Excerpt from American Canyon

Past the parking lot lay land separating us from the families of Silicon Valley. When the shilpies arrived to this hollow space on the developer’s map, the neighbors had no idea what they were cutting out of stone. As it rose, piece by piece, they saw a tall white tower unlike any church. It was a piece of India, exact in all dimensions, that was brought over in each of the shilpies minds. They watched from their kitchen and made calls to the Livermore city offices. They wished for the emptiness to return and grow its weeds.

Attached to the lot was the temporary temple. A small modest three or four bedroom model, ranch style, in a shade of greenish brown. At night, the shilpies slept on the beige carpet. They dreamt of home.

My mother had brought a gold chain with a dangling bar that was hollow inside, called a tailtu, with her. Her hair was growing thin. When she called I said yes, even though I didn’t think of myself as very religious. How long will it take? I asked. If she had answered, she would have said, all day.

Inside, the floor was covered with carpet. I had expected stone. The courtyard around the sanctums was enclosed as a concession to the neighbors. We chanted a shloka and then offered ghee to the fire 1001 times. It burned in the square pit covered with tinfoil, giving us smoke and heat in return. Its flickering was reflected in the pujari’s glasses, which were as thick as an old bottle that had washed up. The tide’s reiterations, like our chants, receded away from land and towards its own dark heart, a trail of shells and eddies in its wake.

By the end of the homam sweat had collected on our skins and was dripping. The pujari grabbed some ashes from the dying fire and wrote my name in Sanskrit on a piece of paper. He sealed them inside.

When she put it around my neck, she told me to never take it off. She said it would ward off Shani, or Saturn.

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