Everyone remembered that their wedding had felt resplendent. Streamers in the air, dancers everywhere, milk and honey flowing like lotus-flower wine… Women bedecked in colorful saris encircled foot to foot men with turbans and white robes enchained arm and arm. The sound of the sitar tickled the summer moisture with precarious delight. Old and young rejoiced to see the betrothed ratify their nuptials before the community from a chuppah raised on high like a sedia gestatoria. The bride and groom blushed in each other’s company as they exchanged kisses and cake. If matrimony is the foundation of society, love is its only affidavit.
Or so Gurpreet and Priya believed upon the day that they became man and wife. They had first met auspiciously enough, working in the IT department at a local multinational in the sprawling suburbs of Dallas, Texas. While Gurpreet was a computer scientist by profession, Priya was an information technician – a match made in Heaven… or else, in Hell. To outsiders, the terms could be used interchangeably, but to Priya and Gurpreet, they might as well be night and day, for her interface acted as the ark to the covenant of his code. The union of their minds tore back the veil on the infrastructure underpinning all communication networks in the known world.
Their courtship had proceeded under traditional Indian guidelines through parental visitations, strained by the fact that Gurpreet’s parents were Goan Catholics, and Priya’s were Keralese Hindus. While Gurpreet looked more Portuguese, Priya looked more Sri Lankan. However, their heritage from the same subcontinent solidified their bond and allayed any hindrances in the budding relationship. Soon after they had been wed, they conceived a daughter, whom they named Maya. Motherhood transmuted Priya’s beauty into something more maternal than maidenly, yet no less refined. She showered affection upon her child, singing her Telugu lullabies and telling her tales of ancient lore to send her sleep and dreams of home before her infant tongue could even speak them into being.
On Sundays, Gurpreet took Maya with him to Holy Qorbana, the Divine Liturgy of the Syro-Malabar Catholic Church, which was marked with all the fanfare of the Carmina Burana transplanted to the steamy forests of the deep southern hemisphere of the globe, where elephants had borne paintings made of flower bouquets upon their leathery grey shoulders and joined trumpets with the blare of their writhing trunks. But these were baptized elephants, not iterated incarnations of Ganesha’s avatar. This began to become a considerable point of contention between the mixed faith couple, as Gurpreet sternly forbade Priya from following her mother into the temple in East Irving. Every night, he would murmur the Konkani Rosary into Maya’s ear as she fell asleep. Thus, the girl was brought up in a polyglot household that competed with the Tower of Babel by way of variety and richness of speech until the age of five years old.
“I hope our girl becomes a star in her next life,” Priya announced to Gurpreet one day, as she pulled a thick slice of garlic naan slathered in butter out of the oven to accompany a platter of lamb vindaloo she had just cooked.
“What do you mean, Priya? We have but one life to live and must live that well,” Gurpreet replied gravely, stroking his inky black beard in the Brahmin fashion of Rabindranath Tagore. Priya proceeded to dish out Gurpreet’s portion in an angry fashion to subtly retaliate for his incursion upon her religion. While they may have shared the same caste for the purpose of the American census, the contradictions in their native cults of worship were bound to produce more than enough conflict to make up for it. Whether such turmoil could be attributed to tribal affiliation on the massive land mass of their birth proved ultimately inconsequential, as the European missionaries who had first evangelized that diverse peninsula had found that the Doubting Apostle Thomas had beaten them there by more than a millennium.
“Maya will have to decide for herself which one she prefers. She’s not old enough now to know what to believe,” Priya said in a bouncy manner as she flounced to her place at the kitchen table. Gurpreet cleared his throat as if to speak but his stare said everything. Then, he bellowed: “If you really think that, then you should have never married me, because you know what I think of Hinduism, and you agreed to raise our daughter in Catholicism.”
“Honey, I only agreed to that, because I loved you, not because I actually believed it!”
In a holy rage, Gurpreet pulled the tablecloth out from under the plate of lamb, sending the smorgasbord clattering to the wooden floorboards. “How dare you contradict the faith of my fathers in my own house – now, clean it up, woman.”
“Look at what you’ve done, you beast – you’ve doubled my work, and now you’ll go hungry tonight,” Priya exclaimed, bursting into hot and heavy tears of anger.
“It’s worth fasting, if it will save your sorry soul and protect Maya from the error of your ways.” He blustered out of the house in a flustered manner, leaving his wife weeping behind him.
That evening, after Gurpreet had returned home from his diurnal cubicle immurement, something strange happened. The ghost of the connubial feud they had earlier haunted the halls of their humble suburban abode filled with the aroma of curry and jasmine. In hushed tones, he tucked Maya into bed, as she whispered the prayers of the Rosary with him from behind her coverlets in the lambent glow of the nightlight. Meanwhile, in the master bedroom, Priya was casting primroses from their front yard garden in front of a miniature statue of the Hindu deity Kali. This image represented the goddess of destruction, the tantric Shakti, the eater of men, dancing upon the supine corpse of her lover, Shiva. She was made of glossy blue porcelain, her breasts bared from behind a tiger’s hide, wearing a necklace of shrunken heads, with four arms, two of which waved a scimitar and a decapitated head on a bronze platter. She had black hair, red eyes, and monkey fangs in a perpetual howl of gleeful derision. This was no angel of life, but rather a devil of death, a daughter of the night, not of the light. And in this hot, dark dusk in Dallas, the thoughts she harbored in her heart were not ones of love and mercy, but anger and vengeance, even upon those nearest and dearest to her. Yet this was supposed to be the goddess of time and the mother of the universe, the guardian of domesticity, and before her, Priya poured the lunar ambrosia of her devotion.
