Living there, isn’t it? Living there and eating hamburger-french-fries. You’ve lived so long with the oatmeal people and now you can’t eat your own food. Isn’t it?”
“It’s not too hot,” Viji tried again. “Kuttima, it’s excellent.”
Kuttima humphed.“And what about the oatmeal children? Too hot for them too?”
The triplets perked up at the word“oatmeal”.“Nothing,” Viji said to them.
“They have oatmeal?”
“No. Do you like your food? Is it too hot?”
“It’s good,” Kieran answered. “But what’s this runny stuff?”
“That’s yogurt.”
It quivered under Kieran’s prodding finger. “It doesn’t taste like yogurt.”
“That’s because it’s homemade.”
“How come you don’t eat regular yogurt?” Kieran asked his aunt.
Shanta looked at Viji. “What is it?” she asked. “He doesn’t like the yogurt?”
“He likes the yogurt.”
“Is it too hot? We can make him something else.”
“It’s yogurt, Shanta, how could it be too hot?”
“Too hot, Kieran?” Shanta asked him in English. “Would you like toast and jam?”
“No thanks.”
“It’s fine, Shanta, not too hot.”
“Kuttima? Go buy some bread.”
“It’s fine, Shanta!”
The fuse was lit. Her first offense. Shanta fell silent. She pinched a few stray grains of rice from the tabletop and passed wordlessly into the kitchen.
There was a tree in front of the house now, a single tree just before the veranda. They used to chop it down whenever it began to grow because a single tree at the front of the house brought bad luck and death. But it had continued to grow, no matter how often they chopped it. They’d hired a gardener to pull out the roots, but he wasn’t able to, not even after Viji’s mother threatened not to pay him. He wouldn’t accept payment, he said, for something he couldn’t do. The more they tried to kill the tree, the harder it tried to grow. But now, Viji saw, they’d decided to leave it alone. Death and luck had found them, tree or no tree. It was taller than she and sprouted young branches, as knock-kneed and feeble as the legs of a fawn.
Behind the solitary tree stretched the veranda, held in by a low adobe wall. Viji felt something release inside, some tension drip off like candle wax, as she opened the gate from the road, her arms full of marigolds. This was home. She knew every corner of it—the sitting room beyond the veranda, behind that the kitchen, and to one side, the formal dining room. To the other side, behind heavy mahogany doors, lay the puja room. She hadn’t been in there yet. Nobody had asked her to go, and something made her stop at its door every time she tried. But now she’d been to the flower lady, her arms were full of offerings, and Shanta was waiting for her to begin their Saturday prayer.
Inside, Viji hesitated at the puja room door, leaning in to smell the wood, the dark resin that curled from it like smoke from a forest.
“Go in, baby.” The old aunt’s voice made her jump. “I haven’t had a bath yet,” she lied.
“Go anyway. Who’s going to care?”
“No, I shouldn’t.”
“What, do you roll in shit every night? You’re clean enough. Go in.”
“No, later.”
“Go!”
“No.”
“Go, I say!” She rapped her cane on the ground. “Ungrateful girl!”
“Athai?” Shanta called. “Leave her alone.”
Pushpa Athai glared at the kit
chen. “Queeny bitch,” she muttered. “Bring my tea!” Viji stood still, hoping her aunt would leave. “Bring my tea, girl!” She beat the floor even harder with her cane. “Deaf! Are you deaf? Bring my tea!” She gawked at Viji with bewildered anger. “Tea! Tea! Tea!” Viji scurried to the kitchen, her arms still full of flowers.
Shanta laughed when she saw her. “Don’t look so scared. I told you they were mad.” She poured a long stream of milky tea from cup to vessel, vessel to cup, cup to vessel, to cool it down. It grew frothier each time. Then she placed the cup on a saucer, leaned over, and whispered, “We’re next, sister.” Viji left her cackling, and took the tea to her aunt.
At last, they were alone again. The aunt had gone up for her morning nap.
“Come,” Shanta took Viji’s hand and grabbed the fistful of marigold strands.Viji started toward the mahogany doors. “Not there! This way.”
