by SJ Sindu
I follow Appa around the shrines. We make a faster route than Laila Aunty, who lumbers from shrine to shrine with her palms clasped together, her lips moving furiously. She’s a real believer. We circle around each shrine three times, stop to touch the carvings at each cardinal direction, count nine careful circles around the shrine of the planet gods. I stop in front of each shrine to pray with my palms together, but not for so long I get bored. The dark idols watch me with vacant eyes. I don’t know what to pray for.
The jingle of bells signals the beginning of pooja. Everyone gets into two lines at the open doors of the main shrine. The priest is naked and hairy down to his waist. A thin white thread loops around one shoulder and travels diagonally down his chest. He wears a dhoti wrapped around his legs to make shorts. Laila Aunty holds out fruit and flowers on a tin platter. The priest asks her for names and horoscope signs so that he can pray for us. He takes the flowers and fruits inside the main chamber of the shrine. His Sanskrit chants fill the temple. He throws flowers one by one onto the dark stone idol of Lakshmi.
I line up behind Appa. Laila Aunty joins the other line. The priest brings out a thick silver tray with little copper containers and a lit oil lamp. He walks down one line, dipping into each container for each person. I hold out my palms, my right on top of my left. The priest puts a pinch of veebuthi in the center of my palm. I dip my finger in and rub a line across my forehead. The rest settles gritty into the crevices of my palms. The priest spoons clear liquid into my palm. I drink it, the sweet water mixed with the remnants of veebuthi, and wipe the rest onto my head. I hold my hands over the flame of the oil lamp and press the warmth into my brow. The priest drops two almonds and three raisins into my palm. He moves on to the next person in line, down one side of the aisle and up the other.
Appa and I escape down the staircase to the basement where the food is sold while Laila Aunty finishes. He buys two boxes of lemon rice and one box of yogurt rice with lime pickle. My favorite. We find seats on cold metal folding chairs set up haphazardly in the open room.
“Laila Aunty will be mad,” I say. “We prayed too fast.” I take a bite of my yogurt rice and the ratio of pickle to rice is perfect. The yogurt spreads thick in my mouth, the lime pickle biting and sour.
Appa’s plastic fork hangs limp. “Nisha wants to see you. She’s having trouble with the marriage idea.”
I can feel the sweat in my armpits, soaking into the cotton sleeves of my churidar top. I dig at the lime wedge in my rice.
“You girls,” he says. “You American girls get so scared for no reason.”
Maybe I should’ve prayed for Nisha. I imagine her in a heavy red wedding saree, her hair done up with flowers and jewels cascading down her chest. Nisha, with a nose ring and bangles stacked to her elbows. Nisha, walking into her husband’s bedroom on her wedding night.
When Laila Aunty finally comes down to join us, she has angry pink patches on her cheeks. The room crowds fast, sweltering with heat. We go outside for air.
“What did you pray for, Lucky?” she asks. “You must always pray for something. I prayed for my daughters to have good heads. And for you to start acting more like a woman.”
In ancient India, devdasis were a revered and respected part of temple tradition. But the British saw the practice of women trained in the arts, free to take on lovers, as prostitution. For many years after that, dancing was considered shameful in Indian culture. It’s only lately that Bharatanatyam has seen a revival. If Nisha and I were devdasis back then, back before the British, we might have been free. I could pray, but here’s the truth: even if the gods are real, I don’t think they can liberate us.
Heart of Stone
One day Amma comes home from work early and sees Grandmother sitting on the porch.
“It’s freezing out there,” Amma says. “How can you be so irresponsible?”
“She likes it out there.”
“She’s restless. You need to take her for an outing.”
“Where?”
Amma dumps the contents of her lunch bag into the sink. “Don’t ask me. Take some responsibility.”