The door slammed behind Gurpreet as he entered their inner sanctum. “What are you doing with that thing? Bringing a curse down upon our house with your pagan worship? There is no mercy in your heart of stone.” Priya threw herself upon the pillow, hiding her moon-like face from the eagle eyes of her husband. As a sort of recompense for the denial of the marital debt, Gurpreet took the idol of Kali in hand and threw it against the stucco wall behind their bedframe, such that it smashed in a thousand pieces across the mattress. “Clean up this mess!” he demanded of Priya. At that very instant, a malign influence transformed her entire physiognomy, and she turned her visage to him with an expression of utter vitriolic hatred and disdain. She shrieked, “Clean it up yourself!” in none other than the shrill voice of Kali, for she had become possessed by that primordial spirit of evil enshrouding the minds of the unconverted scavenging the jungles of the Ganges towards the buxom domes of the Taj Mahal. The smell of sulfur pervaded the room with an icy gust of wind.
A chill shivered down Gurpreet’s spine and the hackles on his back were raised in trepidation. He inquired tremulously, “Priya, dear, what’s wrong? What has come over you? You know how I feel about Kali.”
“I know all too well, and you’ll have to answer for it now!” she growled venomously before unleashing a litany of Bengali epithets.
“Honey, you don’t even speak Bengali – have you been on the Internet too long today?” Gurpreet asked with concern.
“Priya isn’t here right now, she invoked me to come instead.” Gurpreet opened his eyes wide with mouth agape at the horror his lovely wife had transformed into.
“This is all about that damn statue isn’t it, I wish to God you had never bought it and brought it back from Bombay!”
“No, this is all about YOU, you ignoramus, spouting your nonsense, and deforming our daughter’s idea of gender identity – I am going to slay you, eat your soul, and leave you to burn in Hell for all eternity, you bastard!” Priya’s vocal cords had been hijacked by an alien force that stretched them to the max, and they burned with the vibrato of villainy.
“If you don’t stop this nonsense, I’m calling the police on you for disturbing my peace.” Gupreet replied calmly to her lambasting attack.
“Why? You’re the one abusing me, not letting me have freedom of religion.” Priya started turning blue in the face, sprouting arms behind her back like a pair of teradactyl wings, and she rent her sari at the bust. Fangs bloomed like mushrooms where her canines used to be, and she leapt like a leopard to plunge her canines into the throat of her husband. He wheeled around and shut the door in her face, leaving her clawing and scraping at the wood paneling while screaming bloody murder at a volume apt to wake the neighborhood and warrant a visit from the municipal police department.
Gurpreet ran into Maya’s room and locked the door behind him. The rustle at the door roused her from slumber.
“Daddy? What’s wrong?” Maya yawned.
“Nothing, honey. Let’s pray another Rosary, especially for Mommy.”
“Why for Mommy?”
“Because she needs it, dear.”
“Okay, whatever you say,” she sighed in the sing-song voice proper to early childhood.
“Hail Mary, full of grace…”
A bang and a crash sounded on the other end of the hall outside. Priya with superhuman strength had torn the door of the master bedroom off its hinges.
“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” she bellowed in the guttural basso profundo of the big, bad wolf. “I’m gonna blow your house down!”
A shudder passed over Gurpreet’s shoulders as he gazed up at the Indian rendering of the Madonna and Child hovering in maternal solicitude over Maya’s bed. What negative karma had wrought this fate over his family’s head? Gurpreet wondered stormily. Priya was using the full force of her weight to break down the door like a battering ram.
“Pray harder, Maya!”
“I’m trying, Daddy, I’m trying! What’s wrong with Mommy?”
“I don’t know what’s come over her, she’s acting crazy.”
“The Lord is with thee…”
“LET ME IN!” screamed Kali at the gates.
“Blessed are thou amongst women…”
“I’m going to kill you all.”
“And blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.”
“I hate that name.”
“Holy Mary, Mother of God…”
“Ahhhhh!”
“Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen!”
The lock broke and Priya collapsed over the threshold, causing Gurpreet to huddle over his daughter in a protective stance. Who knew what the demon he had been wedded to might do! She heaved like a dying animal at his feet, drooling froth from the mouth onto the carpet, but when she looked up at him with an utterly piteous glance, he knew that she had been restored. Her natural chestnut color had returned, along with her radiant smile.
Husband and wife stumbled into each other’s embrace.
“I’m so sorry, dear, I don’t know what got into me, I had the most horrific nightmare just now that I was Kali, and you were Shiva, and I was ripping you to shreds,” Priya wept into his shoulder.
“It’s alright, you’re awake now,” Gurpreet said as he wiped her clammy brow and kissed her forehead.
“From now on, I would like to join you for the evening Rosary,” Priya said. “And go to Mass with you.” She had become the picture of Mary herself, as she threw her arm around her daughter’s shoulder.
“Yay, Mommy, yay!”
The small, happy family huddled together for another Ave, now that the crisis of the hour had passed, and the devil haunting the family had been exorcised by the power of prayer. He would worry about fixing the door tomorrow when the morning came. For now, they would stay warm and safe in each other’s company under the benevolent mantle of the Mother of God and the true Queen of the Universe who had everlasting dominion over their domicile. And she was forever pleased with the bouquets of roses cast at her feet. The idol had been cast down in its arrogance, and the icon had triumphed in her humility.
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