And on the seventh day, the new red phone rang for the very first time. Shanta shied away from it. Viji picked it up.
“Viji?” George’s voice was shaking. “Viji, you have to come home.” The line was poor, the seconds between them chipped by static.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Anisha Mehta stood squarely in the kitchen. She’d rung the doorbell and stalked past George without a word. He wondered if she was angry with him, too. On the driveway, on the street, there was no sign of Kamla. “I walked here alone,” the girl said, as if reading his thoughts.
“Babygirl’s in her room.” George found his keys and left.
It wasn’t his fault that the route to work took him past Kamla’s house. Nor could he be blamed for the stop sign that allowed him to slow, peer past the bushes at the front of the drive, and watch her needlessly water her lawn. He drove on.
Leaves gathered like floating scabs on the surface of the swimming pool. The cleaner came only once a month in the winter, and the water had turned soupy from the rain. Around the perimeter, the automatic pool sweeper darted, asea serpent whipping its long-hosed tentacles.
Babygirl liked being outside in the winter, when the backyard turned into a secret world of silent grass and frost-powdered branches, where at any second bushes with dripping black leaves could morph into gargoyles. When she pressed her ear to the ground she could hear the wet worlds that moved beneath, the whisper of insects that sounded like an ocean. When she looked closely without blinking, she could see the grass blades quiver.
“I can do a handstand on the balance beam,” Anisha Mehta announced. She demonstrated on the diving board, which, Babygirl noted, was clearly wider than a balance beam. “Now you do it,” Anisha ordered.
“I don’t want to.”
“Come on.”
Babygirl was quite happy where she was, digging her nails into the thick, mulchy soil.
“You’re a baby,” Anisha Mehta said. “But I guess you can’t help it.”
Slowly, the earth began to freeze her fingers. It was a satisfying feeling.
“How come you guys came back without your mom?”
“I dunno. We had to start school.”
“But how come your mom didn’t come back with you?”
“I don’t know.”
“My mom said your mom had some things to figure out.”
Babygirl shrugged.
“Anyway, my mom said the same thing when my dad and her got divorced.”
“So? That doesn’t mean my parents are.” Babygirl crammed more mud beneath her nails.
“I bet you they are. Everybody’s parents are doing it.
Almost everybody I know. And now yours, too.”
“You don’t know anything.”
“I do too. You know what?”
“What?”
“I know a secret.”
“What?”
“Can’t tell, it’s a secret.” She stretched like a cat on the diving board, her body as long as a grownup’s. “I know something you don’t know,” she sang.
Babygirl couldn’t help sitting up.“What do you know?
Tell me!”
“Come here and I’ll tell you.” She sat up to make room for Babygirl. Babygirl sat beside her on the diving board,
her feet dangling above the lifeless pool.
Anisha Mehta leaned in close, her breath like dragonfire in the icy afternoon. “Do you know what fucking is?”
Stan lay in his grandson’s bed and watched as Lupe got dressed. She strapped her bra like a harness around her back, forming new hills of flesh, warm and fresh as hot cobs.
You’re a right bacon butty , he was tempted to say. Normally he would have, but he was tired, and he suspected she wouldn’t know what he meant. She might even have taken offense. They didn’t do much talking, and for this he was thankful. Time not chatting was better spent with his face pressed into her neck, his fingers kneading her ripe handfuls. He was one of the lucky ones, he knew. Now and then he thought ruefully of his mates back in Nottingham, the men at the pub his age and even younger who hadn’t touched a woman in years, not even their own wives. He knew that age brought with it an intense longing the young could never imagine. It enraged him to see the young wasters in his pub, men in their twenties and thirties with worlds before them—riches and places to go and women and women and more women. They could have all the women they wanted, and what did they do? They met their useless mates in the pub every night and wasted their time staring into pints of lager, talking shite for hours on end.