Up one flight of stairs, up the next, was a room that had once been used to store the wedding trousseaux of the women in the family. The great wooden chests towered against the wall, stacked high in the shadows, filling the room like boxed prayers. Their only use now was to block the light from the single window. To lift their lids would bring up a torrent of moths, the oaky smell of old silk, the softly rustling memory of cloth on cloth from the last time they were folded and locked away. In Viji’s trousseau would be three saris: one Kancheevarum silk, one Benares silk, one pure crepe silk, the very minimum for a bride. They’d had no time to shop, and besides, her groom wouldn’t have known the difference. There were no inlaws demanding a dowry, and George had no sisters to pick over the trousseau and sniff at her jewels. It was easy to marry a vellakaran; they had no demands aside from beauty and intelligence and personality. Still, Viji’s mother had acted like she was doing George a favor. She called him Horlicks behind his back, her malted-milk son-in-law.
Shanta lit the oil lamps, and in the tepid haze Viji could see the shelves of idols, statues, and framed paintings, a small stone lingam. The dark flickered when she exhaled. Along the wall, the photographs—her cousin, a great-aunt, and so many others who’d receded to the corners of her memory, whom she hadn’t thought about in years. Busily, Shanta arranged the marigolds around the picture frames and idols.
“Why here?” Viji asked.
“Hmm?” Shanta was dotting red ash onto the foreheads of the photographs.
“Why is the puja room here? What happened to the old one?”
“The aunts pray there.”
“And?”
“And?”
“Why can’t you use that one?”
Shanta turned to her, her forehead furrowed. “You don’t like this one?”
“No—yes, but why have a separate one?”
Shanta considered her languidly, then returned to her tasks, humming. Silently they sat for several minutes, cross-legged on the floor, contemplating the shelves of deities, not uttering a single prayer, not even to themselves. At last, Shanta spoke. “This is mine,” she whispered. “That is theirs.”
Four women who never left a house instead claimed every corner of it, scurried to its edges like roaches, and slipped under its walls. Women in a house together went to great lengths to stake out their territory. Shanta couldn’t bring herself to pray in the same room as her aunts, yet she fed them and dressed them and listened to their barmy demands day after day, knowing that only death would bring an end to it.
“Sister,” Viji whispered. “Come live with me.” But Shanta was deep in prayer now, her eyes closed and her lips tripping over the silent words.
That afternoon in the library, Viji picked a book off the shelf, an old schoolbook of poetry, and pressed the open pages against her nose. This was the smell of books in India. If she took this book home with her, she’d be able to smell it whenever she wanted, for a time, until the scent faded and smelled like nothing, like everything else in Sacramento. She closed her eyes. Very nearly, she could hear the susurrations of the pages piled high around her. Remember, they said.
She remembered a swing—a solid mahogany platform that hung from the ceiling by heavy chains. It was high, and had no back or side supports. It wasn’t a swing for children. She’d tried to hoist herself onto it once and ended up stuck, forearms clamped against the hard wood, knowing that letting go would send her crashing to the marble floor. Yet she wasn’t strong enough to thrust her legs onto the seat. She was stuck. Her elbows stung. She called out for her mother, but nobody came. Soon she was crying, with no free hand to wipe her tears or her dribbling nose.
This was her first memory, the first thing she knew had happened, that wasn’t told to her by someone older. She couldn’t remember if she eventually fell to the floor, or if somebody found her and helped her down. She asked her sister about it.
“What swing?” Shanta said. “We never had a swing in this house.” And then, “Swing, there was no swing. Only fancy people had swings in those days.”
Viji remembered it was brown as syrup, and that it smelled of resin. She knew that its chains were made of shining brass, and that the floor below had black and white checks. And as she hung there damp-faced, the blunt wood digging into her belly, a breeze through the window had coaxed the swing into a gentle sway. She was rocking through the air at last, legs clenched, swinging just slightly. She had stopped crying then, and held on tighter.
That afternoon Viji came upon her sons hurling themselves onto the divan and laughing uncontrollably at the obscene blurp of the plastic sofa cover. “Mom,” Avi squealed, “the sofa’s farting.”
