Miracle
by Jyotsna Sreenivasan
"Miracle" was previously published in Colere and was anthologized in Confessions: Fact or Fiction?: a collection of short stories and memoir.
I don’t know whether I should be worried about my wife or not. I still don’t understand exactly why she did it, although we’ve talked about it a lot. Her hair was attractive, but she’s beautiful to me even now. What I’m concerned about is the reason behind doing it. Or the lack of reason. People who are very exceptional—geniuses, or saints—do odd things. But so do people who are mad or unbalanced in some way. I haven’t seen signs of anything strange about her yet, but neither have I seen signs of exceptionality. Of course I love Meera, and I wouldn’t leave her even if she were mad. I wouldn’t accuse her parents of trying to pass her off as normal when they showed her to me at the bride-viewing. I’m not that kind of man, although I know some Indian men who are like that.
One reason I wanted to marry her is that she seemed so unexceptional – so content, quiet, and happy with herself. She was not flashy or striving after anything, whether it was material wealth or status or some kind of uniqueness. Now she tells me that, when we met, she was full of longing for something, she didn’t even know what.
Meera and I met one year ago, in India. I had been in the U.S. for quite a few years and my parents had been bothering me about my marriage for some time. They wanted me to come back home and choose a bride. For a long time I put them off with excuses – I was finishing my thesis, and then I was looking for a job, and then I had a new job and was trying to get my citizenship. Actually, I had the idea that I should find my own wife. I was a modern young man. Why should I go to India and let my parents hunt up some girl for me?
But for whatever reason, I did not find the girl I was looking for in the U.S. I went to a lot of those Indian events on campus and around town – Diwali festivals and Hindustani music concerts and screenings of old Hindi movies – and some of the girls were pretty, and some were friendly, and some were both. I liked a few girls but by the time I figured out how dating worked, and then figured out which girls might be okay with the concept of dating, and then by the time I got up the courage to actually ask a girl to go out, that girl had either moved away or had taken up with some other boy. So finally I thought I’d better go home and let my parents fix me up. There was no point pretending to be some kind of Romeo.
Meera grew up in a small town in Karnataka, the same state I’m from, but I grew up in our state’s largest city, Bangalore. I’d never been to her town before I met her and when my parents and I arrived, it was at the end of the rainy season and the place seemed like paradise, after the noise and dust of Bangalore. Every green plant that could grow was growing. The palm trees along the roads were dripping with leaves. The bougainvillea bushes were bursting with red blooms. The air was scented with jasmine. And it was so quiet. I think the loudest noise I heard was the clanging of the goat bells, when the goat woman walked by every morning and every evening shooing her animals along the road.
I think I fell in love with the town as well as with Meera, but now Meera says that the town was awful – she was so bored. No one did anything but gossip and watch old movies on TV and do one pooja after another.
I don’t remember much about Meera’s parents’ house because I was only there to see Meera. My parents and I were sitting on the sofa and she came in and did namaskar to us all. She was wearing a pale pink sari and she looked really sweet. Her skin is fair, and I’m not one of those people who think that dark-skinned women are ugly, but the pink sari really did make her face glow in a soft way. She’s a small girl, thin and graceful. I liked her right away.
We didn’t talk then—that was in the afternoon—but that evening I took her out for dinner. We didn’t say anything particularly significant, but one thing I remember is that she said she’d never really talked to a boy before, except for her brother and her cousins. I believed it. Girls are so sheltered in India, especially in small towns.
She seemed very calm during our dinner, but now she tells me that she was wild with excitement. She kept thinking of how it would be if she were to touch me! I’m sure I would have loved that – I was wild to touch her too. Even though I’d chatted with a lot of girls, I had never even held a girl’s hand, if you can believe it.
So I took her back to her house, and told my parents I agreed to marry her, and she told her parents she agreed to marry me. We performed the wedding about a week later, went on a honeymoon to Kerala, and then I took her to my parents’ house in Bangalore. Then I had to come back here because my vacation had ended. Since I was already a U.S. citizen I got Meera a visa fairly quickly, and she was able to join me here in a few months. It wasn’t a long separation compared to how long some couples must be apart, but for me it was horrible. I missed her so much. I couldn’t stand sleeping by myself, after having slept with her every night for ten nights. Meera says it wasn’t so bad for her because it was all very exciting -- shopping and seeing sights in Bangalore when she stayed with my parents -- so much better than the dull town she grew up in. She felt that being married and coming to the U.S. was what she had been waiting for.
