The Prayer Room

by Shanthi Sekaran

  The kitchen fell into silence, save for the clacking of Stan’s dentures. When he’d finished, George collected the empty plates and stacked them in the dishwasher.

  “I’m off,” Stan said. He held his down coat and pulled his fisherman’s hat over his eyes, as he’d done every evening after dinner for as long as George could remember, before heading out to the pub. This time he’d be going to Lupe’s, maybe to the movies with her, maybe to her house, maybe someplace George hadn’t even thought of, like dancing or bingo or church.

  “Is someone picking you up?”

  “Yep.”

  “See you later then, Dad.”

  Stan seemed startled by this pleasantry. “Aye,” he said.

  George wiped fish-finger crumbs off the table and watched as Stan stood straight-backed on the front porch, hands in his pockets, waiting for the flash of headlights.

  When one was on vacation from one’s family, what did one do? George sat in his study to consider. He could very easily:

  Order a pizza.

  Watch television until his eyes teared.

  Buy a dirty magazine.

  Start that journal article he’d been meaning to write. Hire a stripper. (He’d done it once before for a college friend’s bachelor party. A mistake from the start—she’d been squat and pigeon-breasted, chewed gum, and chatted through her performance: So where ya from, then? So when’s the wedding, then? So wot’s it ya do, then?)

  Call someone, anyone, and speak without interruption.

  Write a letter to Viji. He missed her. She filled up his evenings, even when they did nothing.

  Walk naked through the living room.

  Walk naked from the waist down, through the living room and into the kitchen, out the back door, through the shriveling cold of the yard, around the pool, along the thorny bushes, around the shuffleboard court, back inside, past the television, back through the living room, up the stairs down the stairs, up the stairs down the stairs, his nudity waggling between his legs like a giddy earthworm for all the world—or in his case none of the world—to see.

  The doorbell rang, eight deep chimes, one missing in the middle. Hastily, he bundled his thoughts and shut the dishwasher. He opened the door.

  “I was driving by and saw you in the window,” Kamla said.

  “Oh,” he replied. “Okay.” His cheeks were flushing.

  “Can I come in?”

  “Of course. Of course!”

  She stood in the entryway. “The house is quiet.” The only sound came from the final fading reverberations of the doorbell. Then thesy, too, melted into silence. George and Kamla turned together and looked at the split-level living room, now a well of shadow.

  “How about some tea?” Kamla asked.

  George inhaled sharply. “Yes. Okay. Come in. Sorry. Come in.” Tea George could do. Once during exams, he wanted to tell Kamla, he’d risen in the middle of the night, made a pot of tea, and left it in the kitchen undrunk, with no recollection of it in the morning. Tea he could do in his sleep.

  She pulled the sugar from the cupboard. “Do you have cardamom?”

  “No. I’m not sure. That’s more Viji’s department.”

  She turned to him and tut-tutted.“Really, George, you’re useless!” Then she reached over and squeezed his hand.

  “Viji’s not here,” he blurted before he could stop himself. Kamla blinked back at him. “She—she’s out of town. With the children”

  “Oh—I know.” She bit her upper lip.“I know she’s not here. Is that all right? Are you busy?”

  He was a fool and a cretin, and all he could do was say that of course, of course it was all right. They stood in silence and listened to the tea brew.

  “So”’ Kamla began, and stopped. She leaned on the counter. She carried the talk almost single-handedly, with an ease that made George grateful for every word she uttered. It was she who fed the conversation, he who rode its gentle wave. They spoke about the children the car the weather the malls the highways the university the cost of heating Ronald Reagan Ronald McDonald Christmas Hanukkah this new African one and Diwali.

  George was aware that he’d been tapping his finger on the counter and laughing at every pause, like some sort of mental degenerate. He wondered how much longer he’d have to keep this up, this charade of being a normally functioning person, a witty and social and likeable adult. When Kamla smiled and looked directly into his eyes, he choked a little on his own saliva.

