She stood still, next to her car. For the next two days, she wasn’t on call and would probably be at home. There would be too many hours to fill. Then she saw two boys spilling out of the temple, laughing and trying to hit each other as their parents followed slowly and heavily behind. The mother and father looked around gloomily and bent with effort to put their shoes back on as the boys raced in circles, picking up their shoes only to aim them at each other. They couldn’t have been more than nine or ten, the same age as John’s son.
The sight hurt her. How happy and how utterly careless the two boys were in their happiness, knowing that the mother who mumbled angrily at them to stop fighting, the father who slapped their shoulders to get them to stand still, would always be there watching, knowing what was wrong with them and able to fix it, the parents solid as a house. What every child deserved.
Before Michelle could move, in front of her, a lone man appeared, his hips and legs wrapped curiously in excess layers of white cloth edged in festive, almost garish gold. The costume gave an unexpected grandeur to his sad, brown chest. His old-man skin was speckled with white and grey hairs, and despite having the look of someone with an important job to do—he shushed the two boys, beckoned them to move aside, and started scattering spoonfuls of water from a sort of gold scoop he dipped into an equally burnished pitcher, muttering and dropping the water on the ground in a pattern known only to himself—he also had the look of someone resigned to staying late at work, to going home alone. Later Michelle would learn, from John, that the faded orange thread around the priest’s shoulder and neck meant he too was the head of a household, a married man, a dad. But at that moment, John wasn’t there to point out or explain anything; he was packing his things and thinking about California and the future, she supposed.
She stared at the priest’s bare, mottled shoulders, seeing how alone he was and probably always would be. One of the boys, the younger one, looked over at the man and made a face, sticking out his tongue and trying to cross his eyes. “Ho,” his father said, pulling him away from the priest’s view, sheltering him in a corner with his body.
The father’s face was familiar. His bald head, the way he scratched with one hand, held on so tightly to the little boy with the other. And the mother. The Indian mother stood thin, worried, wrinkled, the smooth, elaborate chains of gold around her neck as gleaming as the temple’s roof. Their other little boy butted his head against her waist.
Without intending to, Michelle found herself back inside her car, revving it up and turning sharply, the steering wheel a wild thing in her hands as she sped off. She wasn’t heedless but did not take extra care. The Indians noticed her and took a step back.
She drove away, intent on following each curve of the road, no longer curious or compassionate toward that family or the boy, the one she’d helped to save that day in the mountains. No longer interested in seeing how these strangers lived, what they believed. Only when she reached the building where John was staying, slammed her car door and ran to the door that he’d opened, only when she was stripped down next to him and safe in bed did she realize: nothing could sustain her loyalty, nothing in medicine or religion, nothing more than the rhythm of their breaths and pounding hearts, the mystery of them.
THE GODDESS OF BEAUTY GOES BOWLING
MR. NEELAKANTA VAIKUNTASHYAMALA Gopisundaram Iyer, Gopi to his friends, stood on the staircase of his house, leaning on his cane.
The cane could have belonged to a wandering Buddhist ascetic with nothing but outstretched palms and a cheerful disposition to see him through old age. In contrast, Gopi was seething, tired, resentful. His cane was made of young bamboo, from shoots that grew past the inquisitive, cruel snouts of wild pigs outside his sister’s garden of jute and banyan trees ten minutes from the Kapaleshwar temple at Mylapore. Walks in that garden were truly serene; how he missed it.
Somewhere in the US was a serenity, probably for rich people, he didn’t doubt—a few moments that some tycoon spent in a gold-plated bath, on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, or sunning his pink, fleshy face in the pages of a magazine. Somewhere in the US, it was quiet—but not in Elmhurst, one block from the subway and right under the Number Seven train, where Gopi lived.
His wife was still young, stubborn enough to run up the train steps and then come down looking worried, roaming the street. She would be looking for Shree, always for her. Shree, of course, would be safe and comfortable. Oblivious—but not in a serene way, not like the god Vishnu asleep on a serpent in the cold deep. To Gopi, rather, his daughter was the serpent, rapaciously devouring them.