At first, she says, life in the U.S. was very exciting. We bought a new house -- had it built for us in a new development outside of Washington, D.C., so there was all that to do, selecting the options we wanted, the wallpaper, the carpeting, and so on. She found a job. Her field is computer programming. We went on trips to see the cherry blossoms and monuments in D.C., all the sights in New York City, the Luray Caverns and Shenandoah forest.
Looking back, Meera did tell me one significant thing. One night, several months ago, we were lying in bed just before going to sleep, and Meera started whispering something to me. There were only the two of us in the house so I didn’t know why she was whispering.
“I want to tell you something that happened when I was fifteen,” she said.
I was feeling sleepy, and I yawned. Meera shook me and said, “Listen! Listen to me.” So I blinked and stretched and tried to stay awake.
“When I was fifteen we went to Tirupati, just as we did every year,” she said. “We climbed the hill. We stood in line to see the idol. And when we were in front of the idol, I thought it was God himself looking at me.”
I didn’t know why she was telling me this story. I have been to Tirupati many times, of course. It is one of the most famous pilgrimage sites in South India, and my family visited very often. The subject was not at all interesting to me. At that time I was having a flare-up of a rash I sometimes get, so I was bothered by itching on the inside of my elbow.
“I thought it was Sri Venkateshwara himself looking at me,” she repeated.
“Maybe it was,” I said. I rubbed my elbow, trying not to scratch. “You know the idol is supposed to have been created by Sri Venkateshwara himself. It is not supposed to have been carved by human hands.”
“I don’t believe any of that,” she said.
“Then why are you telling me this story?”
“I want you to know what happened. I went there. At that time I believed in God just like anyone else did. And I saw God looking at me. I started weeping. And out loud I said that I would shave my head.”
“Everyone shaves their heads at Tirupati.”
“Not in our families. You know that women do not shave their heads in our families. The women promise to undertake a fast or something, but it is only the men and children who get their heads shaved.”
“Yes, that’s true. Why did you promise that, then?”
“It just came over me. I don’t know. I can’t explain it. And then Amma was so angry. She thought I would look low-class with a shaved head. But we had to go through with it. Everyone heard my promise. Amma thought it would be very bad luck not to get it done. She took me right then to one of the barbers.”
My elbow was really itching by this time. I got up and went into the bathroom to put some hydrocortisone cream on it. When I came back to bed, Meera was sitting up.
“Listen,” she said. She was now speaking loudly.
I crawled into bed and lay down but didn’t close my eyes.
“After I got my head shaved,” she said, “my friends at school really gave me a hard time. One of my friends said, don’t you know that statue is nothing but a rock? This girl said she was an atheist. I was so ignorant, I thought it was some kind of new religion! I had to look it up in the dictionary. Then when I found out what it meant—I knew. I knew there was no God. I knew I had been deceived.”
“Then why did you think you saw God looking at you?” I asked.
“It was nothing,” she said. “You know how it is, standing in that line for hours. You get hot and tired. And as you get closer to the idol, the incense is so thick you can hardly breathe. And once you are in front of the idol, there are so many deepas flickering there, and the idol is black, you can’t really see the face at all. It was just a trick my brain played on me.”
“You never know,” I said.” Maybe it really was a miracle. Maybe God really did look at you.”
“How can you say such a thing? You are a scientist.”
“Some scientists are atheists. But for me, studying physics and astronomy has made me realize how much there is about the universe that we don’t know.”
“That is no proof of God,” she said. “Just because we don’t know everything yet, that doesn’t prove God exists.”
I didn’t say anything. I was surprised to learn that she was an atheist, but it was OK with me. To each his own and all of that.
Then she turned on the light. “Do you believe in miracles?” she demanded.
“Yes,” I said. I closed my eyes to shut out the glare of the light. “I’ve never experienced a miracle, but I think there is a possibility that miracles can happen.”
“That’s ridiculous,” she said. “How can you say that? You are so educated.”
I didn’t know why she was so agitated, especially since she was the one who brought the whole thing up, and she was the one who claimed to be an atheist. I thought maybe she’d had a stressful day at work or something.
