The old white man first showed up two months ago. He sits on a metal folding chair in the temple lobby, at the bottom of the stairs that lead to the sanctum. He is always off to the side, in nobody’s way. In his hands, he holds wooden beads the color of milk chocolate, strung together with white thread. He chants all day long, until closing time. Sri Ram, Jai Ram, Jai Jai Ram. “He pauses only to use the bathroom,” Neela’s mother tells her. “He chants softly, but some are saying it is a nuisance.”
Her mother is hunched over the kitchen counter, making a neat pile of Neela’s SAT registration forms, and the directions to the testing site.
“How does it matter, if he isn’t bothering anyone?” Neela asks.
“It doesn’t bother me,” her mother says. “Others say he should go to the Hare Krishna temple, you know, where the white people go. If you came to the temple one day, you could see him for yourself. I wanted you to go before the SATs anyway, to get blessings for your test.”
Neela sees her mother squint at the clock on the wall above the couch, next to the framed family portrait of Neela and her parents. “We can still make it tonight, before it closes,” her mother says.
Neela rolls her eyes. “I need my sleep before the test. See you in the morning.”
It was her second time taking the exam. The first time her parents had done everything. They prayed at home every day, and then did a special puja at the temple that cost $301 and required her mother to fry 108 vadas made of gram flour and black pepper.
Her score was not even good enough for Penn State. Neela wants, at the very least, to get into Penn State. She would like to study international affairs, maybe join the foreign service and travel the world. That is her current dream anyway. Her father says it is fine. Her mother urges her to consider something that offers more stability—teaching school even, or physical therapy. “Best to travel for vacation, not work,” her mother says.
The morning of the exam, Neela’s mother pulls the car up to the entrance of the testing site, a public high school one town over.
“Okay, do well, kanna,” her mother says, as she hands Neela a brown paper bag full of granola bars and packets of trail mix. “That Colin is picking you up? I will be at the hospital when you’re done.”
“Yes, Amma,” Neela says. She steps out and slings her backpack over one shoulder.
“Just do your best,” her mother says as Neela shuts the door.
When she finishes the test—exhausted and unsure of whether her best will be good enough—it’s nearly noon, and Colin is waiting for her. They drive to Monroeville Mall and smoke cigarettes in the parking lot, as they do once a week. They throw the butts on the ground and stomp on them, as if they are killing an animal under their feet. Then they go inside and walk back and forth along the mall’s two levels, hoping to spot Tom Hanks Not the Actor, who is both Colin’s secret crush and the school’s star lacrosse player.
When Colin drops her off, Neela gives him a peck on the cheek and tells him to cheer up. “Don’t waste too much time thinking about him,” she says. “You’re better than that.”
It is the last day of summer vacation, and tomorrow is the first day of Neela’s senior year. Soon the homework will pile up, and she will be busy with college applications, essays, and drama club. She and Colin are set designers for drama club, a role that Neela’s mother thinks takes too much time without offering much in return.
“Nobody will ever recognize you for doing background work,” her mother says.
As soon as the school year begins, she and her mother will resume their fights about these things, but today she is free, the rest of the day hers to enjoy.
On the kitchen counter, she finds a plate of steamed idlis covered with Saran wrap. In a small Pyrex with a blue lid, there is mint chutney. Neela takes the lid off and her mouth begins to water from the fragrance of the blended mint. After Neela’s father started going on tour, her mother took extra nursing shifts to make more money, but somehow she still found time to cook.
There is a yellow Post-it stuck to the counter in between the plate of idlis and the bowl of chutney. Neela reads her mother’s scrawl.
“Appa called from Sedona. Here is his hotel number. Call him back.”
Neela sprinkles water on the idlis so they stay soft and fluffy, then shoves the plate into the microwave. She eats standing at the kitchen counter, breaking pieces off with her fingers, dunking the pillowy chunks into the tangy chutney, licking the bits that stick to her fingers.