At fifty-eight, Gopi shouldn’t have felt like an old man. His wife Lakshmi’s face was as young-looking and round as it had been on their wedding day. Though she looked more like a younger sister, people knew her to be his wife. His hold was too possessive anything else. From the beginning he had worried not only that she would outlive him, but that she would have to care for him as an invalid.
There was nearly a twenty-year age difference between Gopi and his wife. To some it seemed like a scandal, a thirty-eight-year-old bachelor finally marrying a nubile, intelligent nineteen-year-old girl from a good family. It was Gopi’s reward for his father’s years of company service and longstanding friendship with Lakshmi’s father. But her father knew, after all, that he would love her to his death, care for her, shelter her with the last scrap of clothing he possessed, like Nala in the Mahabharata, who took off his one remaining garment and used it to cover his beautiful, half-naked wife once they were exiled into poverty.
Gopi made his way down the steps slowly, listening to the sounds that filled the house. In all these twenty years, he’d never expected to be where they were now, like this, in thrall to a child he could hardly recognize as his. His daughter, Shree, the Goddess of Beauty, was brushing her teeth and gargling theatrically as usual. It was as if, knowing how irritated he became, she did it more. Next would be prayers, to which he couldn’t object. Reverberating through the whole house like the noise from a passing subway train—relentless, low-pitched, rattling his teeth as it lurched on overhead.
Praying was the way Shree could talk as loudly as she liked and for as long as she wanted, without ever having to ask permission. There was a story she had started reciting in a monotone, making it something else, not quite an incantation but dangerous-sounding. He had no idea how she’d learned this myth, how there could be myths and legends in a mind the doctors had said would never develop beyond that of the average five-year-old. But there she was at twelve, able to tell the story of Narasimha—half man, half lion, the form of Vishnu that had come down to earth to protect a faithful boy from his father’s threats and curses.
The father in the story was wicked and vigilant. Constantly aware that his power as a king could be taken away, he prayed for unlimited power using the severest penances. He forbade his son from praying to the god Narayana because it reminded the king that he wasn’t a god. But the boy continued to pray. Had the father listened in the night, he might have heard doom in the silence, the lack of a reply from God until it was too late for him to repent. “No man, no beast, no god. I cannot be killed in the daytime or in the night, inside of a building or outside. Go on and pray, my boy.”
To Gopi, the ambitious king’s voice, in its certainty, in its roaring, grandiose monotone, was not like Gopi’s own voice at all, but like his daughter’s. Shree prayed every morning and every evening for their health, without asking him how many more years he wanted to live. But prayers for others were just formalities; her real intention was to make special requests to gratify herself. Let my mom live forever, she said. Let her keep working with me every afternoon. Let Dad not yell and scream, yell and scream. Let Dad love me. Please let him, let him.
Gopi and his wife Lakshmi lay in their beds every night listening to her. Lakshmi could fall asleep right after, first calling out, “Goodnight, sweetheart,” and feeling satisfied by Shree’s answering chortle. When Shree was two or three, and Gopi
sat looking at her from a few yards away on the bare, perfectly clean floor, imagining her being the same way at forty years of age, at fifty and sixty, he’d offered his own prayers silently—that she wouldn’t outlive either of them, that she would die when it was time to get her married, so no humiliation would come to the family, especially to his son. He hadn’t wanted to send Romesh to boarding school, but Lakshmi insisted, saying that the distraction she always felt, the preoccupation with Shree’s safety and routine, would prevent her son from getting all the attention he deserved. They had no family here to cherish him, unlike in India.
She didn’t want him to feel the day-to-day cares of worrying about Shree; Romesh was already too compassionate, getting into fights with the neighbor’s child who had thrown dirt at her. Scolding Shree, when he was only eight and she was ten—once imitating Gopi with his hand raised and his face drawn in a scowl, making her pick up a bowl of cereal she’d spilled and saying he would beat her otherwise. Not knowing, as Lakshmi told Gopi afterward, that Shree’s clumsiness was part of her disability, the same thing that made her use up shoes so quickly and need special inserts from the podiatrist, some unknown but ill-fated process by which her movements would never have Romesh’s exuberance.
