“You knew what he was going to do?”
“Yes. The week before he did it, I went over to the motel and we talked about it. We decided not to tell you because you’d be upset. And we were right—look at you now.”
She ignored the comment and jerked upright. “You didn’t try to stop him?”
“No. In fact, I told him to go ahead and do it.”
She could hear the hardness in his voice, the lack of apology. A part of her raged against him for that. But another part grudgingly respected his refusal to lie.
“How could you encourage such a terrible thing?” she whispered.
“Because I have a family to support. And they’re more important to me than some dog belonging to a bastard who was taking advantage of us. Bishu felt the same way. He told me, No one’s going to cheat our baby out of his birthright. No one’s going to take away the house Bela loves so much. Oh, yes, he knew how you felt. And you—look at you, acting like you’re so much better than him. Than us. You know nothing of what it takes to survive in the world, the values you have to sacrifice, the choices you have to make. You never had to learn, because he and I were taking care of you all along.”
The dark swayed around her like seaweed, choking. For the first time, she hated Sanjay with a deep and committed hatred for the way he had unhesitatingly taken Bishu’s side against her. But that other thing he accused her of, could it be true? She pushed herself to the edge of the bed and got unsteadily to her feet. In the dark she grabbed a pair of pants, a top. She went to the family room and pulled them on. She picked up her purse and car keys. She slid open the corner drawer in the kitchen carefully, so it would not squeak, and took her passport. She ignored Sanjay’s voice: Come back to bed, it’s the middle of the night, what on earth are you doing? Soundlessly, she closed the apartment door behind her. It would take her five minutes to reach the ATM, another five to withdraw enough money for an air ticket to India. She could be at the airport in an hour.
But no. She was still sitting on the bed, motionless, because there was an anchor inside her belly, heavier than anything she had known. It held her down. Sanjay was wrong. She did understand about sacrificing values for the sake of love. She’d learned it just now—as Sabitri, too, must have, during those long widow years, bringing Bela up on her own. It was a lesson all mothers had to memorize.
Bela slid down in bed and pressed her hand against her stomach until the baby, who must have been sleeping, gave a displeased kick. All of a sudden, she was certain it was a girl. The knowledge filled her with tenderness and sorrow. She needed to pass on something wise to her daughter, something that would help her with the choices the relentless world would force her to make. But the darkness fell upon her, blotting out all eloquence, so that all she could think to whisper was, Baby. Baby. Baby.
Before We Visit the Goddess: 2002
I’m in a foul mood. Driving down 288 will do that to me anyway because of the memories, and it doesn’t help that last night’s vodka makes my skull feel like someone’s going at it with a baseball bat. But today I have another reason to be pissed, and he’s sitting in the back seat, scowling. Though what he has to scowl about I don’t know, being chauffeured as he is in air-conditioned luxury all the way out to Pearland for sightseeing. He’s about five-foot-one, bald, very dark skin, thick-framed glasses, and Indian like me.
That’s what my supervisor Yvonne said when she called me at home at the crack of dawn asking if I could come in early, they needed me for a job. I pulled the ratty blanket over my head, hoping she’d give up, but Yvonne knows me well. I’ve been working for her part-time in University Transportation since I dropped out of school, six years now. She kept calling back until I rolled over swearing and groped for the phone. I knocked over a bottle of Hawkeye, but it didn’t matter because it was empty already, and in any case the carpet has so many stains that one more wouldn’t have made a difference.
Yvonne’s voice boomed through my head, “He’s Indian, Tara. Just like you. He’s visiting the university, and he wants to go to the temple in Pearland. I figured you’d be the perfect person to take him.”
I wanted to tell her, no, I wouldn’t. I was certain this person—whoever he might be—was nothing like me. I’d never been to India, I didn’t hang with Indians, I didn’t even think of myself as Indian. And even if I had, no two Indians were just like each other. But it was too early, and my mouth was dry and my tongue was large and floppy like a beached fish.
