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The Prayer Room
Reviewed by Balwinder Kaur
WE have all watched movies where two people meet and love blossoms; all the more exciting when one is from an exotic far off place. A whirlwind romance follows, with secret rendezvous away from society’s prying eyes. They overcome all obstacles and get married. Then the credits roll and the movie ends. The Prayer Room by Shanthi Sekaran starts off where movies end and we get to see how the promise of happily ever after plays out in real life. The protagonists are essentially strangers who have made a lifetime commitment to each other and we watch them struggle as they try to build a life and a home together. George Armitage, an
Englishman, comes to Madras for his art history dissertation and leaves
with his bride Viji, a fellow student. They enjoy a brief honeymoon in
Nottingham, where Viji meets her in-laws Marla and Stan, before
departing for Sacramento, America. The fast pace continues and within
three years of their meeting, they find themselves parents of triplets.
Viji reveals her reluctance to have children and experiences the
inevitable troubles of a new mother, only threefold. Stan’s
cantankerous presence further compounds their problems. The sudden transplant leaves Viji with no roots and she struggles to find her place, feeling trapped in someone else’s life. The author communicates this authentically being an American-born Indian herself—a child of two worlds. Soon Viji finds herself in the laundry room screaming in a requiem for her sanity. Viji wonders, "If she’d ever managed to make a single good decision. A sign that she’d done at least one thing right, at one juncture of her life." Then, there is the eponymous prayer room filled with pictures and statues of Hindu deities and deceased loved ones. It also seems a repository for ghosts and she often hears them; their declarations range from the mundane to the mysterious. This is her sanctuary, the whole world falls away and Viji is at one with herself, God and all she holds dear. Paradoxically, here she experiences debilitating abdominal pains as though the agony of her life were manifesting physically. George, meanwhile, is going through his own identity crisis, coming to terms with the fact that his life hasn’t turned out the way he wanted and is a far cry from a Woody Allen film. He professes his love of art but his distaste for dissecting it which negatively impacts his career as a professor. This is symptomatic of his general apathy, loving things superficially and not for what they are. George and Viji live in the same house but are not together. Physically occupying the same space but emotionally unavailable. Whether it is life that has taken the fight out of them or they never had it in the first place is hard to tell, but they are at best reactionary. This is two people navigating their life but it’s like a swamp, they’re lost in the fog equipped not even with their own wits and the further they venture the more lost they get. Only Viji’s departure for Madras makes them realise they actually fear losing each other. Shanthi Sekaran shows remarkable dexterity for a debut novel. The book is peppered with quaint observations and pithy little anecdotes. The language is succulent and ripe; rich and deep. We taste the salt of her tears and the bitterness of their anger. The hot crowded streets of Madras are as real as the picturesque countryside of Nottingham and Sacramento’s multicultural blend. The characters seem to occupy a headspace fuelled by emotionality rather than the linear progress of time. The narrative moves back and forth, from the past to the present, weaving into the story glimpses of repressed and forgotten memories that tease us into discovering and piecing together this jigsaw puzzle. The novel would have been a more gripping read had it been shorter. Despite the torrent of entertaining minutiae, we can’t picture Sacramento where the Armitage family live for more than a decade, even though it is the author’s hometown. The Prayer Room is
not just another novel by an Indian-American writer about cultures
clashing. It is a tale that spans not just the breadth of countries and
continents but the depth of the human heart. Despite being a marriage of
people from two different nations, we find that things are more same
than different, as everyone’s heart is the same. And home is where the
heart is.
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