by Galaxy Craze
We saw Renee at the temple, making a picture from different-colored rice. The picture, she told us, was of the Ganges River in India. Parvati had asked her to make it from a photograph she had. It reminded her of her childhood.
“We were wondering,” I said. “How do you get to see Parvati?”
“Take her a present,” Renee said, half jokingly.
“A present?”
“When I wanted to see her I would give her one of my rings.” I looked at Renee’s hands; her fingers were bare. In London, she wore rings on every finger, sometimes three or four, and each ring had a story.
“This ring,” she would say, touching a small rose-colored diamond, “belonged to my great-grandmother. This one I found in Hyde Park on my way to work yesterday morning.”
“Why did you give Parvati your rings?” I asked.
“So that I could see her in her rooms. Parvati loves jewelry, and she needs gold to keep down her Shakti.”
“Her what?” My voice creaked like a door.
“Her Shakti,” Renee said clearly. “She needs to wear gold to stay grounded to the earth. Otherwise she would float away to God.”
I imagined Parvati, in her green sari, unlatching each gold chain from her neck, pulling the gold bangles from her wrists, growing lighter and lighter, a cool smile on her face, as she rose above the treetops and through the clouds, disappearing in the sky.
Eden and I sat outside the temple, watching Renee finish the rice picture. Inside the temple was a statue of Hanuman. A plate of sliced fruit lay at his feet. On the temple wall was a poster-size photograph of Parvati sitting outside with her disciples around her.
Renee finished the picture, but as she stood to leave, a few grains of blue rice fell into the yellow sun. “Oh, God damn it!” she said, hitting her fist against her forehead.
A small fire burned in a pit. It was called the dhuni, and all day and all night, Renee told us, someone had to watch over it, making sure it continued to burn.
Parvati liked presents and she needed gold. In our room, I held my mother’s gold chain with a glass locket in my hand. “We can’t give this away, it was her mother’s,” I said. “And besides, she promised to give it to me for my eighteenth birthday.”
What else did we have? Eden’s drawing book, the last three titles in the Famous Five series, sun lotion, and shampoo. I had my silver butterfly earrings, but she only liked gold.
We lay on the mattress on the floor, looking up at the ceiling. The room was warm, the window was open, but no air came through. It suddenly occurred to me that if God knew everything, wouldn’t He see us scheming? And if Parvati knew God, wouldn’t He tell her about our plan? I panicked, imagining the spell she would put on us: bread crusts and a rusty cage, the key thrown away.
“What if Parvati gets suspicious? What if she knows this is a trick?” I said to Eden. “If she does have powers, she might punish us. Aren’t you afraid of that?”
Eden shrugged. “Not really.”
I stared at his little face. “Why are you so annoying?” How could he be so casual and watery when I had to pick the fallen leaves from the pavement lines. Skipping over the cracks; a cross, a kiss; count to ten and start again. In my dreams, there was a man in a black van, slowly following me along a deserted road.
“I know what we can give her,” Eden said, suddenly jumping up from the bed. He rummaged through the pockets of his rucksack and pulled out a small box. Inside the box was a gold coin from China, a good-luck charm in a plastic box, and it was gold—or at least it was the color of gold.
“Let me see.” I reached for it, but Eden closed it in his hand.
“I’m going to give it to her,” he said.
I went to the mirror to brush my hair. Eden wiped the box clean with a handkerchief and spit and put it into the front pocket of his shorts.
“Come here, Eden, you’ve got knots in your hair.” I held the hairbrush by the handle. Eden stood with his hand covering his pocket, looking at the door. Before he could escape, I grabbed him and parted his hair to the side. “You look much better now,” I said, and tucked my shirt into my denim skirt. Then, looking quite businesslike, we went to the guru’s house.
Keshi opened the door of Parvati’s house.
“We have a present we would like to give Parvati,” Eden said.
Keshi smiled and held out her hand. “You may leave it with me.”
