SHARMILA VOORAKKARA

The Monkey God Gets the Brass Ring

I’d heard my father had become a holy man. He’d gone back to India in the years since he’d left us, taken the vows of a sadhu, a word I hadn’t heard until recently. The country my parents came from did not recognize someone like me. Why would I have wanted to know it? It was as foreign and cold a place as the moon.

Holy man. Sadhu.

I hadn't seen him in fifteen years.The last time he left – permanently – I was thirteen years old.

I think I might be sick as I pull into the parking lot of the motel where my father is living as the 24/7 desk man in return for a room.

Until only a week before, I’d had no idea where he was, or even if he were alive. I was sure I’d have heard if he were dead. But as I hadn’t, I couldn’t tell just when and where I would see his ghost: on a street corner scabbed with dirty snow, on a bench in the darkest folds of a park. Every vagrant wore his face. He followed me, if not in body, like a shadow as long as my life.

__

He didn’t want me. Shortly after I was born, my father decided I should be given away to a childless sister of his.”The first born child should be a boy,” he told my mother. A girl would not bring honor to a family. It would be years before he would take vows to become a sadhu, but his beliefs already showed a disturbingly orthodox slant the longer he was in America. In that world, a girl could not utter the ancient words to secure the deceased’s entrance into the afterlife. A girl was not fit even to stand with the mourners.

When my mother refused his request, her refusal would have surprised him, confused him. A wife was expected to answer her husband’s directives with an acquiescent silence. He left us for six months. He didn’t beat her that time, but he would later. His violence would escalate over my childhood, as would his strangeness.

For as long as I could remember, my father had imaginary friends. People he talked to in the mirror, and sometimes in a room while you were sitting there, doing your homework, or watching TV, or sat next to him in a car when he drove. A whole world would open in the space in front of his eyes.

He was the man in the park other mothers moved their children away from.

I hated him as much for his violence as I did for the feeling of embarrassment that clawed its way into my chest,knowing that I was the daughter of the man people laughed at – or whispered about.

Though I could never tell what would trigger his rage and then his disappearances, his returns were guaranteed. And my mother would always take him back despite my begging her not to. I must have been nine years old when, on a drive, they started arguing. My father slammed on the brakes, pulled over to a dirt shoulder one winter night and shoved her out of the car before it had come to a stop. He tossed her out like she was garbage, exactly like that.

I pulled my brother out of the car, and we joined my mother on the shoulder, in the middle-of- nowhere in January.It was night, and cold. My father sped off with my mother’s purse in the front passenger seat and was gone for a year.

In his absence, I discovered my own kind of religion: I prayed so hard I was sure I radiated like a paper lantern. Surely God could have heard me when I pleaded with Him to keep my father away from us.

One day, I got off the school bus and saw my father sitting on the porch. He smelled of the Greyhound bus, its fug of blue chemical sanitizer and urine and strangers. His shirt hung out from the waistband of too loose trousers, the same ones he’d always worn: they slouched loose on him, bagged at the knees. He looked hungry. Thinner than before.

That day, I. stopped praying. I knew that God didn’t listen to the prayers of girls.

___

I am twenty-eight years old the day I find my father. I’ve been doing a terrible job of being an adult. I’ve quit my most recent and directionless job as a substitute teacher in the New York City Public Schools where I can barely face each day. It isn’t that no one leaves lesson plans. It isn’t the daily wearying feeling of futility. It’s that recently I am visited by a feeling of not being safe in the world, or in my body, or in my mind. I believe I am going crazy.

My father started showing up in the dreams that rose from the bottom of my brain. In them, he wore a hangman's mask, and chased me down a long circular hallway in which door after door after door appeared.

“You are the building,” one theory explained. “You are your father. You are every part of the dream.”

The closer I got to understanding that, the more terrified I became.

__

I park in a spot which is only indistinctly marked out by what I thinkare white lines. The paint has been chewed off by years of rain and wind and neglect.

It never crosses my mind to wonder why I’m there. Or even if it’s a good idea. But I’ve spent the last decade or more waiting for a single moment to come to an end.

When I was thirteen, I’d come home to find my parents in the kitchen: my father had my mother pinned to the floor . His hands were around her neck.

I’d seen enough by then to know he was going to kill her.