While she eats, she looks at the family portrait hanging in the living room, above the sagging brown love seat. The photo was taken at Olan Mills when she was twelve, when her unplucked eyebrows met in a V. In it, her mother is wearing a sari the color of cantaloupe flesh, her father a blue pinstriped shirt. Neela is wearing a red velvet dress. She studies her father’s image in the picture. This is the father she once knew, the one who drove her to soccer games, sat up front during school programs to get good video footage, who clumsily braided her hair when her mother was away visiting family in India.
Neela goes upstairs, peels off her jeans and top, and puts on running shorts and a white sports bra. She pulls her long black hair, a streak of it dyed bright blue, into a thick ponytail. Then she slips a Verve CD into her Discman, clips it to her waistband, and leaves the house running.
When she gets back, she collapses onto her parents’ bed, sweaty, props herself against the pillows that line the headboard, and drinks a can of Mountain Dew while watching reruns of Friends, The Cosby Show, and Hangin’ with Mr. Cooper. None of the shows make her laugh, but she sinks deeper into the bed, body slouched, and watches anyway, delighting in her laziness, kicking her socks off halfway through the first episode.
At eight in the evening, the phone rings. The caller ID says Arizona. She ignores the call. Then she gets into the shower, to avoid a lecture from her mother.
When her mother gets back from the hospital, she tells Neela that she will be going to the temple the following day.
“For the night puja,” she says. “Will you come with me?”
Neela shrugs and her mother says, “You won’t have homework on the first day of school. Did you ever call Appa?”
“I’ll come with you to the temple,” Neela says. Her hair, still wet from the shower, drips onto the kitchen floor.
To some degree every Indian in Pittsburgh, Neela included, is proud of the temple. It was the first Hindu temple of its size in North America, built in the late 1970s by Indians who came to Pittsburgh to work at Westinghouse and Alcoa, to practice medicine at Pitt, to study or teach at Carnegie Mellon. Since Pittsburgh sits at the junction of three rivers—the Ohio, the Allegheny, and the Monongahela—Indians all over the country thought it a most auspicious location. Early donations for the temple came from as far as Anchorage, Alaska, and Seattle, Washington. The temple’s carved white spires, chiseled by artisans brought in from Madurai, were featured in Architectural Digest.
Neela’s parents were part of a later, larger crop of Indians who came in the ’80s and were eternally grateful for the work of their predecessors. Neela went to the temple often with her parents when she was young, to play with her friends, eat the cafeteria food, and watch the fireworks on Diwali that the temple had special permission to launch. For Neela’s parents, it was a place to pray, but also a place to gather, to be part of something bigger than their small family unit.
Today when she enters the temple with her mother, Neela immediately sees the old white man. Her mother ignores him, but Neela cannot help but stare.
He is smiling, and he looks peaceful, not strange or scary. He is just an ordinary old white man, the kind you might see standing in the checkout line at Giant Eagle, or buying screws at the hardware store. The grandfatherly type, with skin that looks worn and soft. He is wearing a brown wool beret.
“Cap is new,” Neela’s mother whispers once they pass him. “He started wearing it a few weeks ago.”
In the sanctum, Indu Aunty is singing a lullaby. The priest is rocking the goddess Lakshmi to sleep in a cradle. One by one, he will rock each god to sleep as Aunty sings. Neela thinks she could fall asleep here too, surrounded by the idols. She always resists coming to the temple with her mother, but once she arrives, she finds that the burning incense and camphor calm her, that the ring of the priest’s bell and the temple’s black stone walls are deeply comforting.
Each God in the temple has a duty, to create life or destroy it, to shower wealth, to provide knowledge, to thwart evil. The elephant-headed Ganesha removes obstacles. Neela imagines herself next to him, curled into a cozy ball.
After the priest puts every god to sleep with a short prayer, he comes around with balls of sweetened semolina and fruit.
“How are you?” he asks Neela. He speaks in Tamil. “Long time you have not come.”
Neela forces herself to smile at him.
“I was busy,” she replies in English.
The priest gives two apples to Neela’s mother.
“One for him,” he says.
Neela’s mother nods. “Thank you,” she says. “He will be home in a few days.”
“Come back soon,” the priest says to Neela. “In the temple, we can all find peace.”