My silence didn’t deter Yvonne. She told me that the Indian was some kind of genius economist from India. Last night he’d given a lecture to a packed hall about a small-business model he’s come up with to improve the lot of poor women in third-world economies. Got a standing ovation.
I wasn’t surprised. People love hearing about other people’s misery. Keeps their mind off of their own shitty lives.
“Were you there?” she asked, though not with much hope.
“Please, Yvonne,” I groaned, “can’t you find someone else? I don’t know where the damn temple is. Hell, I don’t even know where Pearland is.”
“I’ll get you a map,” Yvonne said. Her voice went hard and supervisorial. “Don’t be late. You’ll have to drive him to the airport right after, to catch his flight.” She hung up.
I lay there wondering if I could dial her back and say I felt sick. Except I’d already called in sick twice this month. I threw the phone down, picked out a pair of jeans and a semi-clean T-shirt from the tangled heap on the floor, and stumbled into the bathroom.
That was when it hit me, what I’d almost managed to forget with the help of the vodka: what today was. I walked out of the shower, dripping and soapy, to tell Yvonne I just couldn’t do it. But finally I didn’t call her, because it struck me that staying at home alone today would be the worst thing of all.
When Dr. Venkatachalapathi had caught sight of the young Indian woman in the hotel lobby that morning, he experienced a cramping in his abdomen and sent up a belated prayer. May she not be my driver. Please send me instead someone of a different race, white or black, I do not care which. This was not because he was at ease with people of other races. (He was not.) But being forced to consort with an Indian woman with spiky dyed hair and a ring through her eyebrow (and a stud, he would discover, all too soon, pinned to the center of her tongue) was far worse. The fact that she appeared to be about the same age as Meena somehow complicated matters. For this reason, when she opened the front passenger door for him with a half smile, he told her in a stern tone that he would prefer to sit in the back.
“Suit yourself.” Her smile vanished. She popped her gum loudly, conveying, at once, annoyance and disdain, and banged the door shut with undue force, causing him to jump.
This same month, two years back, I’d been traveling on 288. I was in the passenger seat of a souped-up secondhand Mustang, the darling—the car, not me—of my boyfriend. I was doubled up and in the process of vomiting; Justin was in the process of instructing me to do so inside the barf bag he had handed me, thus solidifying my suspicion that he cared more for the car than his girlfriend’s condition—for which condition he was responsible. When I got out, I skillfully tipped the bag so that the vomit fell into the impossible-to-clean-out area between our seats. Sorry, I said in my most contrite voice, so that Justin would never really be sure whether or not it was an accident.
I thought I’d won that one, but I hadn’t won shit. A few weeks later, when I drove back down 288 to Planned Parenthood, I had to drive alone because soon after the barf bag incident, Justin had exited my life.
Dr. Venkatachalapathi could see that the young woman had a less-than-perfect knowledge of their destination. From time to time she consulted a sheaf of directions, causing the car to veer in an alarming fashion on the narrow lane. The single frown line between her brows was uncannily like Meena’s. They had left the towers of the medical center behind them long ago; even the garish strip malls that seemed ubiquitous to this city were gone. Recentl
y, they had passed a field of cattle with enormous, unfriendly horns. It seemed that they were heading for deep country. Would the girl be able to get him to the temple and back to the airport in time?
He shook out from his pocket a white handkerchief that Mrs. Venkatachalapathi had ironed and placed in his suitcase before he left India, and patted his perspiring neck. He wished he had not mentioned to her that there was a Meenakshi temple in one of the American cities to which he had been invited. Her face had paled for a moment and then flushed. She had delicate, fair skin, which he loved and which their daughter had inherited.
“It’s a sign,” she cried, her eyes hot and shiny. “An opportunity. Promise me you’ll visit the temple and offer a puja for our Meena.” It was the first request she had made in a long time. He did not have the heart to say no.
