The Prayer Room

by Shanthi Sekaran

  Here, in the corner, was a picture wrapped in plastic. It was caked with an age of dust that covered the image like concrete. But Viji knew what it was. She remembered the old fingers that had held it, dark and dry as vanilla pods. She remembered sitting in his lap, Krishnan the cook, and listening to the story of Kama.

  The earth and heavens were terrorized by a demon named Taraka, who’d gained great powers through meditation.

  “What kind of powers?” she’d asked.

  “Great powers. The power to burn things. The power to take whatever he wanted, to control anything, to run the rivers dry or make them flood.”

  “To take whatever he wanted? Like what?”

  “Sweets from puja meant for other gods: gold, jewels, land, water, fire—”

  “Any sweets he wanted?”

  “Yes.”

  “Even pista kulfi?”

  “Yes.”

  “And gulab jamun?”

  “Yes.”

  “And kesari?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what about chocolate?”

  “Any sweets.”

  “Whenever he wanted? How did he get them?”

  “Listen! I’m telling you a story. There was one reason only that Taraka could make such mischief. Siva, the great destroyer, the master of fire, the holiest of holies, was mourning the death of his beloved.”

  “What’s mourning?”

  “He was sad.”

  “Why was he sad?”

  “Wait. To escape such sadness, Siva retreated to a mountain grove and fell into a very, very deep meditation. Because of this, only Taraka could use his powers. And so Indra, the king of heaven, came up with a plan. What Siva needed, he said, was a woman, to bring him back to the world.”

  “But why?”

  “Sometimes, my little grapefruit, it simply works that way. But Siva, he was a great sage; another woman would never interest him. Oh no, not even Uma, daughter of the mountain king, reincarnation of Sati, Siva’s lost love.”

  Viji remembered fingering this picture while Old Krishnan spoke. It was shiny then, and new, and showed a sweet-faced man holding a bow and arrow made of flowers. She’d bent the corner of it, back, forth, back and forth, until Krishnan slapped her hand.

  “And she was a beautiful woman, this Uma,” he continued.

  “She was?”

  “Oh yes! My god, how lovely! Her hair itself was an ocean, her eyes were the eyes of a fawn. Her voice was the melody of Govinda’s flute! Bees hovered at her lips, thirsty for the sweetness of her breath. And such bosoms! Each one was as swollen as the earth itself!”

  “That’s not possible.”

  “Nothing is impossible. Now listen. They hatched a plan. Uma would go with Kama, the god of love and fascination, to find Siva in his mountain abode. And tuk! Kama would shoot his arrow, Siva would open his eyes and fall hopelessly in love with Uma. All would be well again.”

  “That’s a good story.”

  “Patience, child, I’ve not finished. You see, this Kama, he went to Siva’s mountain home, and what do you think he did?”

  “What?”

  “He got so frightened, he couldn’t do a thing!”

  “Why was he frightened?”

  “Girl, I will tell you. This Siva was covered toe to head in ashes from puja. His hair was filthy and long and slithering with snakes.”

  “No!”

  “Yes. A cobra circled his neck, scorpions crawled at his knees, and lizards ran round and round at his feet. He was a real fright, I tell you. So terrified was Kama that he dropped his bow and arrow, and dishum! It fell clattering to the ground. What a sound it made!”

  “And what happened?”

  “Siva awoke. Before him, he saw Uma, draped in golden sun, sweet like a pot of milk.”

  “And did he love her then?”

  “No, he did not love her. He was not happy to be disturbed. He said to himself, What is it that has woken me? Surely not this woman? Siva looked around, he scanned the whole world, and—”

  “How did he do that?”

  “Siva can see anything with his third eye.”

  “Third eye? He has three eyes? That’s not real.”

  “It is. The third eye of Siva is all-knowing, all-seeing, all—”

  “But how does someone have three eyes?”

  “He did, just like that, okay?”

  “But it doesn’t make sense.”

  “He is Siva.”

  “But where is the third eye?”

  “Just here,” pressing a finger to her forehead.

  “But how come he needs three eyes?”

  “So that he can see everything.”

  “But how come—”

  “Finished! Too many questions from you. And why? And how? And when? Enough!”