After that conversation, things seemed to go back to normal, but now Meera says that she started thinking about miracles and God all the time. I had no idea. She says she started noticing articles in the newspaper about miracles. She was surprised at first that people in America cared about miracles. She thought that was just an old-fashioned Indian thing. There was one article about an eggplant. It seems when this eggplant was cut open, the seeds formed a pattern that spelled “Allah” in Arabic. She says there was a photo in the paper, but I don’t remember it. I do remember that we ate a lot of eggplant dishes at that time. She says, when she cut open the eggplants, she never saw any pattern in a language she could read.
But now we come to the miracle that she claims she did see. A few days ago, on her way to work, Meera was stopped at a traffic light and she saw a little homemade sign by the road that said, this way to the Virgin Mary miracle or some such thing. So she turned and went that way. She never even went to work. She followed those homemade signs to a small shopping center. When she got out of the car she thought, I’ve made a mistake. The people there were fat old black women and a lot of Hispanics; she felt out of place. So she thought, I don’t belong here. She stayed because she thought she might as well see this thing that they were calling a miracle.
There was quite a long line. She asked what the miracle was, and someone told her that an image of the Virgin Mary had appeared, all by itself, on the side of a building. She waited and waited. She was the only one there in office clothes. A lot of people were holding beads and praying. Some people tried to kneel, but the police made them stand again. That’s how many people there were – they needed police to control the crowd. It was hot and there was no shade. Meera took off her suit jacket but still she felt warm. Finally she reached the front of the line, and all she saw was a blank wall. The paint was peeling and sort of patchy. There was a black woman standing next to her, and Meera whispered that she didn’t see anything, and that woman said, just keep looking. Don’t even blink. Then Meera realized it was some kind of optical illusion. These people were so primed to see the Virgin Mary that their brains somehow created an image out of the pattern of paint on the wall. She was about to turn around and leave. She would still have been on time for work.
But just as she was about to turn, she saw it. She said it popped right out at her. It looked like a real face of a woman, not a painting. It was three-dimensional. It even moved a little. The face looked so kind, so compassionate, Meera said. She couldn’t take her eyes off it. She felt the face was trying to tell her something, and she kept trying to listen, to comprehend, but there were a lot of people behind her, pushing her aside to see the image, and she had to get out of line.
As she stepped aside, the black woman next to her stepped out of line also, and Meera said they looked at each other and threw their arms around each other. This is very unlike Meera. In our families, we do not give hugs all the time, like people in America do. I’m not saying it’s right or wrong to give hugs to strangers, but it’s just not what we do. But Meera said she did it without even thinking. She hugged this fat black woman in the parking lot of that shopping center.
Then the black woman went away and Meera stood there. She said she felt so happy. She didn’t want to go on to work. She thought about getting back in line to see the Virgin Mary again, but instead she turned and saw a barber shop behind her. She went into this barber shop and asked the barber to shave her head. And he did it. I suppose he’d do anything as long as he got paid. He didn’t care if the person was unbalanced or not. She came straight home after that, and when I got home from work that’s when I saw her and found out what she’d done.
As soon as I entered the house, I knew something was up because there was no food cooked. Meera is usually very prompt with dinner. She plans the meals over the weekend, and she even chops vegetables the night before or in the morning, before she goes to work. If she’s making dosa, she puts the dal and rice to soak the day before. So as I said, as soon as I came home I noticed there was no food on the stove.
I called her name, and she called back from upstairs. I went upstairs. In here, she called. She was in our bedroom. And then I saw.
She was sitting on the floor, with a suitcase open in front of her and a big smile on her face.
“What do you think?” she asked. She seemed excited and a little nervous at the same time.
I was in shock, as you can imagine. I sat on the bed and she told me the whole story. She even asked me to feel her head.
“It’s so soft and smooth,” she said. “I don’t remember this from the last time. My mother was so upset and my friends made fun of me. I became ashamed. I began to regret my promise as soon as I made it. I wanted to do it right this time. My hair is a gift to God. This time I will not regret it.”
“Couldn’t it have been the same as last time?” I asked. “At Tirupati, you were hot and tired, and you thought God was looking at you. Now, you were hot and tired, and again you see a religious image looking at you. Maybe it was just a trick your brain played on you.”
