Train to Agra

Evening Prayer

 Evening Prayer . Two Gods: the one in the closet and the one from school days and both are not mine. I opened the door on God at dusk and closed him the rest of the day. He perched on the ledge above my father’s shirts and wool suits, a mandir in every Hindu house, ours smelling of starch, surrounded by ties and old suitcases. I was the ghost at school, sat on the pew and watched as other girls held God under their tongues. My lips remember the prayer my parents taught me those evenings with their bedroom closet open—Ganesh carved in metal, Krishna blue in a frame. I don’t remember the translation, never sure I really knew it. I got mixed up sometimes, said a section of the “Our Father” in the middle of the arti, ending in Amen when I meant Krishna, Krishna, not sure when to kneel and when to touch someone’s feet with my hands. . My name means it all—holiness, God, evenings praying to a closet. My mother says before I was born, I was an ache in the back of her throat, wind rushing past her ear, that my father prayed every evening, closet door open, for a daughter.  And so I am evening prayer, sunset and mantra. At school, I longed for a name that was smooth on the backs of my teeth, no trick getting it out. Easy on the mouth, a Lisa or a Julie—brown hair and freckles, not skin the color of settling dusk, a name you could press your lips to, press lips against, American names of backyard swings, meat loaf in the oven, not of one-room apartments overlooking parking lots, the smell of curry in a pot, food that lined the hallways with its memory for days. I watched the hair on my legs grow dark and hated it. I longed to disappear, to turn the red that sheened on the other girls in school, rejecting the sun, burning with spite. In the mirror, I called myself another, practicing— the names, the prayers, fitting words into my mouth as if they belonged: Ram, Ram and alleluia, bhagvan, God the Father, thy will be done Om shanti, shanti, shanti. ...