I tore open drawers and found a knife – one so old and blunt that it could hardly cut an onion anymore. It wobbled in its dull wooden handle.

I held it up to my father.

I remember a sound coming from somewhere – from everywhere. An ugly bray wrenched up from the throat of an animal. Only when the whole thing was over did I realize that sound came from me. It was my voice that carried three heavy words into the air: “Stop it! Now!”

He spun around, and raised his hand — it was a large, solid hand – in a blow that never came. Instead, he looked right through me as though I were already dead – a ghost, a phantasm. My entire future was told in a single glance in which I ceased to exist.

He left the room.

When I helped my mother up to her feet, she gave me a choice: apologize to your father, or else you are not my daughter.

I didn’t apologize. My father left. Permanently.

I became an invisible presence in the house - the source of all our misfortunes, our loss of caste in the world she came from. No suitable husband would ever be found for me according to the laws that governed my parents’ far away world. We would be American from then on.

My mother didn’t speak to me for months. And certainly, no one would ever speak of the thing I had done. It was unspeakable. I had made the sound of just three words, and ended a world. I locked up my voice for many, many years after that, afraid of it.

How long, in the end, did it last – those few seconds, or minutes, or decades when the three of us were in the kitchen? I lost time, and with it, my sense of reality. The world is actually very flimsy. Its skin is held together with duct tape and bubble gum and just beneath it breathes another world, with a completely foreign landscape. There, no one knows you. You are a secret being whose name no one will speak. Wherever else in the world I might have gone, I was never very far from that other place.

___

Once a Days Inn, the motel had fallen from the grace of franchise status many years before. It had been sold at auction to a Gujarati businessman who decided to turn it into a weekly, monthly, yearly residence for welfare recipients.

The Days Inn highway sign that once towered over the tree line as a beacon to long-haul truckers and traveling salesmen and narcotized drivers was no longer a beacon to anyone. The face of it and the bulb inside had been shot out, bit by bit, by passersby who seemed to take out nameless grievances on it.

My father’s employer, Mr. Singh, (who I’d later learn was a devotee of the guru my father had been following) didn’t see the need to tear down the sign, of which only the Y and the N were now visible. He saw the pot shots as doing him a favor since he wouldn’t have to shell out to have the whole thing torn down.

The motel no longer had a name.

I walked into reception, which had the cloying yet familiar smell of incense and generic curry that was omnipresent in an Indian-run motel. It was a smell so old and stale that it seemed to be breathed out by the walls. And there was my father - his face at least - swallowed up in a big rectangle of bulletproof glass. His eyes widened in recognition when I arrived.

He’d diminished. Time had eaten away at him, chewed off any excess to him that still lived in my memory.

If you’ve ever found yourself driving past all reason on a lonely road, if you ever pulled into a motel in the middle-of- night-nowhere, too tired to drive any further, you may have met him.

If you pressed the little bell on a desk, or screwed to a wall, my father was the kind of person you’d get.

—

One leg had a drag to it. A few years earlier, I’d heard, he’d been hit by a speeding car while walking, thrown into a beet field and left for dead., That aside, I was surprised by how - withered- he looked. There was less of him than I remembered, and what was left was bent - not all the way in half - but he had a slightly dented look. I couldn’t tell if that was some sort of residue from the hit-and-run, or if all of his bowing and praying since taking his vows had left him to grow in that direction. Maybe it was just the natural result of being him - a misfit- someone who had to squash himself into smaller and smaller boxes in which to fit a life, any life.

“Hi,” he said, his voice was drawn out, curiously effeminate, only a whisper compared to the boom I remembered when I was a child. “Hi,”he said again.

It wasn’t the voice I had grown up knowing. Someone had taken a razor and scraped the sharp edges from it. I had heard of sadhus castrating themselves as a form of mortification, and I wondered if that might be the case.

“Hi,” I said. “How are you? “ What was I supposed to call him? Dad? I hadn’t prepared myself for this potential conversational minefield, so I swerved it, at the last minute, by calling him nothing. (My father, for his part, didn’t seem to mind or notice).

“I’m good, I’m good.” he said smiling, still in his booth, his hands pressed at his sides, the words padded in cotton wool. His smile remained in the following silence.

Then: “yes, yes, been a long time, yes.” he said, in a careful voice that barely touched the surface of things.

___

He wanted to give me a tour of where he worked, emerging from a dull gray door to allow me into the Reception cubicle.