The young ached with desire. For the old, desire was a knife blade. Stan felt as if every woman he’d ever been with had gathered to wait for him here, at the end of his life, an army of skin and hair and lips. They’d found him at his weakest. His skin sagged everywhere—everywhere— but this only meant he had more surface area that needed to be touched. The copper spots on his hands and arms and face were no more than a trail map that whispered to the world, Here’s where I want you to touch me, here and here and here and here.
At the sound of Lupe’s zipper, he closed his eyes and thought of England, as the English always did once they managed to escape. He remembered the perfect summers, his memory splashed with make-believe because no English summer was perfect. But like he did with his women, he stacked all the lovely days together, squeezed out the clouds and heavy mists, and made for himself one long legendary summer, an uninterrupted trail of beauty. WHAT SUMMER MEANS IN A COLD COUNTRY HOW TO PLAY CROQUET THAT THERE ARE PEOPLE IN THE WORLD WHO DON’T OWN SWIMMING POOLS HOW TO JUDGE A MUSHROOM THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN WATCHING THE FOOTY AND WATCHING RUGBY DAYS THAT LAST UNTIL MIDNIGHT HOW TO GET YOURSELF OUTSIDE BEFORE THE SUNSHINE GOES. All seasons were half invention, anyway.
But this was real, this he remembered clearly: the fields of rapeseed that stretched outside the city. Once, when he’d been driving Marla to her mother’s house, he’d stopped the car and parked off the A35. The heat was intense that day, the air perfectly still. He’d grabbed Marla’s hand and marched her to the center of the field, where, without a word, he’d laid her down, vanishing into the tall grass. Beneath the roar of the highway, they had made the buds tremble, almost as if their yellow tips had been caught in a passing breeze.
The word rose like gunsmoke in the cold air. Babygirl knew what fucking was. She knew it was what people did, and animals. It was a terrible word. Anisha Mehta edged closer until their knees were touching.
“Your dad? Your dad fucks my mom.”
“Shut up, Anisha.”
“It’s true. I saw it with my very own eyes.” Anisha
Mehta’s fat fingers clamped down on Babygirl’s wrist. “My mom, she was on the bed, and your dad had his hands all over her shirt—”
“Let go of me!” Babygirl yanked at her wrist, but Anisha Mehta was strong.
“Listen to me. Your parents are getting divorced and someone’s got to tell you!”
Babygirl leapt to her feet, but Anisha grabbed her around the shoulders. “They meet all the time! When you were in India, they met every day almost!”
“I said, let me go.” She pushed Anisha to the diving board. Anisha, on instant rebound, pushed her back. The push sent Babygirl into a spin, reeling and then teetering, arms flailing at the swimming pool’s stony edge.
“Wake up!” Anisha commanded, and with a final push she tipped Babygirl into the pool. It was an odd sound: a splash in January, followed by silence.
Like a polished rock, Babygirl dropped smoothly to the bottom of the pool, her legs cycling weakly, her arms drifting and useless above her head. Below her, black leaves made a mosaic on the deep-end floor.
In the summers they played dibble-dabble, a game where a twig was thrown somewhere in the deep end, and the first to find it and capture it was the winner. Babygirl never won, because secretly she thought there were snakes waiting on the deep-end floor, obese black serpents that slithered around the drain. She would dive as far as she could, then charge ba
ck to the surface when she felt something brush her foot. But not this time. This time she twirled calmly to the floor. Around her, the underwater world flashed from blue to black and back to blue. Her hair floated around her in thick brown tentacles. She was an octopus. She wasn’t frightened. Her eyes opened wide in the chlorinated water.
Inside the house, something jolted in Kieran. He ran to the bathroom and sat on the toilet. But no, this wasn’t the problem. In the family room, Avi was watching television. When Kieran found him, Avi was holding his chest, peering at the ground. Whatever psychic tendon had pulled Kieran to Avi now tugged both boys to the sliding glass door.
Outside, Anisha Mehta stood stiff as a scarecrow. Her arms stuck out from her sides. She was in another world, like a sleepwalker. Her eyes were turned down, deep into the pool. Kieran ran upstairs. Avi ran outside, shouting his sister’s name.