“No, that’s not it,” Meera said. “Even in Tirupati, it was really God looking at me. That moment was the happiest of my life. I felt blissful.”
“Then why did you become an atheist?” I asked. “If you felt so blissful, why did you stop believing?”
She shrugged, but she was still smiling. “I was a teenager,” she said. “At that time it really mattered what other people thought. And then, when I realized there were people who didn’t believe in God, I thought, maybe I’m the one who is duped. Maybe that’s why everyone is making fun of me.”
I don’t completely understand Meera’s explanation. Why should it matter so much whether other people believe or not? But that’s what she said.
“Ever since that time,” she said, “I’ve been looking for that same feeling. And now I’ve found it.”
In the suitcase in front of her were a lot of pooja articles – pictures of gods and goddesses, silver idols and kumkum boxes, incense holders, that sort of thing. Her mother had packed them for Meera, but Meera had never set them up. She asked if I would mind if she used the den downstairs for her pooja room. I said that was fine with me – we didn’t use the den anyway. We have three bedrooms upstairs, and on the main floor the living room, dining room, and kitchen. The den and family room are in the walk-out basement. We hardly use most of this space.
Then she looked up at me with her big eyes and said, “I’m going to quit my job.”
I said, “If you don’t want to work, that’s okay. My salary is more than enough for both of us. As far as I’m concerned, your job was just something to keep you from being bored at home all day.”
“It’s not that I don’t want to work,” she said. “It’s that I don’t know what work I am meant to do. I don’t know what God wants me to do.”
That’s when my shock started to turn into worry. Was she going to become some kind of Mother Teresa? Was she going to insist upon serving the poor? Not that I have anything against that, but you have to know what you are getting into. It’s not child’s play. Most of us are not cut out for that kind of thing.
But I didn’t say any of this to her. I just said, “Fine. You do whatever you want. It’s fine with me.” I thought maybe the whole thing would blow over soon.
She called her office right away and left a message with her boss that she was quitting. No two-week notice. I mentioned to her that this would not be good if she wanted to get recommendations for future jobs, but she insisted that she had to quit right away.
Besides this impulsiveness, she doesn’t seem mad, in particular. She cooks the meals just as she used to. She takes care of her clothing and appearance and that sort of thing. I did notice that she has taken off some of her jewelry. She’s still wearing her wedding necklace and the wedding ring we bought together once she came to the U.S, but she no longer wears her diamond earrings or gold bangles.
She has spent the past few days making the den into a pooja room. She set up a low coffee table as an altar, on which she arranged her silver idols. Behind this she hung a large batik of Lakshmi sitting on a lotus. She propped up other framed pictures of dieties – Ganesha, Rama and Sita, and so forth -- on the floor around the table, and hung silk-flower garlands on them. These are the usual things that Hindu women do. As long as she doesn’t spend all her time praying, I have no problem with it.
Right now she’s in her shrine. That’s what I call it. I peek in and see her sitting on the floor facing her altar. I want to go in and tap her on the shoulder and say, come on, let’s drive to the mall. But I just stand in the doorway. She’s like one of those Tibetan boy monks, with her shaved head and her orange salvar kameez. She looks so different that I feel like I’ve never really known her. The smoke swirls up from the incense stick and hangs in the air around her. The scent is strong in that stuffy room, and I turn away to get a breath of fresh air.
When I look back, I don’t see Meera. I see only Lakshmi, larger than life, smiling down at me and holding up a hand in blessing. Then I notice my wife standing at the side of the room. She picks up a banana from the altar and holds it out to me. Her eyes are wet with tears.
“Come here,” she says. She’s smiling sweetly, and I can recognize something of my Meera again.
I’ve been taught that it’s bad luck to refuse prasada – food blessed by God. So I step into the dim room and walk through the incense smoke, toward the Lakshmi with the hand raised in blessing. Meera rests her fuzzy head against my shoulder for a moment. I take the banana, peel and eat it, with Meera and the gods looking on.
Jyotsna Sreenivasan’s novel And Laughter Fell from the Sky was published in 2012 by HarperCollins. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous literary magazines (including Tampa Review and American Literary Review) and anthologies (including Confessions: Fact or Fiction? and Mamas and Papas: On the Sublime and Heartbreaking Art of Parenting). She is also the author of novels for children and reference books for high school and college students.
by Jyotsna Sreenivasan
"Miracle" was previously published in Colere and was anthologized in Confessions: Fact or Fiction?: a collection of short stories and memoir.