I ask Grandmother. She wants to go to an art museum. When I was younger and Grandmother still lived with Amma’s sister-in-law in Sri Lanka, we would go to the museum whenever she visited. Vidya, then a teenager, came with us. Vidya and I would bring our sketchbooks in identical messenger bags and try to sketch out the paintings we liked. Once they had a visiting exhibit featuring photographs of Bharatanatyam dancers. I walked around the room for hours, sitting on the benches and trying to draw the dancers’ curves. My child hands cramped up and my fingers refused to move, until Vidya took my hand and showed me how to sketch with my arm as a brush. “Art isn’t small,” she said. “Don’t try to fit it into your fist.”
Nisha wants to go with us. I dress Grandmother in a saree because she refuses to leave the house in anything else. I push her feet into sandals and buckle the straps. She leans heavily on me as she walks out to the car.
“We could use the wheelchair,” I say. I’ve loaded it into the trunk.
She shakes her head. Her spine stands a little taller. I help her into the backseat and she buckles her seat belt. I put her walking stick on her lap.
We pick up Nisha on the way. I play Grandmother’s favorite CD of calm, melodious Tamil music from the sixties, and she drifts off to sleep. Nisha holds my hand as I drive. Her thumb makes little circles on the back of my palm.
Grandmother hobbles from the parking garage to the museum. She won’t even lean on me for support. She uses her walking stick and stands with her head high, looking more like a schoolteacher than ever, her white hair in a bun at the nape of her neck. Her eyes are clear, eager.
Nisha and I trail behind her. Nisha walks closer to me than normal, her arms brushing mine.
In front of the museum, a homeless woman sits against a tree. Grandmother stops. She pulls out the small coin purse she wears tucked into the waistband of her saree, counts out three dollar bills and a nickel, and drops them into the woman’s outstretched Au Bon Pain cup.
As we walk away, Grandmother says to me, “Always help out the beggars who sit outside temples.”
“This is a museum, Ammamma.”
She smiles and pats my cheek. “Come, Vidya. Let’s go practice your art.”
We let her lead. Instead of heading toward the MFA, she turns and walks toward the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. She’s always liked it better, with its rooms arranged like a house, ready for afternoon tea. Halfway there, she stops to rest on a park bench and watches geese eat grass. Green blades stick to their beaks as they waddle from patch to patch.
“How can she know the way to the museum but still call you Vidya?” Nisha asks.
“She always came here with Vidya.”
“And you.”
Nisha buys tickets while I check our coats and bags. Grandmother looks up through the glass walls of the entrance. I wonder if she remembers the way through the museum. We used to spend hours wandering the rooms. When I was younger, I imagined that ghosts still roamed the halls, going about their business as usual, arranging their hair in front of the smoky mirrors, having tea on the silk sofas, entertaining guests with a piano concert in the Tapestry Room.
Grandmother uses her walking stick as we go through the glass corridor to the historic building. I take it in, the arched brick doorways, the courtyard with gothic windows reaching up to the glass roof, the sound of falling water and people’s hushed conversations. My muscles relax of their own accord. I hadn’t even realized they were tense.
Nisha helps Grandmother sit down on a stone bench.
“Go on,” Grandmother says. “Go see the dancer.”
She remembers. I walk down into the Spanish Cloister, with its ceramic-tiled walls and scalloped stone archway. Life-sized and framed, it’s as if the whole room was built just to house this
painting. El Jaleo. The ruckus. A woman dances flamenco while black-suited men play guitars in the background. One man arches his head back. The dancer tilts at an impossible angle, her hand pointing toward the courtyard, volumes of fabric cascading off her hip. When I was younger I tried to sketch it, but my figure always seemed too stiff, too posed.
I wish I’d brought a sketchpad to try now. Maybe I’m ready. I watch the painting for a while longer. My back unknots.
When I join Grandmother, she’s dozing against Nisha’s shoulder. I shake her gently.
“Ammamma? Are you ready to go?”
She snaps awake and looks confused. “Did we see the paintings?”
“Not yet.”
She blinks clarity into her eyes and stands up. We walk through the Yellow Room, one of her favorite places, where a mirror lets us watch ourselves watch the paintings. Nocturne, Blue and Silver: Battersea Reach. The Blue Room, with its striped wallpaper and dainty sofas. A pale woman against the dawn, her red hair blowing in the wind. The Shower of Gold.
