The Prayer Room Read online

  the prayer room

  a novel by shanthi sekaran

  ebook ISBN: 978-1-59692-933-3

  M P Publishing Limited

  12 Strathallan Crescent

  Douglas

  Isle of Man

  IM2 4NR

  British Isles

  Telephone: +44 (0)1624 618672

  email: [email protected]

  MacAdam/Cage

  155 Sansome Street

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  San Francisco, CA 94104

  www.macadamcage.com

  Copyright © 2008 by Shanthi Sekaran

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  “Hearts and Bones”, Copyright © 1983 Paul Simon Used by permission of the Publisher: Paul Simon Music

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  The prayer room / by Shanthi Sekaran.

  2 parts, 36 chapters (15 & 21)

  1. Indian women—Fiction. 2. Identity (Philosophical concept)—Fiction. 3. California—Fiction.

  Hardback book design by Dorothy Carico Smith; e-book by GSH

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  To the house on Winding Creek Road, and everyone who once lived there.

  Two people were married

  The act was outrageous

  The bride was contagious

  She burned like a bride

  These events may have had some effect

  On the man with the girl by his side

  “Hearts and Bones,” Paul Simon

  Acknowledgments

  I owe deepest gratitude to the following:

  Spencer Maxwell Dutton—I haven’t the words. Avinash, my little alarm clock. My parents, for their faith, and my brothers, who knew I would write before I did. My agents, Lindsay Edgecombe and Victoria Skurnick, for their care and enthusiasm in turning a word document into something real. My editors, Kate Nitze and Soumeya Bendimerad, as well as Pat Walsh, Reynard Seifert and all at MacAdam/Cage who worked assiduously against the odds.

  For their guidance: Jean McGarry and the faculty of the Writing Seminars. Jackie Kay, Anne Whitehead, Bill Herbert and Margaret Wilkinson.

  For their advice and friendship: Debby Layton, Karl Nastrom,Viccy Adams, and Simon Van Booy. Hannah, Aarti and Nirupa, my sisters. Haleh, Anna, Aparna and Deena, my other sisters. The Hard to Find Book Group and the Nottingham Massive. The Horrocks and Dutton families. And for my extended and hyper-extended family, an endless source of humor and love.

  About the author

  Shanthi Sekaran splits her time between Berkeley, California and London. She is a graduate of the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, and is now pursuing a PhD at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Her first publication appeared in the anthology Best New American Voices 2004. The Prayer Room is her first novel

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Part I

  chapter one

  chapter two

  chapter three

  chapter four

  chapter five

  chapter six

  chapter seven

  chapter eight

  chapter nine

  chapter ten

  chapter eleven

  chapter twelve

  chapter thirteen

  chapter fourteen

  chapter fifteen

  Part II

  chapter one

  chapter two

  chapter three

  chapter four

  chapter five

  chapter six

  chapter seven

  chapter eight

  chapter nine

  chapter ten

  chapter eleven

  chapter twelve

  chapter thirteen

  chapter fourteen

  chapter fifteen

  chapter sixteen

  chapter seventeen

  chapter eighteen

  chapter nineteen

  chapter twenty

  chapter twenty-one

  PART I

  CHAPTER ONE

  He had a habit of regretting his purchases. He’d buy vanilla yogurt when he meant to buy plain, nylon socks when he wanted cotton, and lobster at the Chinese takeaway when most people knew that a lobster plate for 70 pence was not a promising choice. And now he sat on a Pan Am airliner with his new small wife beside him. He’d had a girlfriend, Victoria. Not anymore. He’d told her, when he left for India, not to wait for him. He’d spent most of his time in India secretly hoping she would. And now he fervently hoped she hadn’t.

