The Prayer Room

by Shanthi Sekaran

  “Okay! I bet you.”

  “Let’s go.” In the library, a yellow lizard clung to the wall above the bookcase. In the game room, it scurried past the carom board and came to rest next to an old, dusty vina. In one bedroom, above the bed; in the next, above the dresser; in the next, above the lamp—this one was smart, waiting for gnats that gathered around the light. In Shanta’s puja room, a small green lizard waited just beside the door, which made Babygirl squeal and run into the hall.

  “See?” Viji said. “Every room.”

  “We haven’t been to every room yet, though.”

  “Yes, we have.”

  “What about downstairs?”

  Before Viji could speak, Babygirl ran down the stairs, nearly slipping in her hurry. Viji followed her down the stairs, through the sitting room, and watched her burst open the puja room doors.

  “What’s this?” Babygirl stopped abruptly in the doorway. Cobwebs hung from the ceiling like streamers, and a thick layer of dust coated the frames on the wall. Viji sneezed six times. “Gosh,” Babygirl said.

  “You know, Babygirl. You know what this room is.”

  “This isn’t like ours.”

  “No,” Viji agreed, “this one isn’t like ours.”

  Proof at last that the aunts had wholly, indubitably, 101 percent lost the plot. Viji held the end of her sari over her nose and mouth to block the dust. Inside, what had once been the house’s centerpiece, shown proudly to guests, cleaned faithfully every day, was now a sepulcher, a relief map of death. On its far wall, a heavy blanket of silt covered the photographs of Viji’s mother, three uncles, great-uncles, great-aunts, grandmothers, grandfathers, four cousins, the old neighbor.

  It was incredible that the aunts could pray in here, the dust was so thick and aggressive. It pierced through the cloth that covered her nose and mouth and made her cough until she retched. “Kuttima,” she called. “Bring water. A bucket of water.”

  Kuttima, mumbling, brought her what she asked for. There was only one way to do this, and Viji wasted no time. With one swoop she flung the bucket over the room, the water rising in a great arc and splashing down over everything. Dripping pictures, streams coursing from the statuettes, the black stone lingam glistening. It would take many buckets more and a merciless scrubbing. But now, after days of rattling aimlessly in the old house, Viji had a purpose.

  “How come,” Kieran began, spitting over the side of the balcony,“there are so many poor people here?” The dollop of spit dropped lazily to the pavement below and splattered next to the veranda wall. From above he watched a half-dressed family ragtagging down the main road. The little boy wore a dingy brown shirt and no underpants; his smaller sister wore a skirt with no shirt, her soccer ball of a belly swelling over the waistline. They’d had to split their only outfit, Kieran guessed. Their mother, or maybe their grandmother, had dark reptilian skin and a bun of thin hair.

  Babygirl and Avi were stretched out next to the carom board, stacking the round pieces in their corners. Viji had taught them the day before how to play. The board was a square the size of a Twister mat, with pockets in the corner, from end to end almost as long as Babygirl. An expert already, Avi shuttled his red piece into a corner pocket. He whistled triumphantly.

  They’d been on the street the day before. They’d wandered out on their own while Viji was taking a nap. There were no sidewalks here.

  “How come everyone’s staring?” A man leaned out of his shop to watch them pass.

  “Maybe we should go back.” But before they could go anywhere, they were surrounded. Children their height, with worried eyes and older faces, crowded in around them. Fingers reached out to rifle through their hair. Some wore school uniforns, like the Whitman uniforms, but light blue instead of navy. They pushed in around them until the triplets stood trapped in a shrinking circle. Avi looked at Kieran and both boys turned to Babygirl, who stood slapping at the hands, twisting away from the children, exhaling sharply. “Stop it,” she grunted. “Stop it!”

  After what seemed a very long time, a lady from an office came out and shooed the others away. She didn’t have to ask them who they were, she just brought them back here, back to Viji.