When their beloved son Romesh was three years old, Gopi remembered him playing with his sister. Going into the room where she had her toys and stealing them, leading her out into the other room on his fat toddler legs, laughing with delight. Laughing even more when she fell backwards and hurt herself. That was the natural state of things, Gopi believed. Not something to be banished.
“But I want Romesh to stay a child,” Lakshmi had said. “And she needs my care.”
He’d answered, “Why send him? Why not send Shree away.” The children were at the playground together; he didn’t worry they would hear. “God has already punished me. Why do you punish me too, khannu?” His tenderness hadn’t made any difference, in the end.
Romesh was only eight but had quickly been settled in the excellent school at Coimbatore, where generations of Lakshmi’s male relatives had studied and done well. So Gopi had accepted things. The boy’s grandparents were taking great pleasure in bringing him up.
Now it seemed Gopi had little to do but wonder if he had sinned in a past life. Like the hero Rama’s father had sinned, accidentally killing the son of a powerful sage, for which the sage cursed him to also feel the grief of losing a son. God was listening; God was keeping score. So Gopi would say nothing whenever Lakshmi went on. “I think she should have singing lessons, at least a few.
I found a lady who’ll do it for only five dollars a lesson. She used to sing for the dancers at Baby Kamala’s school in New Jersey; now she sings on and off in the temple and so on. It’s worth it, isn’t it? She said she wants to sing like the radio, and she has a good voice. You know she sings along to the bhajans every single Saturday on Voice of Asia. She’s very good.”
Lakshmi was content with his usual answer, a grunt. By the time Shree was eleven, he had learned not to mistake his conversations with his wife for the picture of marriage he’d cherished for years, a man and his wife reminiscing, taking pleasure in each other’s company, proud of each other. Also, his Lakshmi was the bread-earner of the family. He was “retired,” he told people, and had been so since eleven years before, when Shree was born and Lakshmi came ahead of him to America.
At that time, he had been forty-six and jobless, an unexpected bruise on the golden body of Lakshmi’s illustrious family of lawyers and judges and engineers, though he had never hit his wife. Lakshmi was fair-skinned, his parents had insisted on that—so where did Shree’s stubbornly dark color come from? “She favors your side of the family,” Lakshmi said.
Soon after Shree was born and the doctors had handed down her diagnosis, Lakshmi had fled to the US, first telling him she wanted to consult with specialists, then finding early childhood programs for Shree and deciding not to go back. She’d even gotten a job in one of the programs looking for a part-time aide. When Lakshmi, not once consulting anyone, least of all him, had sold her marriage jewelry to put down a security deposit for the apartment in Elmhurst, he’d said to her on the telephone, “What if I refuse to come?” Gopi could never remember how she replied, just the sound of her crying on the phone, then the surprise of his own tears, not shed since his father’s funeral, at the thought of never seeing her again.
He’d taken the first plane he could on a student visa, done a short business course at City College. Then failed, fired from a few jobs, refusing to look for anymore. There was a small inheritance he contributed at first, then promises to go to interviews, then staying at home. His communications degree from Mylapore College was useless here. He could communicate, but no one would listen. In India he’d worked for a small advertising firm, writing in Tamil and English and making phone calls, but mainly talking and sharing tiffin with the college friend whose father had helped Gopi get hired.
Leaning on the side of the armchair in their small living room, before lowering himself into it, he tried again to remember precisely what Lakshmi said to bring him to the US, where he was now marooned. As if there were words he could change, different inflections he could add, that would have made their lives different.
He knew he wasn’t the only one who felt the way he did—look at the movie made just that year, Geethanjali, where a perfectly reasonable and decent chap, a father interested in providing for his other children, tells his wife that a child born with problems died at birth. When she discovers the falsehood and finds the child, wrenching the daughter away from the institution and only home she’s ever known, the whole colony where they live descends on the mother, trying to make her see reason.