After the puja, Neela and her mother go to the temple cafeteria to eat tamarind rice and sambar rice. The food is available daily for a one-dollar donation, and packed in small, square foam boxes. The lemon pickle is free. On Sundays, there are ladoos.
“Welcome, welcome,” the chef behind the counter says. His name is Ram, and he is from Rameshwaram; a short, plump man who knows every regular and not-so-regular cafeteria patron.
“Glad you brought her,” he says, nodding towards Neela.
They choose a table in the cafeteria and sit to eat; no one else is there. Then Neela’s mother heads outside to the car while Neela stops to use the restroom. It is closing time at the temple, and the lights throughout the building are slowly being shut off. Neela walks by the old man, still sitting in the metal chair, still chanting. She shivers, and hugs herself. When she hears footsteps coming from behind, she walks faster. The footsteps only grow louder, so she moves quickly towards the exit, but not fast enough. Just before she reaches the temple’s main door, she feels a palm on her shoulder. She turns to see that the hand on her shoulder is also holding a string of prayer beads, and they dangle by her side. The old white man’s other hand is in a fist. Neela cannot breathe. She wonders whether her mother will come back in to look for her, or whether the priest upstairs will hear her if she screams.
“You dropped something,” the man says. Up close, Neela can see the fine wrinkles on his face, like cuts that have healed. She sees, too, that his cheekbones are gaunt, that his skin is loose. He opens his fist, and shows her an earring shaped like a maple leaf. Neela takes it from him.
“Thank you,” she says. “I did not know it fell off.”
“Have a good night,” he says. “It’s almost time for me to go home, too.”
In the morning, Neela gathers her books for school. She stuffs them into her backpack and zips it closed. Her father is due back tomorrow, her mother has told her, on a flight that will arrive early in the morning. She spots a red flyer sticking out from a stack of papers on her desk. It says, “Spiritual Leader and Scholar-Mystic returns to Pittsburgh for Special Seminar.” She pulls it out, looks it over, and then discards it.
During study hall, her last period of the day, Neela reads her biology book. The first quiz of the year is on amino acids. She yawns. Colin, sitting behind her, pokes her back with a pencil. Neela shuts her textbook and turns around.
“Hey,” he says. “Tom Hanks Not the Actor touched me today.”
His grin is wide, his eyes teasing. Neela is stumped by Colin’s infatuation, how it takes up so much of his time, how it both torments him and gives him delight.
“Does he even know who you are?” Neela says. “Tom Hanks isn’t even cute. He’s old.”
“I was walking down the hall and our arms, like, totally touched.”
“He likes girls.”
“That’s what he thinks.”
“Shut up,” Neela says. She laughs too loudly, and Mr. Bryer calls out their names.
“Miss Prasad, Mr. Tupper. Study Hall is a silent period.”
Neela opens her biology book again. This time, it falls to a chapter at the back of the book, one the teacher will never get to. There is a picture of a rooster on this page. Neela reads about a strange phenomenon observed in chicken coops. When no aggressive male is present, a hen will step forward, the book says. The hen transitions, and grows fierce talons and wattles under her chin. Eventually, a red cockscomb emerges from the top of her head. The other hens might ignore her at first, but when she crows, they accept her. The transformation is complete. She is a rooster. “Spontaneous sex reversal,” the book says.
When Neela gets home from school, she notices that the old family picture in the living room is gone. In its place, there is a framed portrait of her father—the new version of her father. His hair is long; his beard unkempt. He is wearing his saffron-colored robes.
Neela walks into the kitchen, where her mother is boiling a large pot of tomato rasam, twisting black pepper into the soupy concoction with a grinder. Even from a few feet away, the pepper tickles Neela’s nose.
“I found cigarettes in your jeans again,” her mother says, without turning around. “How will you ever get anywhere? Wasting your time with that Colin. If your father were here . . .”
“He isn’t,” Neela says.
“Neela.”
“Where did you put the picture from the living room?” Neela asks. “The one of all of us?”
“It’s still there. Moved to the corner, by the fern. I thought Appa might like to see this one when he comes back.”
“You thought he might like it better than our family picture? Because he only cares about himself!” She is nearly shouting.