“This is where I am usually,” he said, his arm gesturing at a little shelf which stretched along the length of the plexiglass window that separated him from the general public.

It was hard to know what to say about a place so devoid of – well – anything. No personal effects, no paper flowers, no “welcome” placard, no artifacts of any particular kind were kept on. No radio, no portable TV. There was no accompanying muzak, even. All those little things to help a person get throughthe hours.

“Do you get a lot of customers?” I asked.

“Yes, yes. “ he said. “Many people live here. All hours of the day and night they come,” he let out an oddly shaped laugh, and rubbed his forehead. “Sometimes they forget their keys.They are drunk. They say, ‘Mr. Charlie, I am locked out.’”

Mr. Charlie. Chandra was his name. Chandra, which means moon – that lodestone of madness, polestar to the tides.

“But it is so good. I do my prayers here when it is not too busy.”

I nodded, taking all of it in. All of him. All of this place. All of his life.

He moved like someone who had only been recently dumped on this planet, who was careful with its surfaces, touching only what he needed to, and then letting go. His hands would not stay on things for long. Just long enough to open a door, but not to linger, then retreating to his lap like two obedient dogs.

The gray reception cubicle made sense. It was less an office, I realized, than an enclosure.

___

After my three-second tour of the little reception area, and seeing that there were no waiting customers or tenants needing his immediate assistance, my father led me back to his room.

Number 231 of the No Name Inn was a chalky, jaunty orange - a circus-peanut -sweet-headachey orange. It was the orange of donut shop counters, and children’s chewable aspirin, and would be the color of madness from that point on. I thought the walls of psychiatric wards might be that shade, but I was wrong. The walls of those places, as I would see in the not too distant future, turned out to be the shade of the reception cubicle.

I’d landed in a place just left of normal – that is, it was a franchise hotel room, but lived in. There was the standardized furniture that had been thrown in along with the building at auction. But things were worn down, shabby now that they bore the signs of an actual life. There was a hotel bed and a nightstand, the kind you’d see in any roadside chain. The television had a skin of dust on it, and the TV stand was lined with about 10 jars with varying amounts of peanuts in them. Planters Peanuts to be exact, in Planters jars that were missing their labels. This is what my father ate. This was all he ate, and he credited them with a kind of miraculous medicinal power over his diabetes.

“Peanuts, they are the best medicine,” he said to me.

“Uh huh. Are you sure? Do you see a doctor about it, too?”

“I need no doctor. I eat peanuts and walk, and see, there is no need for doctors and no need for medication! God watches over me. You see, prayer is all you need.” My father spoke of God the way the Ringmaster at the circus might announce the entrance of the Strong Man or the Giant with a sweeping-curtain flourish.

After about five minutes of being in his presence, I couldn’t tell you what I was doing there. He seemed harmless – a little pathetic maybe.As though the impact of being hit by that car had knocked something loose in his head. He had the stark and tender look of a person who had just entered the visible spectrum of light, and was busy fixing things to their names. I doubted all of my history. I couldn’t understand how I was ever afraid of him. And for a small moment that widens and deepens in my chest, I am afraid for him.

I am also afraid for myself, because I no longer trust my mind

__

Apart from the original, bought-at-auction hotel art (depicting a barn at twilight and a horse-driven cart) there were old, frayed calendars from years the world had already lived through, kept for the photos of the same man whose face graced every month. His shape was lost in a tangerine technicolor kaftan, his head haloed by a planetary afro.

My father’s guru, Sai Baba.

Are you kidding me? I thought.

“He picked me,” my father's voice came from behind me, quietly, and though I could not see his face, I could tell he spoke through the devotee’s smile which was now a permanent fixture in my father’s face. “Very important day,” he said.

“Thousands of people there were,” he said, and his voice had an urgency crammed into a near-whisper, like too much current for a wire.

According to my father, Sai Baba unfolded from his dais, walked among his followers, and found my father standing by a tree. “Personally, he picked me, " my father explained. “ He told my father that he had important work for him to do, building an eye hospital for the poor. To this end, all of my father’s social security checks were sent.

I believed my father was telling me something that didn’t really happen anywhere but in his mind.

I made my face careful. I didn't want him to know what I knew at that moment, without any doubt, about him.