I don’t know whether I should be worried about my wife or not. I still don’t understand exactly why she did it, although we’ve talked about it a lot. Her hair was attractive, but she’s beautiful to me even now. What I’m concerned about is the reason behind doing it. Or the lack of reason. People who are very exceptional—geniuses, or saints—do odd things. But so do people who are mad or unbalanced in some way. I haven’t seen signs of anything strange about her yet, but neither have I seen signs of exceptionality. Of course I love Meera, and I wouldn’t leave her even if she were mad. I wouldn’t accuse her parents of trying to pass her off as normal when they showed her to me at the bride-viewing. I’m not that kind of man, although I know some Indian men who are like that.
One reason I wanted to marry her is that she seemed so unexceptional – so content, quiet, and happy with herself. She was not flashy or striving after anything, whether it was material wealth or status or some kind of uniqueness. Now she tells me that, when we met, she was full of longing for something, she didn’t even know what.
Meera and I met one year ago, in India. I had been in the U.S. for quite a few years and my parents had been bothering me about my marriage for some time. They wanted me to come back home and choose a bride. For a long time I put them off with excuses – I was finishing my thesis, and then I was looking for a job, and then I had a new job and was trying to get my citizenship. Actually, I had the idea that I should find my own wife. I was a modern young man. Why should I go to India and let my parents hunt up some girl for me?
But for whatever reason, I did not find the girl I was looking for in the U.S. I went to a lot of those Indian events on campus and around town – Diwali festivals and Hindustani music concerts and screenings of old Hindi movies – and some of the girls were pretty, and some were friendly, and some were both. I liked a few girls but by the time I figured out how dating worked, and then figured out which girls might be okay with the concept of dating, and then by the time I got up the courage to actually ask a girl to go out, that girl had either moved away or had taken up with some other boy. So finally I thought I’d better go home and let my parents fix me up. There was no point pretending to be some kind of Romeo.
Meera grew up in a small town in Karnataka, the same state I’m from, but I grew up in our state’s largest city, Bangalore. I’d never been to her town before I met her and when my parents and I arrived, it was at the end of the rainy season and the place seemed like paradise, after the noise and dust of Bangalore. Every green plant that could grow was growing. The palm trees along the roads were dripping with leaves. The bougainvillea bushes were bursting with red blooms. The air was scented with jasmine. And it was so quiet. I think the loudest noise I heard was the clanging of the goat bells, when the goat woman walked by every morning and every evening shooing her animals along the road.
I think I fell in love with the town as well as with Meera, but now Meera says that the town was awful – she was so bored. No one did anything but gossip and watch old movies on TV and do one pooja after another.
I don’t remember much about Meera’s parents’ house because I was only there to see Meera. My parents and I were sitting on the sofa and she came in and did namaskar to us all. She was wearing a pale pink sari and she looked really sweet. Her skin is fair, and I’m not one of those people who think that dark-skinned women are ugly, but the pink sari really did make her face glow in a soft way. She’s a small girl, thin and graceful. I liked her right away.
We didn’t talk then—that was in the afternoon—but that evening I took her out for dinner. We didn’t say anything particularly significant, but one thing I remember is that she said she’d never really talked to a boy before, except for her brother and her cousins. I believed it. Girls are so sheltered in India, especially in small towns.
She seemed very calm during our dinner, but now she tells me that she was wild with excitement. She kept thinking of how it would be if she were to touch me! I’m sure I would have loved that – I was wild to touch her too. Even though I’d chatted with a lot of girls, I had never even held a girl’s hand, if you can believe it.
So I took her back to her house, and told my parents I agreed to marry her, and she told her parents she agreed to marry me. We performed the wedding about a week later, went on a honeymoon to Kerala, and then I took her to my parents’ house in Bangalore. Then I had to come back here because my vacation had ended. Since I was already a U.S. citizen I got Meera a visa fairly quickly, and she was able to join me here in a few months. It wasn’t a long separation compared to how long some couples must be apart, but for me it was horrible. I missed her so much. I couldn’t stand sleeping by myself, after having slept with her every night for ten nights. Meera says it wasn’t so bad for her because it was all very exciting -- shopping and seeing sights in Bangalore when she stayed with my parents -- so much better than the dull town she grew up in. She felt that being married and coming to the U.S. was what she had been waiting for.
