Before We Visit the Goddess (22 page)

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 thought 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. . . .

No. He had wandered in that dark forest long enough. He called to the priest in Tamil and briskly requested that an archana be performed for Meenakshi Venkatachalapathi. He provided the necessary information and the priest limped off toward the goddess, carrying his bell and his bowl of vermilion powder.

For a moment, thinking of Meena, he had forgotten the girl. But now she came up to him, glowing in his white shawl, whispering questions with an avidity that surprised him. What was the priest going to do? What was an archana? Did the prayer have a special significance? Her eyes, full of wonder, made her seem suddenly younger.

“It's for good luck,” he said. “For blessing, in this life and the next. Wait, I will offer one for you, too. But I will need your name.”

“Oh, no! You don't have to do that.” But her face was bright with pleasure as she gave him the information.

“Why,” he said in surprise, “you're named after the goddess, too.”

When Venkatachalapathi asked the priest to add Tara's name to the archana, the old man scowled.

“What is her clan? Her birth sign? Her star?” he demanded. They both knew the system. Without this crucial information, a prayer offered in the temple would not be fully effective.

Venkatachalapathi glanced at Tara. She was looking at him inquiringly; she had caught the disapproval in the old man's tone. He feared that she would not know the answers to any of the priest's queries, that she came from a family that did not keep track of such things. She probably did not even possess a birth chart. He hoped he was wrong. Without a birth chart, how would you know who you really were? Adrift in the universe, how would you navigate your life?

“What's he saying?”

“Nothing important.” He turned to the waiting priest. “She is from the same family,” he said firmly. “Same gotram.”

“But—” the priest began.

He cut him off, giving the name of his own birth star as hers.

It was clear that the priest didn't believe him. But ultimately he was only a hired man. All he wanted, Venkatachalapathi correctly surmised, was to finish his shift and get back to his apartment so he could take a proper nap. He shrugged and, in surprisingly resonant tones, began to chant the holy names.