Her mother sighs as she stirs the rasam.
“Your father cares about us, Neela. I know this is hard for you to understand right now.”
“Do you even feel married to him anymore?”
Neela’s mother puts the wooden spoon down, turns around, and slaps Neela across the face.
“Amma!” Neela backs away.
“Sorry, Neela. I’m so sorry.”
Her mother wipes her hand on her shirt, as if it is wet. She turns off the stove. In her wrinkled hospital scrubs, she looks completely spent.
“I think I need to lie down for a moment, Neela. Eat if you’re hungry, will you? Rice is in the cooker.”
Neela’s father arrives the next morning while she is still sleeping. Lying in bed, she listens to her parents downstairs, and hears her mother’s girlish giggle in response to whatever her father said. He is home for only a few days, as always. Soon he will leave to do a workshop at some sort of hippie farm outside Boston.
By the time Neela emerges, her mother has left for work.
“Hi, Appa.”
She does not stop to hug him, reaching instead for the box of cinnamon squares that sits on top of the refrigerator.
“How was your flight?”
“Good. How are your classes?”
“Fine.”
“How are your teachers this year?”
“Okay.”
“Theater starting?”
“Soon. Colin and I are head of set.”
“Shall I drop you to school?”
“I’m fine walking.”
After she eats, she grabs a banana from the counter and leaves in a hurry, not wishing to stay and pack herself a lunch.
In the evening, Neela and her parents go to a Burmese restaurant they all like. Her father is not wearing his saffron-colored robes. He is wearing the clothes Neela once associated with him: a button-down shirt, slacks, and Velcro sneakers.
“Velcro is the most amazing of inventions,” he was fond of saying, when Neela was little.
When they arrive at Rangoon House, they bump into Neela’s old friend Maisie, who is there with her parents. Maisie and Neela are no longer close because Maisie has become popular, a tennis player and cheerleader who hangs out with Tom Hanks Not the Actor. In middle school Maisie and Neela liked to knit scarves together, and make friendship bracelets. They had sleepovers and practiced putting on their mothers’ makeup. They have grown apart, but they share a familial intimacy when they pass each other in the hallway at school—a nod, a smile, a respectful acknowledgment of a time that has passed.
“Oh, hi, Neela!” Maisie says. “Haven’t seen you at school yet this year. No classes together. Bummer.”
Maisie’s gaze shifts to Neela’s father. She looks at his long, scraggly beard and his knotty hair. Despite the familiar clothes he wears tonight, there is little sign of the college lecturer Maisie knew from their younger days.
“Nice to see you, Mr. Prasad, Mrs. Prasad,” Maisie says politely, though Neela can hear her voice wavering. Then Maisie looks at Neela and drops her volume to a whisper.
“Wow.”
“God bless you, Maisie,” Neela’s father says when Maisie says bye.
Over her bowl of Burmese curry, Neela says she will not attend her father’s event at the community center in the city.
“But we must support your father,” her mother says. “He came here to do this.”
“Not to see us?”
“Prabha, we should not force her,” her father says. He turns to Neela. “Of course I am here to see you.”
He puts his arm around Neela’s shoulder, but she pulls away.
The next day is Saturday, so Neela goes for a long morning run. She runs hard, up and down the hills of her neighborhood, her calves burning, her lips salty with sweat. She stops when she reaches Ferri’s, the grocery store where Colin works.
“It’s on the house,” Colin says, when she tries to pay for her smoothie. “I’m allowed one a day, and I clearly don’t need it.” He pats his belly.
“Anything new with Tom Hanks Not the Actor?”
“No,” Colin says, pouting. “I heard that he might ask Alice Chang to Homecoming.” He sighs dramatically. “What I would give to be Alice Chang.”
When Neela gets home from her run, her father is gone.
“I should be there already, helping to set up,” her mother says, “but I said I would bring you.”
“No! I told you. No.”
She walks upstairs and slams the door to the bathroom. After her shower she hears a honk, and peers out her bedroom window to see her mother sitting in their gray sedan in the driveway, looking up at her.