For a while I’ve had a suspicion; now it’s a reality. The road, which had narrowed as we continued along it, had just ended at a gate bearing a sign: PINEY CREEK RIDING STABLES TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT. In Texas when they say that, they might not be kidding. I try to turn the car around, but there isn’t enough space. We tilt alarmingly. It feels like one of the back wheels is dangling over the ditch. Shit! I glance in the rearview mirror. My passenger appears apoplectic, so I look away quickly. I’m not feeling that great myself. I can feel my heart doing its crazy-prisoner thing, throwing itself against my breastbone like it wants out right now.
I try what Dr. Menaghan in the counseling center has told me to do when I get one of my bouts of panic. “Calm down, girl,” I mutter. “You’ve been through worse and you’ve survived. You can survive this, too.” Sometimes it works, and sometimes it backfires. Today’s one of the bad days. I can feel the memories pushing and shoving each other behind my eyeballs. I’m not sure which one will win. Dad coming up to campus my very first semester and taking me out for dinner to my favorite restaurant and telling me that he and Mom were getting a divorce. Or Robert, my first real boyfriend, and the day I came home unexpectedly and found him in bed with another woman. Today the medal goes to the clinic with its blinding white ceiling lights. Two years ago. What I remember: lying in the recovery room by myself for a lifetime. What I feel: the freeze cold stirrups into which you have to put your feet before the doctor inserts the dilators.
At first Dr. Venkatachalapathi was not sure what was happening. Had the girl suddenly taken ill? She had yanked up the hand brake and was now holding on to the steering wheel as though it might spin away. She had broken out in a sweat and was breathing unevenly. In the rearview mirror, her eyes were unfocused. The car swayed in a most unpleasant fashion. It was distinctly possible that they would topple into the ditch, making him miss his flight to India. He might even end up in the hospital. He could feel tension building inside him like steam in a pressure cooker.
He closed his eyes and focused on the way the breath moved through his nostrils. As it steadied, his mind cleared and he knew what to do. Hadn’t he handled worse crises in the past? When they brought him the news about Meena, he had taken his hysterical wife into the kitchen and splashed cold water on her face. She clawed at him but he held her hands firmly in his and said, We’ve got to help each other get through this. It had quietened her enough to climb into the back of the police car that was to take them to the hospital.
Now he said to the girl, “I shall step out and guide you.”
She scrunched her eyebrows at him and muttered something that sounded like, I can handle it.
“I insist,” he said, and, climbing out into the pulsating heat, he called out instructions. Back and forth, back and forth, minuscule amounts each time. But finally they managed to reverse the car.
Pleased with this small victory, he allowed himself to observe the girl as she drove back the way they had come, hunkered and sullen, without a word of gratitude. She intrigued the scientific part of his mind. She was a puzzle, with her Indian features and Texan boots, her defiant piercings, the skin stretched thin across her cheekbones and crumpled under the eyes. And that spiky hair, now fallen limp as a child’s over her forehead. He had read somewhere that it was a style that lesbians affected. What kind of Indian family, even in America, would produce such a hybrid?
But first, practical matters: they needed to find the temple. He offered to read her the directions. She fiddled with the radio, from which cacophonous sounds began to spurt, as though she hadn’t heard him. But having lived through a daughter’s teenage years, he knew what it meant: she was embarrassed to accept help. He reached over the seat-back and grabbed the sheets before she could pull them away.
Here was the problem: the county roads they were on were numbered, but on the directions sheet, the roads only had names. He made the girl retrace their route to a main thoroughfare. From there, he counted the miles indicated in the directions sheet—another puzzle—and managed to point her to the correct turns until the sculpted white tower of the temple was visible in the distance.
When they finally pulled into the parking lot, she said, “Thanks.” The small, grudging pellet of a word made him oddly happy.
He consulted his watch. “I will be here only for twenty minutes. There is not enough time for you to get lunch. I am afraid you will have to wait until you drop me off at the airport.”
She nodded. Then, with an effort, “Sorry I got lost and made you late.”
“It does not matter,” he said, and realized suddenly that truly it did not, because time (like so many other elements that had shaped his life) was a man-made thing. “The goddess doesn’t care how many minutes you spend in front of her,” he said. “Only how much you want to be here.”