In the tradition of the sadhu, the guru strips you of your name, and gives you a new one, a new life. Sai Baba, the guru whose technicolor image festooned the walls of my father’s room, had personally draped a new name over my father’s shoulders like a garland.

My father never told me what he was called now.

___

My father had an unnerving way of bowing his head and closing his eyes each time he said Sai Baba’s name, in silent acknowledgement of his Holy One, as though my father felt the eyes of the Holy One on him at all times. At times I wondered if there might be a hidden camera planted somewhere in the ceiling of the room.

“The Holy One, Sai Baba, was performing miracles,” he said, bowing his head, his smile in place.

No talk of the past. No talk of his life, or what had happened in the house I grew up in. All talk was about his holy, reborn life. Whatever I had hoped to talk to him about was bulldozed entirely by increasingly frantic recitations – lists, mostly of miracles he’d read about or witnessed: “He can make things appear in his hands! He can cure the blind, he can die and come back to life again!” my father said, and with each miracle he recounted, my father’s voice climbed until I could not tell when or how it would end. Little panicked peaks rose up in my blood. I bit my lip .My upper teeth met my lower teeth.

My father held out his palm, “Look at my palm! Do you see anything?”

I may have jumped slightly, startled by the presence of my father’s open palm, inches from my face, by having a question directed at me.

I shook my head.

“That is right! Absolutely right! It is empty! Well Sai Baba can make candy appear! Lentils! anything! I have seen it. I have seen it with my own eyes!” my father said, his smile broad and beaming, his eyes glittering with brainwash.

And to emphasize, he pointed an index finger at his eyes, now opened wide, as though he were still witnessing these impossible, miraculous things, even now, in this room, with me.

“Right! Right!” my father said as though I had disbelieved him – but I hadn’t actually said anything.

“I saw! I saw! “ he said, shouting now, and I expected him to break.

My initial panic had graduated to actual alarm. I looked to the neighboring wall, expecting there to be some sound of complaint, a “hey! Shut up!” or a slammed fist. But his immediate neighbors, if there were any, didn’t make a sound. I stopped myself from standing up from my seat every now and again, and hoped he hadn’t noticed.

But this was just the lead up to the next thing my father wanted me to know.

“You see,” he said, “After my accident – I was in a body cast for so long –”, he let out a small laugh, “So much time for thinking.”

What had he thought about? I wondered. Did he feel guilty for anything?

Did he ever love me?

“God spoke to me! God told me to give up everything on this earth and to lead a holy life! “ My father was not visited by merely an ambassador of the divine. But “God himself! God himself!” He made his voice so large I stood up. Then I sat down quickly.

I felt little pieces of my mind fly off into space.

The lampshades shuddered. A crack in the wall I hadn’t noticed until then grew loud.

I needed to leave.

But I couldn’t leave.Something in my father’s voice warned me against leaving. As he talked, I think he sometimes forgot how to breathe; if I had so much as dared to move, he might have completely spun out into dust, or lunged at me. His zeal was dizzying, so that I felt carried along, spinning. My father frightened me in a different way than before.

He spoke about God as though every pore of my skin was a tiny doorway that could be wrenched wider to allow God to pour righteousness into me. This was where his violence went in the end – into his violent devotion, whose very assault gave me a strange thought.

My father was afraid of me.

___

I couldn’t say exactly how long I’d been in there – hours? One? Two? Three? But by the time we emerged from Room 231 into the parking lot it was the deep end of evening.

It was surprising to see the parking lot there. It was surprising to see my car under a twitching lamp post light. It was surprising there was a world left after all.

We were quiet. We’d come to the point where I would make my way to my car, and he would walk into the little reception area and wait for whatever else was going to happen to him. Then, without any prelude, without any warning, he gave me the answer I hadn’t realized I’d come here to find.

“You see,” he said, “it was a mistake for me to have had children.”

He was completely sane for that exact moment.

He looked even more hollow in the stuttering light of the street lamp. I knew about his accident. I hadn’t gone to see him. I tried to kill him off in my head. I survived all these years by teaching myself to hate him, so I would not have to feel what I felt right then when I realized that my father could only ever have been the person he became.

He held out his hand and I shook it.

“See you then,” he said.

See you then. They were words without an ending. Or they were words that ended everything. Both and neither. It made perfect sense that that was how we’d say goodbye.