Neela knows she could wait it out—her mother will leave eventually, so as not to miss the session. But she decides to get dressed and go after all; not for her father, but for her mother. Neela suspects her mother is hurting just as much as she is, though the rules of adulthood don’t allow her to show it.
Neela pulls the hood of her gray sweatshirt over her head, and huffs as she clicks her seat belt into place. Her mother is wearing dressy slacks, a silky light blue shirt, and white pearls. She looks pretty, and young, with makeup on. Her hair is half up, the way she fixes it when she is going out somewhere special.
“You look nice,” Neela says.
“Thank you.”
During the thirty-minute drive, Neela’s mother plays Lord Krishna bhajans, and Neela finds herself involuntarily rocking back and forth gently as the singer calls out an alternate name for Krishna. “Govinda, Govinda, Govinda,” he sings, his voice a little louder and more ecstatic each time he says the word.
“He makes even less money than he used to,” Neela says, when there is a break in the singing.
“It is not about the money, Neela. I want him to be happy.”
The event is in a dingy community center. Neela’s mother sits in the front, but Neela sits in the very last row. The room is windowless; the walls are bare and the lights are fluorescent. There are about thirty people in the audience, all sitting on folding chairs. Almost all of the attendees are white, Neela notes. Two are black. One is Asian. In front of Neela, there is a scruffy-faced man with three bags at his side, two plastic and one cloth duffel. He smells like the train station near her grandparents’ home in India.
“Suffering is a choice,” Neela’s father begins. “We alone have the power to relieve ourselves from it.”
Neela slumps into her chair. Her father’s words exhaust her. He looks so confident as he speaks to the audience. At one point, he makes eye contact with Neela. His eyes linger for a second too long and Neela looks at the floor, unwilling to grant him the connection.
When she can’t take it anymore, she leaves the room. She will not watch while people line up to meet her father after his talk. She knows exactly what he does, how he places his hand over their heads to give his blessings. In the corridor, she sees a donation box stuffed with a few five- and ten-dollar bills. The middle-aged blond woman minding the box smiles at Neela and, not knowing who she is, offers her a book: her father’s self-published self-help guide to peace and happiness.
“They are free. A ten-dollar donation if you would like. Are you a student at Pitt?”
“No.” Neela eyes the woman suspiciously. “I have a copy of it at home.”
The woman nods and then busies herself by arranging the stack of books.
“What made you like him?” Neela asks while she fishes through her purse. The woman looks back up at Neela.
“You’re way too young to understand this. But when you’re in a bad place, a really bad place, and someone tells you things will get better, that he believes in you—it changes everything.”
The woman stops talking.
“Glad he helped you.” Neela takes a cigarette out of her purse and sees the woman’s alarmed expression. “Don’t worry, I’ll take it outside.”
After she smokes, she throws the cigarette on the ground and stomps on it. Back inside, her mother says she has been looking for her.
“We need to help clean up. And you smell terrible. When will you stop spending time with that Colin?”
They put the folding chairs away and sweep the room while her father puts his books and the donation box in the car.
When her father first started holding sessions, when Neela was just starting high school, nobody came. Then a few people started attending, and he was exuberant. “This is how it starts,” he would say during their family dinners. At the end of Neela’s freshman year, he quit his job as a college lecturer, declaring that he could not be a poor scholar of religion any longer. A permanent teaching position was never going to come along; it was hopeless to think it would. Industry was out of the question—who wanted a religious scholar? They were surrounded by engineers and scientists and doctors, aunties and uncles from the temple who did not know that Neela, for a brief time, had qualified for reduced-price school lunches, that her mother had bought only the quick-sale vegetables at Giant Eagle. Still, they were doing okay. They were not poor. Neela remembers her mother pleading with her father to keep his job.
“Between my job at the hospital, and your work at the university, we make it work. We have enough.”
“I need a change.”
“But this is what you want to do?”
“This is what I must do,” he said. Religion was the business he knew, the one he had studied from its very origins. To Neela, it felt like he was giving up, becoming someone he was not because the world demanded a certain kind of success.