  When he was a child, he’d been unable to speak to his friends in front of his parents. It was intolerable to be watched in conversation, to be observed for later comment. His parents weren’t here now, but Viji was. She was everywhere in the kitchen, crouched in the cupboards, swinging from the refrigerator door, riding the slick sharp wheel of the electric can opener. She lurked in every slurp of tea, nuzzled her way into the pauses.

  “Have you spoken to Viji?” Kamla asked, at last.

  “Hmm?” He feigned nonchalance. “Oh, yes, actually. Just the other day, in fact.”

  “And she’s fine?”

  “And she’s fine,” he nodded judiciously.

  “It must be nice for her, you know, to be back home again. After so long.”

  Of course—Kamla knew nothing of the note, of Viji’s silence, of that fleeting troubled glaze over her eyes when he had bid her goodbye. Or did she?

  The words he wanted lay somewhere between his testicles and his stomach. They quivered: “Did she say anything to you? Ever?”

  Raised eyebrows. “Like what?”

  “Like why she left, or—”

  Kamla looked at him quizzically and smiled. That smile meant something. “Not really,” George stood in silence, unsure of whether to push on. “She didn’t leave George, did she? It’s only a holiday. I could use a holiday”She smirked. “You men. Such babes in arms. Always struggling to be independent and then when it comes, you don’t know what to do with yourselves.”

  “But surely—I mean, it was a bit sudden, you know, surely she must have said something.”

  “Hmm, no. I was thinking of taking Anisha to the beach. She likes the beach, you know, more than the mountains. Her father was a mountain person. A mountain man.” He felt her watching him. “She wasn’t very happy, you know, George. I think she needed to see her family again.”

  But I’m her family, he wanted to say. “Right. Right. I suppose I don’t miss my own family in quite the same way.”

  “Well, your family’s here.” She nodded at the pack of tobacco Stan had left on the counter.

  “I suppose you’re right.”

  “But you must miss England, don’t you?”

  George shrugged. (Of course he missed England. But he missed more than England. If he acknowledged the void, really looked down into it, he’d see that it would take more than a landmass to fill it.)

  Kamla sniffed at the air. “Smells fishy.”

  “Fish fingers.”

  “Oh. You don’t know how to cook?”

  Forty minutes later, George saw Kamla to the door. She tucked her hair behind her ear and said goodbye. And then, because men on vacation from their families often did things they couldn’t explain, he said, “I have a Christmas party tomorrow.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “Well, a holiday party, Christmas, Hanukkah.”

  She waited.

  “Fancy going?”

  She considered, hand on doorknob, then smiled that inscrutable smile. “No. Not really. But thank you.”

  George nodded.

  “Goodbye.”

  “Bye.”

  He closed the door and shoved his face into the cold fragrant wood. “Shit,” he said. “Buggery.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Shame on you , Viji scolded herself. Shame, shame, shame, behaving like those teenagers on television. She’d hung up on George, and now it embarrassed her to think of that letter she’d written. She looked around at the street that tumbled and wheezed around her, a cacophony of storefront
s, a train wreck. The STD office keeled into the sari shop, which butted against the sweet shop, which rammed into the grungy teahouse, which crashed into the tailor’s. She flapped her feet, yellow with silt from the crumbling road. She would wash them before she entered the house. What was once just ground, just normal inevitable dust, was now dirt.

  On the veranda, three small pairs of shoes waited, which meant the children were inside. The day before, they’d wandered into the streets and gotten lost. They had become things of fascination for the local children, who’d fingered their hair and left grubby marks on their clothes. They’d been brought back by a secretary from a doctor’s office around the corner.

  Inside, the house was dark, the only sound the whip of the ceiling fan. Then, from the kitchen, familiar voices, the clank of a pot. She slipped upstairs to the library to be alone.