  “But what happened?”

  “I’m trying to tell you, aren’t I? Now listen. Siva saw Kama, Siva grew angry, Siva killed Kama with a lightning bolt from his third eye.”

  “A lightning bolt!”

  “Shu! Quiet. Kama was dead, gone, so-long, a pile of ashes on the ground. And Siva resumed his meditation. There. End of story. Finished farewell goodbye auf Wiedersehen that’s it!”

  “That’s it?”

  Her father had come to the doorway then and Krishnan, jumped to his feet, tumbling Viji from his lap to the ground.

  Now, with the edge of her fingernail, she picked away the layers of soot. She dripped water on the picture to loosen the sticky residue and soon he was visible again—Kama, with his bow and arrow, the god of love and fascination. She stuck him in Krishnan’s picture frame. It was unusual to have a cook’s picture in the puja room, but here was a young Krishnan, moon-faced, his hair combed back like a movie star’s. He stood proudly in some photo studio, his hand slotted like Napoleon’s under the buttons of his jacket. The photo had been with him when he died, and Viji’s mother had put it in this frame. The frame now hung on the bottom row, close to the ground and toward the back of the room; he was, after all, only a servant.

  She remembered that young face. It wasn’t so different from how Krishnan had been when he had died. In fact, the only thing old about Old Krishnan were his fingers, shriveled by the juice of onions and lemons, a hundred times burned by frying oil, scraped and peeled by knives. How strange, she thought, that she should remember sitting here with him, in this puja room. Family puja rooms weren’t for servants. Servants were meant to have their own.

  It was one of the few times in her life that Viji noticed irony: Krishnan, a mere cook, stared down by her father on many occasions and shooed from the puja room whenever he ventured in, hung securely on this wall. But her father was nowhere to be seen.

  “Shanta, what happened to Appa’s photo?”

  “Which one?”

  “In the puja room, downstairs.”

  Shanta shrugged, “We never put one up.”

  “What?”

  “We just didn’t.” Her sister pressed down on the rice grinder and filled the kitchen with its metallic din.

  She asked Uma Athai, who laughed gleefully but would not answer. She asked Pushpa Athai, who looked sharply into her eyes and whispered, Don’t tell the children.

  “Tell them what?”

  “Tell them this. Yes, exactly.” She nodded sagely and would say no more.

  “Shanta,” Viji returned to her sister.

  “Yes, Viji,” she answered in English. She sat at the dining room table and polished forks that they never used.

  “There’s no photo of Appa in the puja room.”

  “Yes, Viji, this I know.”

  “And why?”

  “It was decided that we wouldn’t have one, that is all.”

  “Who decided?”

  Shanta cast tired eyes over her sister.“You ask so many questions. Why these questions now?”

  “There’s something somebody isn’t saying.”

  “Isn’t there always.”

  “Stop it, Shanta.”

&nbs
p; Shanta stopped, laid her dustcloth on the table, and pointed her fork at Viji. “What is this Shanta-Shanta? What happened to Shanta Akka? How about some respect? Are we twins? And what is this Viji-Biji business? Is that what they call you there? What happened to Vijaya?”

  “That’s beside the point.”

  “Oh ho. Beside the point, is it, madam professor?”

  “Please listen to me,”Viji said. She sat with Shanta and placed her hand on the dustcloth. “I simply noticed that the picture of Appa was missing from the puja room. This seems like quite a strange thing, don’t you think?”

  “Something strange, is it?” Shanta looked at her intently now, and Viji grew nervous.“Coming from America to tell me there is something strange in my house? Well, listen to me, Sherlock Holmes. There are things you might not understand, and who could blame you? You’ve been away too long.” She paused. “Forget it. Tell me what you want to eat.”

  “Understand what? Understand what, Shanta?”

  Shanta leaned close to Viji and whispered, “I’m not going to tell you.”

  Viji laughed at the absurdity of it, but Shanta’s face stayed blank.

  “Tell me!”

  “No.”

  “Shanta.”

  “Enough! Who are you, coming here and asking me about these things? Don’t you know? Don’t you remember? Or did you forget like you forgot us? Hmm? Polish these forks!”