The chubby one burst through the door while Lupe was pulling up her stockings. She wore only her bra on top, and she gasped and turned away. The boy was shouting something and pointing to the ground. He was flapping his hands like he’d touched something hot. Stan could make nothing of this wall of words, but like the children on that Lassie show, he knew he had to follow.
The cold slapped his belly and his bare thighs. He was wearing his underwear and nothing else. Avi wielded a pool net. Its pole rose high above the boy’s head, and he was fishing something out of the water. He was prodding something—a hand. A hand lay limply on the surface of the pool. They were playing a game. A pool game. When she saw him, the neighbor girl ran.
Children didn’t play pool games in January. Attached to the hand was the arm, the shoulder, the head with long willowy hair now floating—his granddaughter. Stan dove in. In the water, he was young and strong. He grabbed the girl around the waist, and with a single kick he shuttled her to the pavement. Hair stuck like webs to her face; he had to sift through them to get to her mouth. What he’d learned so long ago came back in an instant. He’d done this once, to a cadet who’d fallen overboard off the coast of Norway. They said anyone who fell into that sea died instantly, that there was no point in rescue. But the boy was fished out, and Stan had brought him, half-frozen, back to life.
Babygirl spouted water like a fountain, gagging. Her chest convulsed and her mouth grew wide in a silent sob. But her eyes were open. “All right, chick?” Stan said. She looked straight back at him with brown eyes and ebony lashes. He saw it then, clear as day: these were Marla’s eyes. Here she was, sitting upright and looking around her like she’d been in a dream. And you were there, Stan thought, and you were there, and you and you and you….His chest exploded. He fell to the frozen ground.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Turbulence didn’t bother Viji. It was no more than bumps in the road, which felt like a natural part of traveling. She didn’t mind the way people’s heads bobbed and rattled, like eggs in a crate. What did worry her was smooth, motionless flight— this did not feel natural. This could lead to anything.
A stewardess was leaning on a seat a few rows up, talking to a man with a crown of white hair. She was Asian, wrapped in a long printed dress that clung like skin to her fairy-tale waist. A smile lilted across her face, and she never once took her eyes off the man. In one hand she held a pitcher of water, in the other a tower of plastic cups. Viji was thirsty.
“Excuse me,” she called.“Excuse me!” The eyes snapped up. “Can I have some water, please?” With the gloom of a mistreated servant, the stewardess straightened and made her way to Viji, pouring as she walked, spilling water down the side of her hand. She did something that was not a smile but a stretching of her lips, and handed Viji the cup.
Stan had had a heart attack. George found out from Mrs. Bauer, after Lupe ran half-clothed to their home and begged her to find Mr. Armitage’s number at work. Mrs. Bauer had called an ambulance and then called George. Viji couldn’t help smirking to herself. All this hankypankying like a young bachelor—a man his age should have known better. If he were a devout Hindu, he’d have been spending these last years in prayer and meditation, preparing himself for the next life. She thought of her father, his last years spent who-knows-where—in a chair, most likely, staring out of a window until the last day of his life and the final, soundless slump.
They’d been in the air for eleven hours. She had to use the bathroom, but she knew it would stink by now.
“I need you to come home,” George had said. She closed her eyes and sat back, bathing in the words. George had never needed her for anything before.
The man next to her had fat hands and a walrus-like pinky that hung over the armrest, only inches above her thigh. He smacked his lips, eyes closed, oozing into her personal space. From the corner of her eye, she could sense a colossal wart that stuck from the thick brown bark of his face. As if he sensed her sensing him, he sat up straighter, though his eyes stayed closed. The pinky flexed and curled above her thigh, a caterpillar escaping its cocoon. There was a smaller wart lodged next to the fingernail, and soilcolored age spots sprinkled over the hand. To think, this hand had once belonged to an infant, had once been as silken and fine as her own children’s hands. She thought of George’s hands, the dry skin at the knuckles, the elegant line from bone to joint and the square nails, pillowed in cuticles that he used to chew until, eventually, she had made him stop.