  The evening before, Viji had taken them to a temple. It was a dark place, with a roof that climbed into the sky. Inside was airless and wet and smelled of burning oil. The ceiling dripped into a puddle on the floor, but no one seemed to notice. No one put a bucket underneath it, or rags. Men with no shirts, only a thread looped diagonally around their chest and white cloth tied around their waist, loitered next to pillars, or strolled toward the ringing of puja bells. He thought maybe they prayed for a living. Like priests. Kieran wondered who would pay someone to pray for a living.

  He worried that his shoes would be stolen. They’d had to take them off outside, and beneath his feet the stone was worn into smooth ripples. If he were poor, he would’ve waited outside temples and chosen the bestlooking shoes. Then he would’ve taken them and sold them to other poor people, or to bargain hunters with lots of money. If he were poor and had no legs, like the man at the airport, he didn’t know what he’d do. It wasn’t as if a man with no legs could steal a pair of shoes unnoticed. What do you need those for? someone would surely ask. The only other person he’d seen with no legs was in his history book, a man in a wheelchair with a mustache like a broom, whose jeans closed off neatly at the knees. At least he had a wheelchair. Then he’d skipped even further into the book to look at the photographs of tall, wild, bushy jungles and helicopters in the trees.

  “Turn back to the Iroquois nation, Kieran. We won’t be studying that,” his teacher had said. When he’d asked why, she’d said, “It’s not history yet.”

  “But it’s in our history book.” He was bored of the Iroquois and their five nations and their longhouses.

  “Yes, but it’s very recent, Kieran. We need to look at what’s come before.”

  Before what? But he’d turned back without protest, to look at what had come before.

  When they’d first arrived in America, George and Viji were no different from any other two immigrants. They’d searched, like truffle-seeking pigs, for the something-inthe-air that every immigrant wanted: a sense of normalcy. That warm, bread-in-the-oven certainty that seemed to cleave to everyone around them. From their first steps on American soil, that long ride from the airport, their descent into the Sacramento Valley, they yearned for a normal, ten-fingers-ten-toes life. This house, these pots, this parking space between the two white lines, this mailbox where mail appeared abracadabra every afternoon. In hopes of attaining this normalcy in their small rented flat, furnished for them by the university, they began to make offerings: a houseplant purchased from Emigh Hardware, a trip one Sunday to the International House of Pancakes, a tablecloth with matching yellow place mats, a blender with six settings from Sears. But still, normalcy was no more than a taste on the backs of their tongues. Like the elusive truffle, it burrowed deeper into the earth and farther away from them. To dig for it would be to dig clean through the earth’s core, straight through to Madras, to Nottingham, emerging black-snouted, triumphant, and back where they had begun.

  Even when the wish for ten-fingers-ten-toes turned into the reality of thirty-fingers-thirty-toes, the pungent cloud of difference followed them, weighed them down like jet lag. Which diapers? Which brand of mashed-up food in tiny glass jars? Which schools? Which friends for the children—this four-year-old with the grandfather’s eyebrows? That blond girl who picked her nose and rubbed the harvest on her tricycle? The runtish boy on growth hormones? Whom to trust? Whom not to trust? For Viji, this last question was easy: black people, Mexicans, anyone who seemed to be struggling or worse off than she was, anyone who didn’t pop fresh from the pages of a JCPenney catalog. For George, more bent on actually using his judgment, the decision was harder, but he finally settled on a few equally obvious choices: Girl Scouts frightened him—they seemed far too competent at too young an age. Car salesmen, parti
cularly the ones who said, What’ve I gotta do to get you to walk outta here with a—. Game-show hosts, not that he would ever conceivably encounter one. And real estate agents.

  Theirs was named Marcia, pronounced Mar-see-ya. She wore yellow stockings to match her yellow high heels. She showed him a haunted-looking gray house with collapsing shutters, a “fixer-upper” near the capitol, a row of tract houses in the middle of a field, and a green stucco nightmare with pokey holly bushes growing around the porch. She showed him a number of houses that made him consider moving back to England. But finally, Marcia with the yellow stockings redeemed herself. She brought him to the house on Winding Creek Road. Perhaps because of what he’d seen before, perhaps from a sense of urgency at the thought of Viji’s swelling belly, George saw the house once, kicked a wall to make sure it was sturdy, and said,“I’ll take it.” He signed the papers, and that was that.