We explained, at length, how the gift had come from China, to London, and then to California, safely, in our carry-on luggage, so there was absolutely no chance of losing it in the baggage claim, which is why it was so important that we give it to her ourselves.
Keshi told us we could wait inside. Eden and I sat on a wooden bench in the hall. Two ceiling fans turned above us. A woman vacuumed the brown carpet in the room on the other side of the doorway.
An older man sat on the bench across from us. He stared down at his feet, with the ashamed look of a child who has just been scolded.
We sat quietly on the bench for what seemed like an hour or more, before Keshi led us down the long hallway, past a series of rooms, and outside to Parvati’s garden.
Parvati sat in a lounge chair by the side of her swimming pool. A tray of iced drinks with lemon and mint leaves sat on the table beside her. She sipped her drink while Eden and I stood quietly, waiting for her to notice us.
Two men sat on chairs beside her. One of the men strummed a song on the guitar. He had curly shoulder-length hair and a necklace made of Rudraksha beads. We had seen him the night before in the dining hall, and Renee told us he was the son of a famous American folksinger.
A girl swam in the pool by herself; it was Sati. She waved to us from the turquoise water.
“You have a question for me?” Parvati lifted her sunglasses to her forehead.
“We brought you a present,” Eden said.
“A present?” Parvati said. “Oh, I love presents!” She raised her hands in the air and the gold bangles on her wrists fell together like a chime. The two men looked over at us, squinting in the sun.
Eden held out the coin, wrapped in a handkerchief. Parvati looked at it as he held it in his hand; then she reached for it, turning her palms upward. There was nothing on her hand, only the lines across her palms and the backs of the gold rings on her fingers. No scars from nails, no scars at all. He put the coin in her hand and she closed her fingers around it. “Lovely children from England,” she said again, but there was nothing there.
* * *
There was nothing there! Eden and I ran back to our room, excited and half afraid, imagining the collapse of the ashram, the revolution, once we had spread the news. We closed the door and sat down on the bed to catch our breath. Where was our mother? We needed to tell her what we had found out. We needed to tell her right away.
As the sun set behind the trees, Eden talked excitedly about his discovery: the gold coin from China, her up-turned palms, that he was the first one to think to look at the guru’s hands.
The day grew dark. I had a nervous feeling in my stomach. We ate the leftover crackers from the airplane and drank a plastic cup of orange juice with a foil cap. Outside we could hear dinner being called. We had left the window open with the light on inside, waiting for Mum, and mosquitoes filled our room.
The day was ending and my cheeks burned from the sun. I lay under the covers with a damp towel across my forehead, feeling the way I had when I was six and in bed with scarlet fever.
During the weeks I was in bed in a darkened room with scarlet fever, I read a book about a group of friends who discover a passageway into another world. The story turned into my dreams. In my dreams, I went with them into the secret world, where everything was covered with snow but never cold. There was a message one of the children told me, a riddle hidden in a song. The words made the shape of a golden key, the key to the other world, but the dream always ended too soon and I awoke, stranded in my bed, straining to hear the rest of the words.
Today, we had discovered the g
uru was a fake, but instead of gloating, like I did when I found my mother’s lost watch in the flowerpot, I stared up at the ceiling with a cold, hollow feeling inside. There was no magic in this world.
We were asleep when our mother came back to the room. She stood in the dark, watching us.
“Mum?” I said, sitting up.
“Shh,” she whispered. “You’ll wake Eden.”
“Where have you been? We’ve been waiting for you.”
“I’ve been with Parvati,” she said slowly. Her voice was as clear and still as her body. Like a glass. It was the way she sounded after she had been crying and after she wiped her eyes, rinsed her face with cold water, and looked at herself in the mirror with a new clarity.
“What were you doing with her?”
“She’s helping me figure out some things in my life.”
Eden turned under the covers. “Mum,” he said. “Is that you?”