  The plan was this: to go to Madras as a visiting scholar and return with a chunk of an art history dissertation in hand. Instead, he had an Indian woman. He wasn’t certain that the marriage was binding. It had been performed hastily in a temple down the road from the college, and there hadn’t been a notary present. The priests hadn’t worn shirts. He felt a shirtless man could have little in the way of official authority. But then, if the marriage weren’t binding, what would he do with this woman, leaning trustfully against his shoulder, asleep or pretending to be? Sorry, love, he might say, it seems we’re not actually married. There’s a letting agency down the road and a market on the corner. Best of luck with everything. Her hair was loose and drifted onto his chest. She wore a sari and two gold bangles. From above, he studied the fringe of her lashes. No, he couldn’t turn her away.

  George had left for India with visions of social clubs and exclusive dining rooms that served gin and tonics and Sunday roasts. His supervisor at the university was from Exeter and would show him how to make his way through the heat and the dust. He would spend his afternoons in the cool of the English library, and emerge in the evenings for drinks at the club. There would be bridge games, played by English girls gone moist who would sit with their legs spread, wearing thin cotton dresses and fanning the heat away.

  It was August 1974. Everyone spoke of the heat, the cloud of it that had smothered him the moment he stepped off the plane in Madras. But it wasn’t the heat that stayed with him, not even the dust. It was the air, thick and glutinous, that existed nowhere else in the world. And swarming through every molecule of it was Madras and everything in Madras: sweaty silk, water, the curiously thin coins, tin cups, oil, frying food, groundnuts, the empty smell of boiled rice, turmeric, coriander, cumin, coconut oil, cow dung, goats in the street, naked children wearing nothing but gold chains around their waists, beggars with no legs, adobe houses, power cuts, wells, irrigation ditches, billboards, hotels, mothballs, citronella, fire. All of it rushed into George each time he inhaled. And when he exhaled, none of it came back out.

  There were two English women on his course, Stella and Jo, and they didn’t play bridge. They took tea in their rooms, spending most of their time studying and the rest of it on “expeditions” to local temples, getting skinny and brown as natives, wearing badly wrapped saris, and maintaining a steadfast indifference to George. No club, no parties, no nights made slippery by gin. George was a student, and no different from every other student around him. He ate in the canteen with the rest of them, spooning watery lentil soup onto rice, drinking from his own bottle of preboiled water to keep off the runs. He studied in his hall library under the whir of some sleepy ceiling fans, haunted daily by the room’s single resident fly. His supervisor was an effete and sweaty man who spent his days in a very large office. He could happily speak with George for three and a half hours about seventh-century temple engravings. But an existence outside of his office was something he probably never risked. Days swelled like bloated carcasses and ruptured
into months. George stayed and worked and was oblivious to the gift that this country was about to push, with its wide and forceful smile, into his arms.

  And this was where they met: it was May, a month when bathing was useless. George stepped out of the bathroom and into a fresh coat of sweat. He put on a clean linen shirt, cool at first, until it too melted to his skin.

  In the lecture hall, fans were mounted to the walls, but any air they made vanished immediately into the roomful of bodies.

  Her first words: Excuse me. His first words: Go ahead. And she squeezed past him into the crowded lecture hall. George looked after her, the first Indian woman he’d seen in a dress. The dress was white, cotton, so thin that it shaded her more than clothed her. It fell to her knees. Hers were the first brown calves he’d seen since leaving Heathrow. He watched for her the next week and the week after, spotting her always in the back row. Legs crossed, dress creeping above the knee, showing a narrow strip of thigh. Brown skin was taking on new meaning for George. In a country with so much of it, he got to see so little. After eight months, he’d begun to forget the thighs and breasts of English women.

  To look without looking was a vanishing art form. It had certainly vanished in Madras, where people gawked at him, leaned out of their windows as if they’d never seen a tall white man before. In his one and only lecture, George looked without looking at the people around him, homogenously brown, speaking an English that brought to mind neither Forster nor Kipling. He sat at the lecture hall’s center and had to turn in his seat to look at her, which he did, awkwardly, three times. The man next to him stared at George each time, annoyed at the needless fidgeting. She wore her hair loose around her shoulders. Indian women didn’t do this. Loose hair was intimate. He looked again and his elbow knocked his pencil to the ground, where it rolled under the seat in front of him, unreachable, gone forever. Feeling foolish, he vowed never to look back again.