  But when she opened the door, someone was already in there. She gasped and closed it. He was shoulders and a head and sat in a shadowy corner. “Shanta,” she called, but not loudly enough, because nobody answered from downstairs. Maybe they had a visitor. Maybe they had a visitor and she’d just rudely shut the door in his face. She prepared a smile and opened the door again. There was nobody. “Hello?” she asked.“Hello-oooh,” she cooed, like a true-blue Maple Grove housewife. Nobody. Her heart tripped over itself and she had to breathe slowly to calm down.

  “I’ll sit down,” she said, out loud, because it helped to hear real sound. She did sit down, in the chair opposite her father’s favorite. Arms on the armrests. She sat for several minutes, until at last she decided there was nobody in here, it was all in her head. She sighed once, then again, hoping it would help her relax.

  This was her father’s safe haven. He’d surrounded himself in here with books. Did they hold the answers? They were other people’s words. They had little to do with her. Words, in general, had little to do with the impulses and mysterious flashes of sound and sight that made up daily living.

  She remembered him as a man with a massive face and a vast plane of a forehead. He was clean shaven, except for the thick sideburns that cradled his face. His eyes were wide. His body, in comparison, was thin and feline. He was kind. He angered easily.

  She’d always known he was something of an outcast. A magistrate, yes, but a stranger everywhere he went. Maybe that’s why he liked it in here. Books didn’t require him to say anything or be anything. She’d once heard him called an idiot. She hidn’t remembered it until just now, and the thought of it pained her. It was the word her mother’s mother used, and not in the way most mothersin-law used it. What she meant was that Appa was subpar, recallable goods.

  Every day he swallowed pills that resided at the bottom of a silver cup. Viji used to poke at them with her fingers. They were smooth like beetles, red like rust, blue like Krishna. He would point to things. Yes, she remembered now. He would see things before anyone else did, so quickly that when she looked, they’d be gone. He once saw a well in the courtyard, and a girl with red hair.

  What she remembered best was the large, warm presence of him, the way he’d turn her upside down and hold her by the ankles and swing her like a pendulum. And yet gnawing inside of him had been something that was invisible to her, a small girl hanging by her ankles, trying not to laugh because laughing made it harder to breathe, her mouth tight with glee and gasping. In the hanging-fromher-ankles world, everything had been born anew, from the upside-down gate to the upside-down tree stump that grew from the dirt sky, to the upside-down dog across the street, barking into the ground. Somewhere in there, something must have happened. Something in that upside-down world of theirs had made her father want to leave, to stay away forever.

  “You can’t go there.” The guard had stood before Viji. He wasn’t much taller than she was, though she was ten and he a grown man, but the thick khaki fabric of his uniform, the cap pulled low over his eyes, gave him a certain authority.

  The marble floors cooled the courthouse. They were polished to a shine, but still the building smelled of stagnant water. Beyond the guard was a reception desk, and beyond that, an occasional adult roaming past. Shanta stood a few feet behind her, poised to step forward and drag her away.

  “I’m looking for my father, sir.”

  “Who is your father?”

  “A magistrate, sir. He works here.”

  “Do you have an appointment?”

  “No.”

  “Then no entry.”

  “Please, sir—”

  The guard barked an order at a man who squatted against the wall. The man scurried to his feet and ran from the building. In less than a minute, he returned with a steel tumbler of tea. The guard held it a few inches above his lips and poured it in a stream down his throat, glugging rhythmically, steam rising from his lips.

  “Go away.” He clicked his tongue and hissed at Viji. “Off with you, or you’ll end up in this court for real.”

  The courthouse was a day away from crumbling. Every afternoon felt like the last day of the building’s life. She had been here three times already, standing outside of it after school, fingering the cracks in its giant pillars. Appa had left more than a week before, and now she was stuck living with the neighbors, in the big house that grew cold at night, in a bedroom whose wardrobes were too tall for her, so that she had to wait for a servant to bring down her uniform each morning. She wanted Appa home again so that she, too, could return.

  The courthouse was the color of age and death, bled pale by the perpetual loss and gain of inhabitants. Along the courthouse wall sat a row of men, squatting in the dirt, their dingy shirts hanging loose from their necks. Their clothes were not in tatters, nor did they have begging bowls. They simply sat and waited for orders. They completed the orders and returned to the squatting position. This was their job. They ignored Viji and Shanta.

