For some reason, even though Ranjana and Harit had discussed the temple at La Ronde, it did not occur to her that he might be there. There were so many different Indian circles, and Preeti seemed outside Harit’s limited orbit. So when Ranjana and Mohan stepped into the temple with a stainless steel bowl of honeydew and grapes, and some store-bought barfi, Ranjana was surprised to see him seated, cross-legged, with the other men on the right side of the room. His back was toward her, but that hair was unmistakable, the beginning of a bald spot like a moon behind clouds.
It was uncanny how authentic their temple was, as if it had come out of a travel book. It was built on a gigantic plot of land, and this removed any noticeably American sight, so that the Indians in attendance could pretend that they were back in their home country. Even the trees that surrounded the place seemed Indian. The creek that ran behind it, the airborne dirt, the birds that flew overhead—you could swear that you were in Uttar Pradesh. And then there was the building itself. Funded with millions of dollars from the many affluent attendees, it was gilded in stone the way that a mirror could be gilded in gold. The various pieces had been carved in India, then transported on ships. Assembled, they rivaled the temples of Mahabalipuram in their ostentation, a forest of ornate stone thorns jutting every which way, here and there circling a tenderly carved deity. Wide steps flanked by humongous stone banisters jutted up into a grand threshold. The interior had a vaulted ceiling through which ten windows, like angry angels, shot sunlight onto the sprawling marble floor during the daytime. A series of six-foot-tall deities, posed as if in a godly fashion show, ran across the back of the altar. Red rugs ran askew like plush rivers. Gold exploded wherever possible. Then there were the bright swishes of the women’s georgette, the white and beige tangle of the men’s business casual.
As she had with Achyut, Ranjana felt an indefinite tension creep into her at the sight of Harit. Having Mohan by her side made the moment all the more bizarre. Mohan had no cause for concern, she reassured herself, but she hadn’t even mentioned her dinner with Harit and Teddy to him. How could she have possibly explained it? In a way, it had been even more dangerous than the night at FB. The gay bar had been so outside her own understanding of life that it would have been hieroglyphs to Mohan. But the dinner with Harit and Teddy could at least find a footing in his mind. Two men accompanying a woman to dinner, her husband out of sight, eating at a fancy restaurant and speaking of her family unpoliced, one of them roughly her age, unmarried, probably seeking out a wife, however late in life. Then Teddy, truly different from Mohan in most ways but still his elder, capable of dispensing advice to Ranjana that she might, God forbid, take. She was kicking herself now as Mohan strode forward to shake hands with some of the other men. She made her way to the pantry, which pealed with the chickadee voices of the other women.
She set her various parcels on a countertop and said her Namastes to the room. However mournful they were all supposed to be, there was a jollity to the union of Indian women that could never be fully dispelled. Their whispers—the hushing of their mouths using the back of one hand—came across as gossip instead of reverent intonations of pity. Sonya Mehta, the woman who had gone night-riding naked through her dreamscape, was there in full force. Instead of wearing a demure outfit—a few of the women were wearing slacks instead of saris or salwars—she was wearing a gleaming sari with so many beads on it that it looked like someone had rolled her in glue and then pushed her down a hill of rubies. Ranjana sometimes wished that she could be this selfish yet clueless at the same time; Sonya did what she did, in life as in the presence of death, and perhaps that was why her beauty remained undiminished. It was self-consciousness that aged you, worrying about chance social encounters and your place in them that brought wrinkles as if they had been called to prayer.
When Ranjana got back to the main room, Mohan was already seated in the middle of the men, in front of Harit. Ranjana decided to seat herself and deal with Harit later. If she stayed just behind him on the left side of the room, he would not note her presence, and she could pay attention to her real reason for being here—the puja. Preeti and her husband, Anu, were seated in front, facing the pandit, and their heads were bowed. The people at the temple had been through countless ceremonies like this, but what pleased Ranjana was how the sense of reverence, at least before the altar, was relatively consistent. Whereas the babbling in the kitchen, however low voiced, went against the solemn purpose of the evening, the sentiment in here was respectful.
Their pandit was young, in his late thirties, a replacement for his predecessor, a beloved old man who had passed away last year, his resonant Punjabi accent still ringing in their ears. The injection of this new pandit’s youth into their ceremonies gave them all a renewed sense of faith. So many of them worried that their children were not carrying on the Hindu tradition, and seeing a younger pandit offered some reassurance. Of course, Ranjana was one of the culpable crowd. As she had half-confessed to Harit, temple had not been a huge part of Prashant’s life, even though she was somewhat exonerated due to the fact that his Hindi was not that bad. She and Mohan had been stuck in their mother tongue for many years after their arrival, her English slang coming mostly from soap operas and trips to the grocery store and telemarketing tussles over the phone, so Prashant had grown up surrounded by both languages. Sanskrit often played a greater role in temple, however, so Prashant’s Hindi failed him within these walls. That sense of ineffectiveness, for someone as smart as Prashant, was why he disliked going to temple. Ranjana could bet that, aside from the pandit himself, there was likely no one in this room right now who knew Sanskrit. She thought again of Seema’s yoga companions and, for a moment, marveled at the shattering of the tongue, language repurposed and rethought and reorganized.
Her mind was wandering. This is what happened when she came to temple. Most of the time, she would conjure up characters and scenes; if she could have gotten away with it, she would have kept a small notebook with her and jotted down these ideas. Ranjana had not brought a dupatta but had a maroon wool scarf that she wore over her head. She wondered if describing blood as a maroon scarf might work. No—a maroon dupatta. That was culturally appropriate for the story.