  When he did look back again, Viji caught him. She stared back, her eyes wide with some mixture of amusement and surprise. The man next to him turned to have a look too, but he didn’t see what George saw. Brown legs, bedroom hair.

  And now, there were worse places she could be. The last four days had been a fever dream, and this, the baggage claim at Heathrow, was just an extension of it. Viji stood by the carousel and watched other people’s luggage go by. Hulking suitcases, brown boxes wound desperately with twine, a black leather bag with the tip of a shoe sticking out. She’d had to come in through the noncitizen line; George had said he would meet her on the other side. She watched the clock at the far end of the hall. Ten minutes, still no husband. His line had been shorter. He should have been through by now. Around her glided a sea of British people—towering, pink-hued, dressed in trousers, hair that was brown and lighter brown and lightest brown. They all looked like George. Which one had she married? Next to her stood a tall Caucasian male, a few days’ stubble sprayed across his cheeks. Same sand-colored hair. Linen shirt, linen trousers. She looked down to find sandals and pink toes, knobbly with the lesions of a hundred mosquito bites. This could have been her husband, but it wasn’t.

  A month after they married, they had a honeymoon. George felt it was only right, that after all the strangeness something predictable was in order. They toured the Lake District, driving around Cumbria in his father’s ’67 Volkswagen. They listened to the radio, tinny beneath the engine’s urgent roar. Cooar blimey! was a phrase she learned, and six of one, half a dozen of the other, mates’ rates, don’t fancy yours much, ee by gum! Most mornings, the engine refused to start, until George learned to bleed the radiator and seal it with his lips to blow out the air bubbles.

  They had no set plans for that holiday, and they wasted a good deal of time asking what the other wanted, tossing their choices around like work colleagues on a business trip: Shall we eat in a pub tonight or a restaurant? There’s an Italian down the street, or would you prefer something light? I was going to get another pint, but I don’t have to. Would you join me? You don’t have to. Well, I don’t mind. Whatever you want. It’s fine, that’s fine with me. Are you sure? Often Viji wished George would just order for her, and George wished Viji would get an opinion of her own. Surely there were things she hated, but he had yet to find them. The only thing she’d refused was the kidney pie he’d bought from a farm shop. She’d even eaten the black pudding that came with their hotel breakfast. “So tasty.” she said, stabbing the black congealed disc with her fork. “Like nothing I’ve tasted.” She stopped suddenly. “It isn’t beef, I hope.”

  “No,” George said. “No, not really.”

  She resumed eating, chomping happily.“How do they make it?” A herd of sheep roamed by their window, and George managed to skirt the question.

  He found that he liked her voice. They had talked some in Madras, but not much, and it wasn’t until now that he truly learned how she sounded. She spoke with an accent that he recognized as educated, a voice that wrapped around the language and stretched it out like taffy. She turned words into intimate things; she spoke with an affection for the syllables themselves. The hours spent driving passed easily with her, conversations drifting in and out the car window.

  From Ulverston they drove to Lake Coniston, and from there to Windermere. Everything around her was green, Hollywood green, as green as Scarlett O’Hara’s ball gown, soaked with pigment by the months of winter snow and spring rain. Driving with George through the countryside, Viji felt she didn’t know him at all. The few scraps of intimacy they’d collected during those hectic nights in Madras had vanished. Now he was a man with light hair who gripped the steering wheel tightly, his jaw set. He pointed to streams that ran between the fields, and to flocks of sheep and cows. He named the massive hills towards which they drove. They stopped in towns with bewildering names like Tintwhistle and Penistone, bought eggs and bread from farm shops. She felt obligated to compliment the scenery whenever possible, and took every opportunity to be awed by the land of which he— of which all these English—seemed so very proud.