  Viji and George had done their best to turn the big bushy place into a bastion of normalcy. And they got close, close enough to catch a whiff of it occasionally, in the peace of a warm Sunday or the reliable hum of the water heater. House-job-car—they had all they needed. So they did what every immigrant eventually did. They said to themselves, This is it. This is where we stop. And they settled, somewhere in the middle of the deep dark earth, close to the truffle, or very far away.

  Somewhere in the pool-house soil, perhaps not far from that truffle, nestled among the tentacles of sprinkler systems and sewage lines, level with the cement foundations of Maple Grove’s houses, was the box. And inside the box, the shrapnel of George and Viji’s life together, guarded lovingly by their children. A cufflink, a handkerchief. A pair of blue crystal earrings.

  It was night. Stan returned after George had gone to bed, his footsteps muffled by the hallway carpet. George hadn’t slept yet, hadn’t even come close. He got up and stood at the sliding doors. The pool in moonlight winked at him. I know what you’re up to, it rippled. As if in response, the security light by the pool house snapped on. Nothing but a cat. George saw its tabby coat as it clawed a eucalyptus tree.

  The earrings were safe underground. Only the children knew where they were. Except now Stan knew, too. And, he sensed, so would Viji one day. How silly he’d been, holding on to those. How sentimental and wholly unlike himself. The earrings were, he was absolutely certain, not safe underground. Too many others were privy to what had once been his alone, and the realization of it left a sour coating in the back of his throat, a cocktail of bile and worry. He would have to dig them up.

  The sliding door opened with a hoossssh and he was outside, barefoot. The late-December frost turned his toes to pellets of stone. When he kneeled beneath the glare of the security light, his pajamas went soaked and brown. He dug with his bare hands and didn’t get far. From the pool house he fished an old handshovel that he’d bought for Viji’s roses. Yarns of cobweb stuck between his fingers and clung to his face. He raspberried a sticky strand from his mouth.

  With the shovel he cracked the frost. This was the spot, he was sure of it. He could still see the children kneeling here that Labor Day afternoon. The dirt flew in fast and meaty clumps. He was strong, even at this slack hour of the night. And within seconds, yes, he hit the box.

  His fingers turned fat, swollen with cold. They shook when he opened the lid, scattering dirt over the children’s treasures as he fished out the earrings. A quick toss into the swimming pool or over the fence to the neighboring yard, and he would be free of them forever. But of course he wouldn’t do that. He sat, his ass a block of ice now, and fondled the twinkling stones.

  A flash in the window. He looked up and yelped aloud. Stan stood at the sliding door, backlit by the family room. Hands on glass, he peered out at George. George didn’t know what to do. He waved. Stan did not wave back. George waved more deliberately. Stan only stood there, as if he hadn’t seen. In his sleep, his hair had flipped the wrong way and hung like an awning off the side of his head. “Dad?” George called. Stan pawed at the glass, then turned around and walked back into the house. George would bury the box, go inside, and get in bed. He looked down at the earrings, glinting prettily in his grubby palm.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  1980. George woke as the train slowed into Nottingham station. He’d forgotten how all English train stations looked the same, with their squat platforms, that brick dome, and the façade of arches caging a circular drive. Weak-kneed with sleep, he stepped off the train. The chill slapped him awake. This kind of cold happened only in March, when the skies blushed blue and the clouds scattered, leaving the freeze to unleash itself on the earth below. Down south, among London’s buses and high buildings, it was warmer and damp. In Sacramento, the buds would be popping forth. He looked around expectantly, trying not to look expectant, to see if anyone had come to collect him. Of course his father wouldn’t be there. But he looked for the old fishing hat anyway. How lovely it would be to see his mother, in her silly disco sunglasses and green coat. Up the stairs he lugged his suitcase, over the platforms to the station lobby. He would take a taxi home, or maybe just walk.