  Next to one of the columns sat a bull with horns painted red and yellow, flicking flies away with its tail. If it was waiting for its owner, its owner never came. It was a homeless bull.

  Beyond the pillars, the street ran with its own worries, too crowded and hot to bother with the two girls, one small and short-haired, in a gray uniform, peering into the building’s entrance; the other taller, impatient, with a violet bruise burgeoning over her eye.

  “He’s not coming,” Shanta said. She prodded the cushion of her bruise.

  “Yes he is. He has to.”

  “I’m hungry.”

  “It’s only four o’clock.” Viji was hungry too. On the street corner a man was selling crunchy, salty spirals of murukku. A few people had left the building already, men in brown suits and narrow ties. Through the arched entry, she could see the guard, leaning against the reception desk, his baton a lazy pendulum.

  “He never shows up,” Shanta said.

  “He might this time.”

  At five o’clock, as people left in thickening clots, Viji ventured back in. The guard shifted his weight and cocked his hip. “Please, sir, can I see my father now?”

  “Not possible. No children.” This sounded to Viji like a made-up rule. He eyed their gray uniforms. “Why aren’t you in school?”

  “Excuse me, sir, school is dismissed.”

  “And who is your father?”

  She said his name. He shook his head and said, “No such man.”

  He seemed to be saying that no such man existed, that her father—magistrate, pill taker, ankle swinger—simply wasn’t true.

  Viji stayed outside the courthouse until dark, when the trickle of lawyers and secretaries had slowed and finally stopped. The two girls watched as the guard pushed the door shut. They listened to the latch bolt into its lock. It didn’t matter to Viji that Shanta was right, that Appa wouldn’t come out of the courthouse. And to Shanta, who never left Viji’s side but kept quiet, fretful watch, it didn’t seem to matter, either.

  Later that afternoon, the kitchen boomed with laughter. “Again,” Kuttima called, clapping her hands. “Again, again!” Viji shook her head and he
ld her aching belly, the room blurring behind tears of mirth.

  She grabbed another plate and turned to the two washbasins filled with water. “How American ladies wash dishes.” She dipped the plate jauntily into one basin, dipped it into the next basin, and set it aside to dry. It was crusted with rice still, and dripped brown suds. She turned to her audience and beamed.

  “Again, again!” Uma Athai thumped her foot for more. Viji had done this little sketch four times already, alongside “American lady speed-walking,” “American lady winning money on the radio,” and “American lady in a sanitary-pad commercial.”

  A scream. Upstairs. Babygirl.

  “Babygirl?” Viji called. The room fell silent. No answer came. “Chellum?”Viji swept up the stairs and Shanta followed. They found Babygirl in the bedroom, her back against the wall, in horrified silence. “What?” Viji asked. “What?” She followed Babygirl’s gaze to the wall above the bed. There, a green lizard, no bigger than a finger. It was thin, utterly harmless, almost transparent, possibly malnourished.

  “Pshh! That’s it? This is why you screamed?”

  Babygirl glared. She scowled at Shanta, who leaned against the wall panting, still breathless from the stairs.

  “It’s just a lizard, Babygirl, it won’t do a thing to you.”

  “What’s it doing here?”

  “They live here. They kill mosquitoes and flies. There’s probably one in every room!”

  “Nuh-uh.”

  “Yes.”

  “No.”

  “I’ll make a bet,” Viji ventured. Her daughter’s eyes brightened.

  “For what?”

  “Ice cream.”

  “They have ice cream here?”

  “They have ice cream here—of course they have ice cream here.” She looked sideways at Babygirl and sighed. Her children thought this was a barbarian country—no toilets, no showers, no pizza, no ice cream. I’ll pee in America, Babygirl had said that first day. India was the seat of civilization, the home of mathematics and poetry and science—but none of this mattered to children who had to squat to shit.