  Around them rolled the valleys she’d seen in paintings. They planted a warm ache inside her. Fields of tiny yellow buds spread as perfectly rectangular as if a servant had clipped them back with shears. Around her, all was beauty—fenced in, trim and sedate. Every blade of grass looked like every other blade of grass, as if they’d all had a meeting and decided how to be. Blankets upon blankets of miniature flowers, atop the greenest green. Nowhere could she see the dusty roadsides or pointless rock piles of home. The English countryside was like English desserts: custard on pudding, cream on cake, sweet smothering sweet and holding at bay the salty bits of life.

  George bought a bottle of sloe gin from a local farmer. Viji asked him how much it cost. This was a habit of hers, he was beginning to learn. He wouldn’t tell her, and they had their first fight. He had his reasons for buying that particular bottle on that specific day. The price didn’t matter. Besides which, it cost far more than he could afford, and he preferred not to remind himself of this. He would save it, he said, for a special occasion. It would get better with time.

  They picnicked at the southern edge of a lake one muggy afternoon, after George had bought some elderflower wine and oatcakes and cheddar. By the time they’d finished half the bottle, George’s words were slurring and Viji had fallen into a warm haze. When George wandered off to piss in the bushes, Viji lay on the lakeside, her head resting on her forearm. The world was in a stupor. She watched, for what seemed like hours, the water’s hot fast ripple, perfectly silent. Drunken geese flew in a teetering V over the tree line. On the opposite shore were some ducks, gliding smoothly across the lake’s surface, showing no signs of the frantic churn beneath. She thought of her uncle’s village house, of the river that ran past it, bordered by arid dirt and cut by a bridge. She missed the creek behind her home in Madras. She missed the fried fish her mother’s cook would make. She dozed. Not even George’s footsteps woke her. She woke when his lips brushed her neck and, sleep
ily, she unbuttoned his shirt. They made love there on the hard, grassy bank. On the main road above, a tractor rattled by but didn’t stop.

  It was a sordid business, this luring of females to his bedroom. It was such an obvious sort of game, mired in nervous dialogue and badly worded invitations. George wished for a way around it, but there was none. With Viji, the game troubled him more than usual—he somehow felt guiltier with her than he would have with someone English. It wasn’t just that startled gasp of pain when he entered her, the sudden rigid clutch of her body under his. It was more the sense that he was a predator, and she his prey. Nonsense, Victoria would have said. That little thing is more predator than you’ll ever be.

  They slept in his old bedroom at his parents’ house in Sneinton, a neighborhood at the eastern end of Nottingham. On a twin mattress hardly big enough for both of them, they slept against each other, locked in like pieces of a puzzle. Often he woke in the mornings with his feet on the floor and a cramp in his lower back. Viji’s brown legs wrapped all the way around his waist, and her soft sheets of hair snuck into his mouth.

  George felt little need for sleep. And he was glad, at least, to not have to watch her leave. No longer did he lie helplessly as she wrapped her sari around and around, carefully tucking the pleats into her waistband, her face drying into a tight mask of worry and guilt. And she was happy to be here with him, or so it seemed at night. During the days, she spent long hours gazing out the window. During the days, he wasn’t so sure.

  Still, there were times when the very existence of Viji—in his mother’s kitchen, standing next to him at the cornershop, dreaming in a window seat—sucked the language from him, left him verbally bereft and unable to work. Sometimes he wondered what she would do if he left her somewhere, at the supermarket or the post office in town. Would she find her way home, making her quiet way down the pavement, or would she simply vanish? Would she find a job in a bakery and a flat in the city center? He could only watch her and wonder how she’d ended up here, with him, on this pockmarked strip of England. There were moments when he despised her for it, the way she’d mutely latched onto his life, wandered into his bed, then into his world, and forced upon it an outline. He’d preferred it shapeless.