At first, she says, life in the U.S. was very exciting. We bought a new house -- had it built for us in a new development outside of Washington, D.C., so there was all that to do, selecting the options we wanted, the wallpaper, the carpeting, and so on. She found a job. Her field is computer programming. We went on trips to see the cherry blossoms and monuments in D.C., all the sights in New York City, the Luray Caverns and Shenandoah forest.
Looking back, Meera did tell me one significant thing. One night, several months ago, we were lying in bed just before going to sleep, and Meera started whispering something to me. There were only the two of us in the house so I didn’t know why she was whispering.
“I want to tell you something that happened when I was fifteen,” she said.
I was feeling sleepy, and I yawned. Meera shook me and said, “Listen! Listen to me.” So I blinked and stretched and tried to stay awake.
“When I was fifteen we went to Tirupati, just as we did every year,” she said. “We climbed the hill. We stood in line to see the idol. And when we were in front of the idol, I thought it was God himself looking at me.”
I didn’t know why she was telling me this story. I have been to Tirupati many times, of course. It is one of the most famous pilgrimage sites in South India, and my family visited very often. The subject was not at all interesting to me. At that time I was having a flare-up of a rash I sometimes get, so I was bothered by itching on the inside of my elbow.
“I thought it was Sri Venkateshwara himself looking at me,” she repeated.
“Maybe it was,” I said. I rubbed my elbow, trying not to scratch. “You know the idol is supposed to have been created by Sri Venkateshwara himself. It is not supposed to have been carved by human hands.”
“I don’t believe any of that,” she said.
“Then why are you telling me this story?”
“I want you to know what happened. I went there. At that time I believed in God just like anyone else did. And I saw God looking at me. I started weeping. And out loud I said that I would shave my head.”
“Everyone shaves their heads at Tirupati.”
“Not in our families. You know that women do not shave their heads in our families. The women promise to undertake a fast or something, but it is only the men and children who get their heads shaved.”
“Yes, that’s true. Why did you promise that, then?”
“It just came over me. I don’t know. I can’t explain it. And then Amma was so angry. She thought I would look low-class with a shaved head. But we had to go through with it. Everyone heard my promise. Amma thought it would be very bad luck not to get it done. She took me right then to one of the barbers.”
My elbow was really itching by this time. I got up and went into the bathroom to put some hydrocortisone cream on it. When I came back to bed, Meera was sitting up.
“Listen,” she said. She was now speaking loudly.
I crawled into bed and lay down but didn’t close my eyes.
“After I got my head shaved,” she said, “my friends at school really gave me a hard time. One of my friends said, don’t you know that statue is nothing but a rock? This girl said she was an atheist. I was so ignorant, I thought it was some kind of new religion! I had to look it up in the dictionary. Then when I found out what it meant—I knew. I knew there was no God. I knew I had been deceived.”
“Then why did you think you saw God looking at you?” I asked.
“It was nothing,” she said. “You know how it is, standing in that line for hours. You get hot and tired. And as you get closer to the idol, the incense is so thick you can hardly breathe. And once you are in front of the idol, there are so many deepas flickering there, and the idol is black, you can’t really see the face at all. It was just a trick my brain played on me.”
“You never know,” I said.” Maybe it really was a miracle. Maybe God really did look at you.”
“How can you say such a thing? You are a scientist.”
“Some scientists are atheists. But for me, studying physics and astronomy has made me realize how much there is about the universe that we don’t know.”
“That is no proof of God,” she said. “Just because we don’t know everything yet, that doesn’t prove God exists.”
I didn’t say anything. I was surprised to learn that she was an atheist, but it was OK with me. To each his own and all of that.
Then she turned on the light. “Do you believe in miracles?” she demanded.
“Yes,” I said. I closed my eyes to shut out the glare of the light. “I’ve never experienced a miracle, but I think there is a possibility that miracles can happen.”
“That’s ridiculous,” she said. “How can you say that? You are so educated.”
I didn’t know why she was so agitated, especially since she was the one who brought the whole thing up, and she was the one who claimed to be an atheist. I thought maybe she’d had a stressful day at work or something.