I wonder if Grandmother can remember the paintings’ names she used to help me memorize. Her face slides in and out of attention as we walk. At the bottom of the stairs, she turns to me.
“Help me climb,” she says.
“There’s an elevator.”
“I don’t want anyone’s pity.”
So I help her climb the stairs. We walk through the Dutch Room, where twenty years ago a pair of thieves sliced five paintings out with box cutters. The gilded frames still hang against the filigree wallpaper, empty. Grandmother has always loved this room. Every time we walked through she would say the same thing. I wonder if she’ll say it now.
Hobbling out of the room on her walking stick, she says, “It’s always about the ones who aren’t here. Remember that.”
The sentiment seems to be one that every Sri Lankan understands implicitly, we who start every cultural function with a moment of silence for those lost in our country’s decades-long ethnic civil war. Never forget the empty chairs. Never forget who should’ve been here.
“Vidya,” Grandmother says. “Let’s go to the church.”
The church is the Long Gallery on the third floor with a stained glass window on one side and small pews where people can kneel to pray. I help Grandmother kneel. She folds her palms one over the other and prays. Nisha does the same.
I stand behind them. I don’t even know how to pray at the temple. How do I pray in a museum?
Nisha crosses herself and stands up. She walks backward and takes my arm.
“Do you want to know what I prayed about?” she asks. With a glance toward Grandmother, she kisses me on the cheek.
“That you won’t get married?”
I say it as a joke but she says, “I prayed for a way out of this.” She sighs and rests her head on my shoulder.
There’s always a way out. You could be a ghost. I could be an empty chair.
“Don’t you want to sketch anything?” she asks.
“I didn’t bring a sketchbook.”
“Wait here.” She jogs out of the room. By the time I help Grandmother stand again, Nisha is back. She pushes a small notebook and pencil into my hands. “I’ll help Grandmother walk around. Go sketch.”
I can’t kiss her in front of Grandmother but I smile and hope it’s enough. I take the notebook back to the Spanish Cloister and sit down on a bench. The room is shadowed. Slivers of light float in from the garden and the courtyard, but the stone pillars and floor absorb most of it. The grays and blacks of the painting shift and slide around in my vision. What must it be like for the dancer, in front of all those men? Did she use her body as a way to keep them back?
I make a few false starts. The pencil is much too small. I adjust, and the fourth sketch captures her movement. She isn’t falling. She’s simply dancing, simply moving. I sketch. There’s no wedding. No Nisha. No museum. Just the dance. A way to keep them back. A movement like falling but you never crash.
The windows of Machine pulse with light that spills onto drunk passersby. A motley group of club-goers waits outside in line—androgynous youngsters with pierced noses, aging twinks with bright hair, hard and soft femmes in flirty dresses. Others rest against the brick of the neighboring mattress store to smoke.
I sit in my parked car and wait for Nisha. Bruins fans pass me in droves. She was supposed to be here fifteen minutes ago.
When she finally arrives, her knock on the car window makes me jump.
I get out of the car. “What took you?”
Her makeup is stronger than usual, her eyes lined and her lips red. Her hipbones jut out over her tight jeans.
I smooth down my UMass Minutemen shirt and try to run my hands through my hair. She tucks some strands behind my ears.
“You look nice,” I say.
She hooks her spangled purse under her arm. Her wrists clang with bangles. The line at the entrance thins out by the time we join in. A cute butch in front of us smiles at Nisha. I put an arm around her waist. Her T-shirt is cut in such a way that I can touch the skin of her lower back.
The bouncer at the door seems to know Nisha. She nods to us as she stamps our wrists. The bass of the dance beat resets my heart. We walk downstairs to a bar. Darkness crawls inside our eyes. People play pool and arcade games, and inside a glass-paneled room, a massive crowd dances to techno. Nisha walks to the bar and leans against it so that her hips tilt at just the right angle. The light arcs over her butt.
“Cosmo, strong,” she says to the bartender.