“Yes, darling. Try to go back to sleep, I didn’t mean to wake you.”
She began to undress in the dark. The air lightened around her and her body darkened against it, so that her arms and legs, even the expression on her face, became visible.
“Mum,” Eden said, sitting up in bed, “we made a discovery today.”
“What is it?”
“Parvati doesn’t have stigmata,” he said excitedly. “We went to look at her hands, and there was nothing there.”
She stood still, her hand on her shoulder. She stared at us on the bed, as though she were listening but could not understand what we were saying.
“What are you talking about, Eden?”
“We went to see her today. Renee told us to take her a gift, so we spent all day trying to think of what to give her and I found the gold coin from China in my suitcase.” Eden spoke quickly, as though time were running out, telling her about our plan.
“You went through all that trouble just to look at her hands?”
“There was nothing there! Not one little scar,” Eden said, his voice growing louder. “That means she’s lying about having the marks of Jesus.”
Our mother dropped her skirt to the floor and stood naked in the dark. She pulled her hair back from her forehead and held it with her hands. “The marks aren’t always there; they come and go. She is not a fake, I promise you. All these people wouldn’t be living here if she were. Why are you two always so suspicious of everyone?”
I sat up, confused that this news hadn’t meant more to her.
“Why don’t you believe us?” Eden asked.
She shook her head, as though she had had enough. “Why can’t I have just one nice day? Why can’t I have just one day for myself without hearing this kind of nonsense from you? Don’t you ever trust me? Don’t you trust what I’m doing? Don’t you know that everything I do is for you, to make sure you feel loved? I never felt loved by my mother.”
She looked suddenly at the window, covering her bare chest as though a person had appeared in it.
“What, Mum?” Eden said, looking to the side at the open window.
Our mother sat down on the edge of the bed and pressed her palms to her eyes.
“I’m sorry, Mum,” Eden said. He put his hand on her back. “We just thought maybe she was pretending.”
After a while she lay down beside us in the bed, placing a glass of water on the floor beside her. She leaned across me, kissing my cheek, then Eden’s too. “Let’s try to go back to sleep now. It’s been a long day for all of us.”
TWELVE
In the morning, we met Renee for breakfast in the dining hall. While Mum and Renee were talking, I noticed Eden looking across the room at a young boy who was sitting alone at a table.
“Darling,” Mum said to Eden, when she saw where he was looking, “why don’t you go over and make friends with him? He looks about your age.”
Renee turned in her seat, looking at the boy. “His name’s Jabe,” she said. “He moved here a few months ago from Los Angeles.” Renee leaned forward, speaking quietly. “He’s very shy. His mother used to leave him alone in the apartment when she went to work because she couldn’t afford a babysitter. She left him a pile of sandwiches and two glasses of milk and the television on while she worked a double shift.”
“Oh,” Mum said, glancing at the boy once more. “Eden, come on. Let’s go over and talk to him.” She stood up from the table, taking Eden’s hand, walking cautiously across the room. Jabe had straight brown hair and large round brown eyes. Even now, as he sat at the table alone in a room full of people, he looked toward the door, as though he were waiting, hoping for someone to arrive.
“Well, I have to go to my chores,” Renee said, as she stood up, clearing her plate from the table.
Sati and her mother walked into the dining hall. Sati wore her bikini top and denim shorts, her hair pulled back into a high ponytail.
She walked across the room and sat down in the chair beside me. “Parvati liked the present you gave her,” she said.
“She did?” I said, surprised at the excitement in my voice.
“What are you doing after breakfast?”
“I don’t know.” I could smell her grape-flavored lip gloss.
“The girls are meeting at the pond.”
Sati’s mother carried a tray of food to the table. She set a bowl of yogurt and raisins down in front of Sati.
“When’s your baby due?” my mother asked, when she came back to the table.
“The end of November.” Sati’s mother smiled, touching her belly. “I’m Caroline,” she said, reaching out for my mother’s hand.