The girl stared at him, weighing the verity of his statement. Under that glance he felt like a fraud. Had it not been for his reluctant promise to his wife, he would not have wanted to be at the temple at all. He rushed awkwardly into speech. “Would you like to come inside?”
Even before he finished the sentence, he regretted his impulsiveness. What if she was Christian or Muslim? An atheist? Young people nowadays, one never knew what they might turn out to be.
He was ready for a brusque refusal, but she pointed to her jeans, to the tight black T-shirt stretched over the bony torso. “Is it okay to come in like this?”
He quelled his own doubts. “It will be fine. The goddess does not care about what we are wearing, only what is in our hearts.”
“I’m not sure I’d qualify on that count, either,” she said.
Far as I know, I’ve never been inside a temple. My father, who was a Communist in his youth, was dead against it. My mother had to fight him just to set up an altar in the kitchen, where a tiny ten-armed goddess statue shared shelf space with her spices. Because he was the fulcrum of my existence, I grew up convinced that religion was the opium of the people. When my mother gave me a holy picture to take to college, I tossed it in the bottom of my suitcase and didn’t bother to take it out when I unpacked.
Stepping into the temple, I’m assailed by a scent. A mix of crushed flowers, incense, and a woodsy odor which I’ll discover is holy ash—it’s strangely familiar. Had my mother secretly taken me to a temple when I was a baby, incapable of giving her away to Dad? She’d have been right to be cautious; as soon as I learned to communicate, I told him everything. Until he destroyed our family, at which point I stopped talking to him.
I didn’t talk to my mother much, either, after the divorce. The last time had been two years ago, the night before the abortion. I’d called her cell from the pay phone outside Walmart because I didn’t want to use my own phone, didn’t want her to call me, weeping and drunk, late at night, as she had gotten into the habit of doing before I’d changed my number.
I’d called because I was scared. Because suddenly I wasn’t sure if I was doing the right thing. I said to myself, If she says, Don’t, I’ll cancel the appointment. If she says, Come, I’ll drive up to wherever she’s living now.
But I never got to talk to her. A man picked up at the other end. At first I tho
ught it was a wrong number because it was so late at night, but he told me it wasn’t. Hold on, he said. He put the phone down and shouted something, his tone familiar and intimate. I heard her shouting something back. I didn’t catch the words, but I heard the laughter in her voice. I’d never felt so alone.
I hung up then. Clearly, my mother had moved on with her life. I needed to do the same.
We make our way through a pillared hall toward the deities, each glistening within his or her enclosure. Dr. V—he said I could call him that, it’d be easier—gives me a quick introduction to the divine family. Here’s the goddess, with her husband to her right and her brother to her left. Here are the brother’s consorts. Here are the animals the deities ride. Fascinating, these intricate heavenly relationships. Their multisyllabic names are too complicated to remember. In any case, I don’t put much stock in remembering things. Being able to forget is a superior skill.
A sleepy old priest in a white dhoti sits on a metal folding chair outside the goddess’s enclosure. He stares at me suspiciously though—for Dr. V’s sake—I removed my eyebrow ring before entering the temple. I’ve even swaddled myself in a shawl that Dr. V pulled out of his suitcase. Still, the priest’s eyes say, You can’t fool me. You don’t belong here.
The temple was an architectural disappointment, thought Dr. Venkatachalapathi, another valiant but doomed attempt by the immigrant community to re-create the Indian experience. This could never compare to the original Meenakshi Amman Kovil of Madurai, fourteen sculpted gates rising twenty stories tall. The energy inside that sanctum, born of centuries of chanted prayers—how could you hope to re-create that in this flat landscape dotted with strange trees, on the wrong side of the black waters? Even he, who wasn’t a temple-going man, had felt that power. Twenty years ago, at his wife’s insistence, they had journeyed there to offer thanks because the goddess had finally given them a child that had lived. It had taken an entire day by train. Himself, his wife, and the ten-month-old Meena. She had clapped her hands in delight when they came upon a procession of temple elephants. Jewel of his old age, gift of the goddess, now gone. . . .