  Shanta scraped her chair back and was gone.

  After so little time, Viji was sick of this house. She’d had enough of the old women who coursed through it, day after day, eating away at it like termites, giving nothing back to the world.

  Later that night, she spied on the children as they watched television, a Tamil soap opera that Viji had never seen before. It tinned through the house, unrelenting drama, tears, shrill violins, and the ubiquitous funny man: short, dark, and fat with a nasal voice that could be heard from any point in the house. The funny man never changed. The children sat fixated, though they couldn’t possibly have understood a word of it. How long their bodies were growing, Avi lying on his belly over the plastic-covered sofa, Babygirl sitting on her feet, Kieran hunched and cross-legged, with terrible posture like George’s, his chin jutting and eyes half-closed. How oblivious they were. How oblivious everyone was, even George. Only Viji had known she was taking the children away, perhaps to send them back alone. And if she wasn’t coming back herself? What would she do then? She had no illusions of being able to live without them. The very thought of it set off sirens. She ached.

  When they were younger—watching television, sleeping, riding in the car, Babygirl and Avi used to climb onto Kieran, as if they knew he could cushion them. Viji used to have to nudge them apart, lay them neatly aligned in a single crib. Later, as toddlers, they abandoned their own small beds and piled into Kieran’s. Viji would find them, a hillock of limbs in the morning. It didn’t seem to matter then, where Kieran ended and Avi began, where boy gave way to girl, whether or not her daughter’s hair melted onto her son’s forehead. It didn’t matter to them, it didn’t matter to her. Now they slept separately, still innocent, she assumed, of how their bodies would change.

  But one day soon, Babygirl would come to her with a quiet announcement, and Viji would react accordingly. She would speak calmly, as if the event were hardly worth mentioning. There would be few words on the matter, only instructions. She wouldn’t cry or poke fun or act like the day was some momentous occasion. She’d avoid those oily pronouncements that she’d had to suffer from her mother and her aunts: You’re a woman now, things are going to be different. And by no means would she go around to her friends’ houses, as her own mother had, to spread the happy news. My daughter is a woman! her mother had announced in every sitting room. She imagined Gail Bauer’s eyes, saucers of surprise, were she to knock on her door and announce, My daughter is a woman!

  Viji remembered when it had happened to her, how she’d felt sticky with the news, how it had made her skin crawl to know that people knew, and to know they knew she knew. Her mother had hounded her away from the puja room: Never while you’re unclean! You know better. Her aunt had taken her aside at her ceremony, tight crowhands around Viji’s arm, and instructed, “Men will look at you now, Viji. Their eyes will be everywhere. Cover up!” Viji only snatched her arm back and slunk upstairs. The men didn’t look—she was a stick figure still, a stick figure seeping life, hiding in bed. It would take a few years for the men to start looking. And when they did, Viji would know what to do.

  But then again, maybe Babygirl would be excited— maybe she would strut down the hallway and burst into Viji’s room. I’m a woman now! Maybe she would even want a ceremony. If she didn’t, Viji wouldn’t make her sit through one. She wouldn’t do that to Babygirl.

  “No ceremony?” Amma started the second Viji entered, not even waiting for her to light the first lamp. “No ceremony at all? Hmm. Doesn’t matter. She can live without blessings. She can live without luck.”

  I’m not listening.

  “Ho ho, big surprise.”

  There’s no need for such things. Why so much galatta for every little thing?

  “Correct, correct. Who needs blessings when you live in America? Life is one big blessing, isn’t it?”

  Yes, maybe it is.

  “Big house, big car, big professor father. Isn’t it?”

  Viji’s ceremony had taken place on the third day of her first period. Spread across the sitting room floor were bowls of fruit, a brass pot on whose mouth was balanced acoconut, and trays of jasmine. For the first time, Viji was allowed to wear a sari.

  “I can only thank God that you had one—or else who knows where you would have ended up.”

  Are you saying you approve of my marriage?

  “Don’t talk so fresh.”

  I’m very lucky. I have a good life.

  “Yes, you do.”