“Beer,” I say. “Whatever you have.”
The bartender puts down two glasses. Nisha takes hers and sips, so I pay for the drinks. Men in tight Hollister shirts laugh and bend toward each other at the pool tables. Women in shorts stand around in large groups at the tables. One woman in baggy cargoes and a striped polo smiles at me from a corner of the bar.
Nisha stays quiet and watches the crowd. The music is so loud I wouldn’t be able to hear her anyway. She stands next to a poster advertising for dancers at a club called the Mason Jar. My beer tastes like perfume. I should’ve been more careful about what I ordered. I take in the chill of the air conditioning that falls down from black vents in the ceiling. I’ve heard of this place but I’ve never been. How many times has Nisha come here? How many women has she brought?
“Do you always come here?” I ask.
The woman across the bar is still watching me, her flat-billed hat tilted slightly on her head.
“Not always.”
The woman across the bar lifts her beer in a toast and takes a drink. I drink from my glass.
“Are you listening?”
“What?”
Nisha pouts. She pulls my hand. “I used to come in college. Let’s go dance.”
The dance floor is so crowded we can’t move. Nisha pushes through and pulls me behind her. Someone’s sweaty back grazes my arm. Someone else’s elbow bumps me in the small of my back. But the beat is sinking into me. Nisha rubs her palms on mine and pulls me closer. I close my eyes against the pulsing lights. Dark. Jasmine. Nisha. I press my fingers into her waist. Skin. She breathes against my neck.
“I’m so glad you came,” she says. “I miss this.”
“You don’t have to get married.”
She draws back and looks at my face. The light glints off her blue contacts.
“Of course I have to,” she says. “I meant I miss not having to pretend.”
I see the woman from before, the one with the flat-billed hat, over Nisha’s shoulder. She smiles, and jerks her head toward the exit.
“If you get married,” I say, “you’ll have to pretend forever.”
Nisha’s palms twitch on my spine. “Pretending is better than the alternative.”
I push her off of me. “I’m going to the bathroom.” I walk in that general direction
until I’m sure Nisha can’t see me, then climb up the steps toward the exit.
Bruins fans stumble around outside the club. People smoke beside the buildings. Butts litter the concrete.
The woman is waiting for me, twirling a cigarette in her fingers. She moves closer and offers me one. I take it, just in case Nisha happens to wander this way and wonder what I’m doing. The woman lights it and steps close enough that I can smell her cologne.
“That your girlfriend?” She tilts her head toward the club entrance.
“Not really.” I hope my voice doesn’t shake.
She raises an eyebrow. We smoke in silence, her shoulder almost close enough to mine that I can feel the air in between us. I should give this woman my number. Kris would say so. In a way she reminds me of the rugby girls, swagger and boyish charm. I don’t owe Nisha anything.
“I have to go.” I put out the cigarette with my foot.
The woman kisses my cheek. “Come see me if you change your mind.”
I go back into the darkness of the club and down into the bathrooms. Four people in line. Good excuse for taking so much time. I fiddle with the edge of the poster calling for dancers at the Mason Jar. Female dancers experienced in belly dance, Middle Eastern or Indian dances, to work one night a week. I should’ve given my number to that woman. Nisha’s engagement ceremony is around the corner. Female dancers, Indian dance, one night a week. Nisha’s engagement, then the wedding. She’ll be a wife before I know it. Before I can stop her. I don’t even know if she wants me to stop her.
•••
Amma is waiting up for me when I get home, her face bathed in the glow of her computer screen. She doesn’t say anything. She makes me warm milk with sugar.
“I don’t know what I did to deserve this,” she says. She trudges up the stairs, leaving me to my milk.
Would it help if I told you Amma lost a baby? Her name was Tabu, and she was supposed to be born between my sister Vidya and me. But Tabu never cried. A year later Amma and Appa had me, so that I could walk in the shadows that Tabu’s wrinkled little body never cast. Maybe Tabu would’ve made all the right decisions. Maybe Tabu would’ve made Amma happy.