  George! The voice came from his head, a distant call that he attributed to being home again after nearly four years. It came once more, George! It was an apparition, born of a need for familiarity, the same urge that made him think he recognized the strangers who milled around the lobby, checking arrival times and holding up newspapers. And then he heard, “George!” This time it was real, a clarion call, unmistakable. He turned, and by the newsstand in the distance he saw a red glove waving. And then she was there, in the middle of the station, running and smiling and looking so much like home that he wanted to sweep her up and roll her to the ground.

  Victoria grabbed his forearms before he could wrap them around her. She beamed, and for several seconds they stood looking at each other. Then her smile fell. “All right, George?” she asked.

  “All right, Victoria.”

  She sped ahead of him, and he had to jog with his suitcase to keep up.

  “I didn’t know you’d be here,” he panted.

  “Your dad called me.”

  “What? He did? When?”

  “Last week. I suppose when he knew you were coming.” She stopped abruptly.“Well, don’t look so worried, George, you know how he is.”

  “Right.”

  “It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Right.”

  “Listen, it’ll be fine.”

  “I know.”

  She placed a gloved hand on his arm. “You must be shattered.”

  “I could sleep.”

  “Well hold on for the taxi ride and then we’ll get you to bed.”

  The drive to Sneinton was two miles long, but rammed with traffic. Hindi film songs filled the car and a Ganesh pendant hung from the rearview mirror. The driver spotted George’s gaze and turned the volume down.

  “No, it’s all right,” George said.“Turn it up if you want.”

  Victoria smirked.

  “What?”

  “Nothing at all.”

  They stared silently out of opposite windows until the taxi stopped. Together, they walked down the row of terraced houses until they came to 38.

  “The door’s unlocked,” Victoria said. And so it was. Inside, the house smelled of old sausage. The radiator hissed its welcome and a television tinned from the other room.

  “Hello,” he called, but no one seemed to hear.

  Victoria shouted, “We’re back!” and the television switched off.

  “Hiya, George,” his father said. He looked worn, his hair more white now than blond. George went to hug him, but his dad skimmed away from him and headed down the corridor. “She’s been asking for you,” he said. “Excited and all sorts.”

  The house was even smaller than George remembered, and darker. He’d forgotten how much furniture was packed into the small rooms, sideboards pushed against bookshelves and sidetables, as if too much space would cause a person to come unmoored and fly off the face of
the earth. There was one window overlooking the sunless street; the others looked onto their neighbors’ walls. In the days he spent there, he wouldn’t get used to the narrow kitchen, smaller than his pantry in Sacramento. The knocks and voices from the neighbors adjacent would keep him awake at night.

  “George,” his mother said as he sat down on her bed. “You caught me napping.”

  “Hi, Mum.” He hugged her awkwardly, leaning across her chest, squeezing her shoulder. She wasn’t thin or wasted, neither skeletal nor hollow-eyed, not at all the way he’d imagined his sick mother. Her face was full, swollen from painkillers, he would later find out. Her voice was strong, nothing like that choking whisper they used in the movies. Her hair was black still, with the streaks of gray she’d had for years and years. She was pale, but her skin had always been milk white.

  “How are you, Mum?”

  “The rebel armies are advancing, darling.” He didn’t know what to say. “Hand me my tobacco, will you?”

  “Tobacco?”

  “What?” she shrugged. “What harm could it do me now?” The tobacco packet held a row of ready-made spliffs.

  “Who rolled these for you?”

  “Never you mind, George.” She lit a fag, and the smoke she blew into his face was rotten with marijuana.

  “What’s that, then?”

  “It helps me relax. Now put the kettle on, will you? And take a shower, please—you smell of airplanes.”

  Later: “Is it so shocking I would be here?” Victoria sat on the carpet by the fireplace, holding one palm up to the flames. The light sharpened the lines around her mouth.

  “It’s shocking you would come when I was here,” he replied.

  “I know. I behaved horridly. I shudder to think of it.” She shuddered physically then.

  “You talk different,” he said.

  “I talk different? You talk different.”

  “Nonsense.”

  “You sound like John Wayne.”