“Yes, ha ha,” Viji said. “Where is your sister?”
“I dunno. She made it fart first and then she got mad.”
Babygirl stepped into the room then, still scowling at her brothers. This set them off again, pouncing and laughing and blurping and getting louder and louder. Such a commotion sounded devilish in the yawning old house.
“Kieran, Avi,” Viji called over the din. “KIERAN, AVI.” They stopped and waited. Well-behaved. “Do you have any homework?” They blinked at her. “You didn’t bring any?”
“It’s Christmas. Our only homework is to write about our holiday heritage.”
She sighed. She hadn’t a clue what this meant, this holiday heritage. When she was the triplets’ age, she was doing geometry. “Let’s see the house, then.” She took them all over the three-story building, into former bedrooms that held only broken bits of furniture, into the game room stacked with dusty carom boards and domino sets, to the library guarded still by sentinel rows of forgotten books, as faded now as the wallpaper, rubbed into silence by years of neglect. Her father had loved this room. She used to find him in here, sitting silently, gazing at a far shelf or running his hand over the long, cool table. When he left, nobody else ventured in—not even Viji dared to enter with her books.
She found Babygirl and took all three of them to the rooftop, crisscrossed with clotheslines. On the ground Kuttima had spread sheets of newspaper, lined with row upon row of fat chili peppers and lemon rinds, drying in the sun to be stored and pickled. From here they could see Madras, hung with power lines and clotheslines of white dhotis flapping in the wind. The palm trees were pregnant with coconuts. Surrounding them were rooftops of tidy terraces and ceramic tiles, and further out were the puttycolored roofs of the slums, kneeling to one side, warped by heat and faded by repetition. A wind blew through the city and swept up the smell of rain. Viji’s nostrils filled with sky, pink as cotton candy and thick with moisture. She thought suddenly of the blue, blue California sky, a color she would never see in Madras.
“See there.” She pointed to the local temple with its carved stone tiers, stacked like a charcoal wedding cake. Beyond it rose the brown crosses of the Episcopal church.
“Mom, what are we doing for Christmas?” Avi asked.
“We’re not having Christmas, Avi.”
“What?” He gaped at her in disbelief.
“In India only the Christians have Christmas.”
&n
bsp; “But we’re Christian. Dad’s Christian.”
“Daddy’s a compassionate atheist.”
“What?”
“How come we can’t do Christmas?” Babygirl accused.
“I told you. What do you want, a Christmas tree?”
“Yes!”
“They don’t have them here. Shall I send you to the church?”
“No! We want Christmas!”
“They don’t do it the same way here, Babygirl. You wouldn’t like it.” She’d always felt sad for the Christians she saw, singing off-rhythm songs about Jesus, not even in their own language, making childish chalk drawings of Santa Claus, decorating their verandas in gaudy foil, members of a club that no one wanted to join.
That evening, Viji woke from a nap to total darkness. Not even the streetlamps outside her window were on, nor were the veranda lights. The power had gone. “Shanta?” she called. “Avi? Kieran?” She felt her way downstairs, careful not to slip, though she knew these steps by heart. The street outside had fallen quiet, as it often did on Sunday evenings, and the house was perfectly still. Only a cloud of light glowed from deep within the kitchen. Theirs had been the first house in this district to have electric lighting. Now all the houses had it, but the current was sure to fail at least twice a day. Viji cursed the darkness softly as she entered. “I’m here,” she announced to the empty front room. If her sister heard, she didn’t respond. They were in the kitchen, Babygirl seated on the floor by Kuttima, peeling a ginger root with her fingernail. The boys sat next to an oil lamp on the ground and played cards with a deck from the airline. The darkness calmed them. When she was young, the family always came together at these times, gathering around a candle to wait for the lights to come back. Shanta sat on a chair against the wall, eyes closed, focused on a tune she was humming. She fanned herself with a magazine, released by the dark from her evening tasks. Work stopped when the current went. Only gnats churned silently, charmed by the flames. The children, with nothing more to do, began to count them.
The Prayer Room Page 16