  And not because I sat in front of a coconut. “Wretched girl. Don’t talk to me. I don’t even want to see you.” But her mother didn’t leave the room. She stayed to seethe where Viji could feel her, first in her belly, then in her womb, then as a clenching ache in her thighs. She bent over and clutched her abdomen, breathing through the pain. She was used to it by now.

  Thinking back to how she was, she understood her mother’s fears. Viji had been wild, wearing her hair down like a demoness, using her Diwali money to buy dresses and lipstick, pulling Deepa into her bedroom to practice filmy dances, and deliberately practicing again outside the convent school, opposite the corner tea shop, where the boys from the boys’ school gathered in the afternoons. Maybe this wasn’t wild by American standards; Viji didn’t know anymore. Parents always seemedshocked by the things their children got up to. If Viji had danced in front of boys, what would Babygirl do? If she bought lipstick secretly, what would Babygirl buy? But her daughter, playing now with the end of her braid, wasn’t interested in lipstick or boys. It was too early. It would always be too early. Maybe, Viji thought, the ceremony wasn’t such a bad idea. Maybe, when the time came, she’d have one after all.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  There were things about this place, this country she had once called hers, that surprised her. The multitude of eyes, for instance. Had they been there before? Eyes all over, the women staring harder than the men. Their eyes slid like tentacles over her hair-nose-chin. Her own eyes she cast to the floor in public, fixed on the sidewalk or a triplet. They watched her chest her hips her knees her feet as she walked, her shoes her bag her fingers that gripped the leather handle. She wished she had eyes in all these places so that she might stare back at them. Once she had blended in here, with the rickshaw driver and the men at the tea shop and the woman with angry eyes who held a mangy-haired child on her hip. She’d been a Madrasi who scowled into the sun, her nose and mouth twisted against the city’s solar glare. For twenty years she’d shared the air with these people, but America had left its indelible mark. She passed a woman in a dirty sari, sitting behind a
wooden cart piled high with jasmine buds. She tried to imagine this woman with sunglasses and a purse, and the thought of it made her laugh.

  Even worse was the way they stared at the triplets, cutting into them with their eyes in search of an explanation for these creatures with the caramel skin, molasses hair, and cherry noses, stocky American legs and straight strong teeth. How much dishti, evil eye, must have been piling up around her children. She would have to take them to a priest.

  Because she didn’t scrunch her eyes and scowl, because she was inexplicably a thing of wonder, Viji was deprived of what she wanted most: to look, to soak up all that had dripped away from her. As she walked around like this, eyes downcast, the streets around her faded like an overexposed photograph, until only the thick and obvious structures remained.

  So, because there was no other way, she went undercover. She coated her hair in coconut oil and wound it into a poor, sprouting bun. From Kuttima’s room she stole a worn-out sari. On her cheeks and forehead she rubbed turmeric paste, which the local women wore to keep their skin soft, even though it turned their faces yellow. She screwed up her nose and eyes, cocked her head, and bared her teeth as if she were carrying a hundred-pound weight on her back. And soon, with very little effort, she walked the streets unnoticed, a well-oiled and shining example of anonymity.

  At the end of a lane, a house waited. At its crown, was a weather vane, at its foot, a swing. For years it had lingered at the end of its death, waiting for Viji’s return before it let itself crumble to the city street. She wouldn’t remember it initially; it would only seem familiar. But it had something to show her.

  And then, with little idea of where she was going, she turned into a lane. A woman at a jasmine cart picked her teeth and watched Viji approach the house. With nothing to hold her interest, the woman turned away. And then, the weather vane. Viji knew this house, but only vaguely, like a relative she’d met once at a wedding. They called it the big house. But she didn’t recognize the pink-stained veranda or the Lakshmi carvings on the door or the heavy iron lock, busted open now so that the door stood ajar. Inside, the house had faded to gray, covered in the fine soot of neglect. On the ground, a carpet of broken glass. But Viji knew this house. She blew at the wall and the charcoal dust scattered to reveal sky-blue paint. She scraped her toe along the floor to find the black-and-white tiles. Emerging colors scattered the clouds. See, the house whispered, but it was only the creak of the door. She didn’t know why she knew this house, she didn’t know what it meant to her.