When Neela was twelve—the same age she was in that framed family photo—her parents took her to Disney World. She had begged for the trip after seeing commercials on television. Her mother said it was too expensive. But on the first day of Thanksgiving Break, early in the morning, Neela’s father took her to the driveway. She was still in her pajamas. He pointed to the car.
“Get in,” he said, his eyes twinkling. He and her mother had packed it with their things the night before.
They drove to Florida on snowy roads, saving the money they would have spent on plane fare. In the parking lot of a Wendy’s in Roanoke, West Virginia, they stopped to put chains on the tires. Her father had tried first, but could not tolerate the cold and the chains kept getting tangled up. It was Neela’s mother who managed to lay them out and then wrap them around the tires. It was her mother, too, who drove the car forward so they could snap the chains in place.
When they reached Florida, her mother learned that if they went on a tour of a time-share property, they could get free tickets to the amusement parks.
“No hanky-panky?” Neela’s father said to the woman who was doing the tour. “We just take the tour and get the tickets?”
“Yes,” the woman had promised, her white teeth and shiny heels gleaming in the sun. The tour took a whole day. There were walkthroughs of three condos, followed by a lunch of sandwiches on white bread at the golf course and long sales pitches. By the end of it, Neela was ready to return to the hotel and sleep. Her father complained that they should have bought the tickets outright.
“They stole our time.”
“But we saved money,” her mother said. “We couldn’t afford this trip in the first place.”
Neela loved the Magic Kingdom. For two days, she ran from ride to ride. When Princess Jasmine appeared, Neela posed with her, an awestruck child again.
One evening, Neela and her parents went to a diner that smelled like dirty school cafeteria dishes, located halfway between the Magic Kingdom and their hotel. Neela spotted Captain Hook there, putting a spoon of ice cream into Princess Jasmine’s mouth. Neither was in costume, but Hook’s mustache was real, and Neela recognized it.
Her father smirked when she pointed them out. “You know those people are actors with real lives, don’t you?”
“Of course,” Neela said, though she had been mesmerized all day, convinced that the unreal was real, that magic was possible.
“Don’t you know Mickey Mouse is a woman?” her mother added, teasing.
Her father threw his head back and laughed; her mother’s eyes were lit. Neela wasn’t hurt by the joking, though it was at her expense, because she loved to see her mother this way, loved how wide her smile was, how pleased her mother was to make her father laugh.
In the car ride home after her father’s lecture, Neela sits in the back. She pulls her hoodie up over her head and leans against the door. Her father is talking to her mother, and it is all about his business. He is thrilled about the evening’s turnout, the six books he sold. Neela feels something knot up in her stomach. Her father is playing dress-up like the actor who played Captain Hook. It was humiliating, that he had to resort to this.
The next morning, Neela finds her father sitting cross-legged on the couch. As she eats her cinnamon squares he reads the Sunday Post-Gazette in his hands. His own portrait hangs above him. Her mother is at work already.
“One day, they might cover my events.”
He puts the paper down on the sofa.
“What do you think?”
“Maybe.”
“Come. I know this is hard for you. Sit with me.”
He is wearing a plain white kurta pajama and his hair is tied into a bun. Neela leaves the cinnamon squares in the kitchen, and sits cross-legged on the patterned Persian carpet in front of her father, facing him as if she is one of his followers.
“Pretty earrings.”
“You bought them for me. Maple leaves from Quebec.”
“That reminds me,” he says. He goes to the kitchen and comes back with a small paper bag. “I bought this for you in Sedona.”
Neela opens it and pulls out a red rock, a smooth sphere.
“The rock formations there are stunning. The gods live among them. I am sure of it. You see them as the sun rises and sets, their faces smiling at you under the light. It’s like . . .”
He stops, worried he has upset her.
“It’s fine. Preach to me. You need the practice.”
Neela knows how obstinate she sounds. How rude.
“I’d like to take you someday, that’s all.”
“You don’t have to do this, you know. You could stay home. Or do what you used to do. I could get a job at Ferri’s if we need extra money. Colin gets five-fifty an hour.”
“Your mother makes enough money for the family, Neela. I have learned to accept that. What I am doing now is building a business. It will take time, but my heart is in this work.”