After that conversation, things seemed to go back to normal, but now Meera says that she started thinking about miracles and God all the time. I had no idea. She says she started noticing articles in the newspaper about miracles. She was surprised at first that people in America cared about miracles. She thought that was just an old-fashioned Indian thing. There was one article about an eggplant. It seems when this eggplant was cut open, the seeds formed a pattern that spelled “Allah” in Arabic. She says there was a photo in the paper, but I don’t remember it. I do remember that we ate a lot of eggplant dishes at that time. She says, when she cut open the eggplants, she never saw any pattern in a language she could read.
But now we come to the miracle that she claims she did see. A few days ago, on her way to work, Meera was stopped at a traffic light and she saw a little homemade sign by the road that said, this way to the Virgin Mary miracle or some such thing. So she turned and went that way. She never even went to work. She followed those homemade signs to a small shopping center. When she got out of the car she thought, I’ve made a mistake. The people there were fat old black women and a lot of Hispanics; she felt out of place. So she thought, I don’t belong here. She stayed because she thought she might as well see this thing that they were calling a miracle.
There was quite a long line. She asked what the miracle was, and someone told her that an image of the Virgin Mary had appeared, all by itself, on the side of a building. She waited and waited. She was the only one there in office clothes. A lot of people were holding beads and praying. Some people tried to kneel, but the police made them stand again. That’s how many people there were – they needed police to control the crowd. It was hot and there was no shade. Meera took off her suit jacket but still she felt warm. Finally she reached the front of the line, and all she saw was a blank wall. The paint was peeling and sort of patchy. There was a black woman standing next to her, and Meera whispered that she didn’t see anything, and that woman said, just keep looking. Don’t even blink. Then Meera realized it was some kind of optical illusion. These people were so primed to see the Virgin Mary that their brains somehow created an image out of the pattern of paint on the wall. She was about to turn around and leave. She would still have been on time for work.
But just as she was about to turn, she saw it. She said it popped right out at her. It looked like a real face of a woman, not a painting. It was three-dimensional. It even moved a little. The face looked so kind, so compassionate, Meera said. She couldn’t take her eyes off it. She felt the face was trying to tell her something, and she kept trying to listen, to comprehend, but there were a lot of people behind her, pushing her aside to see the image, and she had to get out of line.
As she stepped aside, the black woman next to her stepped out of line also, and Meera said they looked at each other and threw their arms around each other. This is very unlike Meera. In our families, we do not give hugs all the time, like people in America do. I’m not saying it’s right or wrong to give hugs to strangers, but it’s just not what we do. But Meera said she did it without even thinking. She hugged this fat black woman in the parking lot of that shopping center.
Then the black woman went away and Meera stood there. She said she felt so happy. She didn’t want to go on to work. She thought about getting back in line to see the Virgin Mary again, but instead she turned and saw a barber shop behind her. She went into this barber shop and asked the barber to shave her head. And he did it. I suppose he’d do anything as long as he got paid. He didn’t care if the person was unbalanced or not. She came straight home after that, and when I got home from work that’s when I saw her and found out what she’d done.
As soon as I entered the house, I knew something was up because there was no food cooked. Meera is usually very prompt with dinner. She plans the meals over the weekend, and she even chops vegetables the night before or in the morning, before she goes to work. If she’s making dosa, she puts the dal and rice to soak the day before. So as I said, as soon as I came home I noticed there was no food on the stove.
I called her name, and she called back from upstairs. I went upstairs. In here, she called. She was in our bedroom. And then I saw.
She was sitting on the floor, with a suitcase open in front of her and a big smile on her face.
“What do you think?” she asked. She seemed excited and a little nervous at the same time.
I was in shock, as you can imagine. I sat on the bed and she told me the whole story. She even asked me to feel her head.
“It’s so soft and smooth,” she said. “I don’t remember this from the last time. My mother was so upset and my friends made fun of me. I became ashamed. I began to regret my promise as soon as I made it. I wanted to do it right this time. My hair is a gift to God. This time I will not regret it.”
“Couldn’t it have been the same as last time?” I asked. “At Tirupati, you were hot and tired, and you thought God was looking at you. Now, you were hot and tired, and again you see a religious image looking at you. Maybe it was just a trick your brain played on you.”