“I’m Lucy.”
“You just arrived. Is this your daughter?”
My mother nodded. “And that’s my son over there.”
“He’s sweet. I love their accents.”
My mother watched Eden, who was showing Jabe the set of playing cards the stewardess had given to him on British Airways.
“Looks like he’s found a friend,” Caroline said.
“I hope so.” My mother smiled at her.
“What house are you in?”
“We’re in Hanuman House. All three of us in one room.”
“The three of us spent almost a whole year in one room. That’s when we decided to build our own house.”
“Your own house?”
Caroline sipped her water; she put her glass down on the table. “It’s the gray house off the path.”
“Oh,” my mother said. “I was wondering who lived there.”
“We needed a little privacy and more room.”
“How long have you lived here?”
“Almost four years now,” Caroline said.
My mother looked at her, waiting to hear more. “So, how do you like it?” she said, hunching her shoulders slightly.
“We’ve been happy here,” Caroline said. “In fact, our lives have changed. When we first met Parvati, my husband’s business was bankrupt, our marriage was falling apart, and Sati was doing terribly in school, but since we’ve been with her everything has turned around for us.”
My mother smiled at her.
“It’s not all easy. John—my husband—and I are apart a lot. He has to commute once a week to Denver, stays for three or four days, then flies back for the weekend. It’s tiring for him.”
“I can imagine,” my mother said.
Sati ate her yogurt; she swung her legs under the table. “Can we leave now?”
“You didn’t eat much,” her mother said, looking into her bowl.
“I’m really not hungry.”
“Where are you going?” my mother asked when she saw Sati take my hand.
“We’re just going to the pond,” Sati answered.
“Don’t forget to put on your suntan lotion or you’ll burn,” my mother said. “The California sun is much stronger than the sun in England.”
“I won’t forget,” I said.
Summer and Molly were sunbathing on the dock when we arrived. Molly lay on her back with her Walkman on,
singing aloud to the song playing in her ears. Summer lay on her side, reading a book.
I spread my towel out next to Sati’s.
“Do you want me to put lotion on you?” Sati asked.
“All right, thanks.”
“When I first came here I got such a bad sunburn there were blisters down my arms and I had to go to the hospital.”
“The hospital?” I said, as though it were a dangerous word. In London, I saw a man, standing alone outside of the hospital, weeping. Even now, when I thought of him, I wondered what had happened: his wife dying, his mother or father, his child?
I lay on my stomach with my head to the side. I heard Sati squeeze the lotion into her hands. It felt cool as she rubbed it into my shoulders and down my arms. I closed my eyes and felt her hands move from my ankles up the back of my legs to my thighs.
“Open your legs a little bit,” she said, into my ear. Her hands moved beneath the elastic of my bathing suit, in between my thighs. As she moved her hands back and forth I felt a warmth between my legs. It was the same feeling I had in bed at night when I thought of the boy Nicholas in Scotland.
As we lay on our towels in the sun, Summer, Molly, Sati, and I went around in a circle, asking each other questions. Who is your favorite actor? What’s your favorite book? Favorite band? Each time a new question was asked, I hoped my answer would be the same as Sati’s.
Suddenly, Molly screamed. A small black insect was crawling up her arm.
“Just stay still. It’s only a spider,” Sati said, as she scooped it up in her hands.
Molly made a face, “It might be a black widow. They bite, you know.”
“Parvati says we’re not allowed to kill bugs. It’s bad karma,” Summer said. “Except mosquitoes. That’s self-defense.”
“I would never kill a spider anyway,” I told them. “Spiders are good luck. Haven’t you ever heard the tale of Robert the Bruce in the tower? He was inspired by a spider spinning her web.”
“Whatever,” Molly said.
“Let’s find a safe place for the spider to make a web,” Sati said. “Where it won’t get stepped on accidentally.” At first I thought she was talking to all of us, but then I realized it was just me. She wanted me to go with her.