“Work? This is work? This is a scam.”
“It is good for me, and good for the people.”
Neela looks at her father, dressed in his cotton pajamas. In the framed portrait above him, his right palm faces forward, an offer of blessing to anyone who looks his way. Neela wonders whether this version of her father hangs in the homes of any followers. If not, would it someday? She hopes not.
“You’re a fake,” she says.
Neela’s father shakes his head. “As time goes by, maybe you will understand.”
He stands up and reaches out to hug her, but she steps back. Her eyes are wet. Both her father and the framed portrait above him are blurry now. She blinks. That he was doing this for money was difficult to accept, but that he believes he is doing good is an insanity she cannot process.
“Neela,” he says softly.
“I’m going for a run.”
She races through the streets of her neighborhood in her sports bra and shorts, in spite of the cold. In a matter of days, summer has turned to fall. She runs down to Ferri’s, up the hill to the high school, and back home again, cutting as fast as she can through the brisk air. She feels the weight of her body each time a foot touches the ground, but also a lightness, a sense that she can go anywhere, do anything. When she comes back home, her father has left for the airport, off to his next lecture. She collapses on the couch, closes her eyes, and feels as if she is floating in dark space, like she is both a single particle and many, minuscule but expansive; it is a feeling beyond her understanding.
Neela turns on the television, but instead of what is on the screen she sees her father: in his taxi, his suitcase full of books, his shoulder bag containing his notebook, a water bottle, and the snacks her mother packed for him. In his wallet, she knows, he keeps a picture of her. In the photo she is six years old, her hair in two tight braids, and she is standing in the lobby of the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh. Her father is at her side. In the photo he is thirty, a graduate student on the brink of getting his doctorate. Neela knows that it was a stressful time for her father. He received no promising job offers, which led to his taking the position at the university as a part-time lecturer. It was never his dream.
Neela imagines her father boarding the plane, taking his seat, and pulling out the photograph, showing it to the passenger next to him proudly.
“My daughter.”
Neela had loved going to the library with him back then. It was a grand place, with its domed ceiling and marble stairs that led up to a room of old library books for sale. In the lobby, Neela often knelt to run her fingers over the intricate tiles.
In the photo, above where Neela and her father are standing, there is a painting of Andrew Carnegie. The industrialist is dressed in a suit, standing as erect as a preacher, with a book tucked under his arm.
“They called him the robber baron,” Neela remembers her father saying. “He made a lot of money and then gave it all away. See that book under his arm? The Gospel of Wealth.”
Those words, “robber baron,” had stuck with Neela for years, their sound and meaning strange and indelible.
That evening, when she gets home from a long day at the hospital, Neela’s mother hands her a copy of the Post-Gazette. She points to an obituary. The old white man is wearing his beret in the picture. He was a retired schoolteacher from West Lafayette. Towards the end, he found a new kind of spirituality, the paper said. “He went to the S.V. Temple every day.” It was a cancer of the blood. Once it started spreading, he wanted nothing but to spend his last days at the temple. He had gone to India as a young man on a Fulbright scholarship, and ever since had been a devout Hindu.
“His family wants to hold a memorial service at the temple,” her mother says. “You should have heard the drama at the meeting last week, discussing the possibility. One half said absolutely not; the other half said why not?”
The chairman of the temple board had quieted the patrons by announcing that the family was donating thirty thousand dollars to the temple. The old man’s son was a successful engineer in Silicon Valley. It was enough money to start a renovation project, to bring craftsmen from India to Pittsburgh once again to carve new deities and build their abodes out of stone. “Can you believe it? That poor man. And such generosity from the family,” her mother said. “Of course, the chairman reminded us all that to give to God is to give to good.”
Still in her blue scrubs, her smell a mixture of sweat and hospital disinfectant, Neela’s mother sits down next to her daughter and puts her arm around her. Neela turns on the television. The two fall into silence as a raven-haired meteorologist on WTAE talks. It may snow a few inches next week, though it is still fall, and portions of the Ohio, the Allegheny, and the Monongahela could freeze over.