“No, that’s not it,” Meera said. “Even in Tirupati, it was really God looking at me. That moment was the happiest of my life. I felt blissful.”
“Then why did you become an atheist?” I asked. “If you felt so blissful, why did you stop believing?”
She shrugged, but she was still smiling. “I was a teenager,” she said. “At that time it really mattered what other people thought. And then, when I realized there were people who didn’t believe in God, I thought, maybe I’m the one who is duped. Maybe that’s why everyone is making fun of me.”
I don’t completely understand Meera’s explanation. Why should it matter so much whether other people believe or not? But that’s what she said.
“Ever since that time,” she said, “I’ve been looking for that same feeling. And now I’ve found it.”
In the suitcase in front of her were a lot of pooja articles – pictures of gods and goddesses, silver idols and kumkum boxes, incense holders, that sort of thing. Her mother had packed them for Meera, but Meera had never set them up. She asked if I would mind if she used the den downstairs for her pooja room. I said that was fine with me – we didn’t use the den anyway. We have three bedrooms upstairs, and on the main floor the living room, dining room, and kitchen. The den and family room are in the walk-out basement. We hardly use most of this space.
Then she looked up at me with her big eyes and said, “I’m going to quit my job.”
I said, “If you don’t want to work, that’s okay. My salary is more than enough for both of us. As far as I’m concerned, your job was just something to keep you from being bored at home all day.”
“It’s not that I don’t want to work,” she said. “It’s that I don’t know what work I am meant to do. I don’t know what God wants me to do.”
That’s when my shock started to turn into worry. Was she going to become some kind of Mother Teresa? Was she going to insist upon serving the poor? Not that I have anything against that, but you have to know what you are getting into. It’s not child’s play. Most of us are not cut out for that kind of thing.
But I didn’t say any of this to her. I just said, “Fine. You do whatever you want. It’s fine with me.” I thought maybe the whole thing would blow over soon.
She called her office right away and left a message with her boss that she was quitting. No two-week notice. I mentioned to her that this would not be good if she wanted to get recommendations for future jobs, but she insisted that she had to quit right away.
Besides this impulsiveness, she doesn’t seem mad, in particular. She cooks the meals just as she used to. She takes care of her clothing and appearance and that sort of thing. I did notice that she has taken off some of her jewelry. She’s still wearing her wedding necklace and the wedding ring we bought together once she came to the U.S, but she no longer wears her diamond earrings or gold bangles.
She has spent the past few days making the den into a pooja room. She set up a low coffee table as an altar, on which she arranged her silver idols. Behind this she hung a large batik of Lakshmi sitting on a lotus. She propped up other framed pictures of dieties – Ganesha, Rama and Sita, and so forth -- on the floor around the table, and hung silk-flower garlands on them. These are the usual things that Hindu women do. As long as she doesn’t spend all her time praying, I have no problem with it.
Right now she’s in her shrine. That’s what I call it. I peek in and see her sitting on the floor facing her altar. I want to go in and tap her on the shoulder and say, come on, let’s drive to the mall. But I just stand in the doorway. She’s like one of those Tibetan boy monks, with her shaved head and her orange salvar kameez. She looks so different that I feel like I’ve never really known her. The smoke swirls up from the incense stick and hangs in the air around her. The scent is strong in that stuffy room, and I turn away to get a breath of fresh air.
When I look back, I don’t see Meera. I see only Lakshmi, larger than life, smiling down at me and holding up a hand in blessing. Then I notice my wife standing at the side of the room. She picks up a banana from the altar and holds it out to me. Her eyes are wet with tears.
“Come here,” she says. She’s smiling sweetly, and I can recognize something of my Meera again.
I’ve been taught that it’s bad luck to refuse prasada – food blessed by God. So I step into the dim room and walk through the incense smoke, toward the Lakshmi with the hand raised in blessing. Meera rests her fuzzy head against my shoulder for a moment. I take the banana, peel and eat it, with Meera and the gods looking on.
Jyotsna Sreenivasan’s novel And Laughter Fell from the Sky was published in 2012 by HarperCollins. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous literary magazines (including Tampa Review and American Literary Review) and anthologies (including Confessions: Fact or Fiction? and Mamas and Papas: On the Sublime and Heartbreaking Art of Parenting). She is also the author of novels for children and reference books for high school and college students.