The man sputtered a sigh of fetid breath. She had to lift her hand to her nose. This was why they gave out mints on airplanes. She looked for the stewardess, who had rejoined her gentleman friend a few rows forward. Surely the woman had better things to do; Viji strained to see the man’s face, but she couldn’t. Never mind. She’d heard about stewardesses.
By the last hour of the flight, the air had grown thick with collective breath. A sediment of thought had built up on the plane, the imaginings of so many people over so many hours, peaking with every inhalation, rushing through the air with every exiting breath. Freed from dark nose tunnels, the ideas hurried along the aisles, past beverage carts, and into Viji’s nostrils as she slept.
She thought then of Krishnan’s hands, her memory of them as unobstructed as the sunshine that streamed through her airplane window. How thin and weathered they’d been, every centimeter covered with star-shaped wrinkles that he said had been there since birth, an omen of luck in life. A track of shiny welts had run down his left forefinger, where he’d cut himself with the chopping knife, repeatedly over the years. He’d said it was like falling in love: no matter how many times he nicked himself, he never seemed to learn. How different his hands were from Appa’s great paws, soft and untraced, the hands of a magistrate. She’d left Krishnan’s picture behind where it belonged, in the house’s puja room.
When she pressed her face to the airplane window, the cold felt good against her forehead. She ran a hand over her belly, between her legs, where all was normal again. There was no telling why the pain had gone, or where. She rolled her thoughts away, the crinkled remembrances, scrunched them into balls, and dropped them from the airplane. Through the clouds they plunged, down into the death-freeze of the ocean.
CHAPTER TWENTY
George couldn’t remember if socks were allowed. Surely Viji had worn socks in here on cold days—or was there something holier about bare feet—the humility of toes, the honesty of the heel? He balled his socks and tossed them to the hallway. Flowers lay ashen on the shelves, falling away to dust. He sniffed: oil and smoke and a rosy trail of incense. They’d been gathering here for twelve years. He hadn’t been in the puja room for three years, not since he and Kieran and Avi had painted the walls blue. Kieran had painted the top half of each wall, on tiptoe on a ladder as George held his calves. The deities, framed and carved in stone, gazed out at him blankly now, like in-laws unimpressed with both his looks and his credentials. So he did what he felt was right, and sat on the floor.
His body stuck out at surrealist angles into the room, his knees at his ears, his elbows rising to meet his temples. When he crossed his ankles
, they trembled and ached. He managed to stay in this position and even brought his palms together in prayer, like he’d seen Viji do. It gave him something to do with his hands. When he lowered his forehead, a drop of sweat ran down his finger.
It resembled praying, though he didn’t know exactly how to pray. It had to involve more than just asking for things. And he couldn’t do what Viji did, string together line after line of Sanskrit mantras in a sad harmonica monotone. All George could do was close his eyes and feel very, very worried. For a moment he thought he saw a light, but this too faded to darkness.
They pressed against his eyelids, the years of muttered prayers. They towered to the ceiling, crowded the walls, and made it hard to breathe. Lingering in the room was the smell of palms pressed together, the damp that gathered between them. Around him hung the steady aroma of daily devotion, the milky smell of hope.
He opened his eyes when he felt he had finished. When he noticed his mother’s picture on the wall, he took it down and picked away the sticky residue that had built up in the corners of the frame. Without planning to, he brought the frame to his forehead, his own nose smashed against Marla’s, and he began to ask for things. Two things.
When he looked up again, he saw a white square where the picture had hung. It was bright white, covered over for years by the frame. When they’d painted, they hadn’t bothered taking anything off the walls. He pulled down another frame and found another white square. Then he found two more, and three more. The newer photographs were backed by blue, but the old ones left a spray of white shapes across the wall. In the lightless room, they glowed like the shadow of a prism.
The Prayer Room Page 28