But that was a mother’s love. Reason didn’t enter it. At any rate, these days, when he and Shree were home alone together with Lakshmi at work and his son studying at boarding school, Gopi had the freedom to tell Shree exactly what he thought of her, Those glasses are awful and ugly. Stop eating so much or I’m going to get the belt. Why do you take so long to bathe? Oh Shanyanay, deerdramay, pishashu. Fitting names for demons, all of them. As she would for years to come, perhaps for all her life, Shree lacked any comprehension of these names. She didn’t respond with tears, only the same benign, determined stare that Lakshmi said was partly a result of her visual defects.
Another morning. There was silence in the house, meaning he had avoided Shree’s prayers so far. The sound of the Queens public bus screeching to a halt just outside was like a school bell—he eagerly pushed himself up and went to the door before Shree could come down to fling it open. Somehow depriving her of this joy satisfied him. There was too little she hadn’t stolen. Lakshmi had just come back from the market. It was eight o’clock and she had twenty minutes before going to her job as a special education teacher, for which she’d gone back to school when he was forty-six and she was twenty-seven, full of energy and hope that learning techniques for strangers’ children would help her with Shree.
Her life was a blur of things to do for Shree and for her work. She no longer had the time to go to the market in the morning and buy him fresh food, as his sister and his mother always had every morning, since he was a child.
But today was a special day, a holy day—the achingly proud day of his son’s Avanay Avatam, the thread ceremony, with an uncle taking Gopi’s place in India, because they couldn’t afford a ticket home. Lakshmi had shopped for special foods, to make the prasadam she would offer to the gods so that next year they might save enough to bring Romesh to the U.S. for a visit. This morning, no matter how uneasy their togetherness, Gopi and his daughter both inhaled the smells of coffee, fresh papaya and coconut milk, steaming idlis from the cooker, mint chutney. As he ate, he flipped through the newspaper she had brought, fingering each page as he read, since each proved that Lakshmi had been thinking of him only, and not about Shree, when she bought the paper.
“Heartshare has a bowling trip for school-aged children,” Lakshmi said
, sitting next to him. “Normally, I wouldn’t let her go, but she really wanted it this once, and she’s told me she can do it even with her legs like that, so…it costs only twenty bucks. Can you please take her to return the bottles? She can get some pocket money that way, for the trip.”
“She’s not a school-aged child,” Gopi said firmly. “She’s a retard, in a program. It’s not a school. School is where you sent our son. School means there’s a future that you’re learning for.”
Lakshmi looked down. She hadn’t bought a second newspaper, which she sometimes did, at fifty cents; it was something she could read on the bus to work. Too much else to do, he thought. Or she was saving the money. “So will you go?” she said. “Today I just cannot, and she needs it.”
“Seri,” he agreed. “I need to buy some iced tea anyway. At least let her help me.”
Lakshmi agreed. She got up to clear the table, their breakfast finished after less than twenty precious minutes. She was busy thinking about her lesson plan for the day, he supposed, how she would teach children who couldn’t do more than play with their own fingers. They liked to trace the letters of the alphabet in sandpaper cutouts she had carefully pasted.
The night before, after dinner, Gopi watched her making them. He’d looked away from her then; now he wondered how she’d thought of the project. How could she stand to be creative for those kinds of children? The mistakes?
His walk to the store passed without incident. On the corner, Shree took his hand as they waited for a stoplight. He was certain she felt the power she had being alone with him; he felt sure that she was goading him.
No matter, he wouldn’t be irritated today. For once, he let his daughter hold him. His son was ten years old. The boy had been away at school, away from them, two long years now. Today was his Avanay Avatam. One of Lakshmi’s brothers would stand in for Gopi and, when saying the prayer, Romesh would call out “father” to that man. That man, who wasn’t his father, would hold the boy’s hand. They would laugh while waves of the ocean rose and broke over the two of them.
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