Although she was in her own lovely house in Stow, Ohio, Naveena felt like an intruder. She was trying to get her little boy dressed for the Deepavali party. But as her mother-in-law, already wearing a rustling silk sari, barged into the boy’s bedroom, Naveena retreated into a shadow.

“What he needs is a good spanking.” Mrs. Sundaran wielded the edge of her palm at Tejas.

Mrs. Sundaran was always threatening Tejas with a spanking. He was just five years old. He was growing lanky, true, but still had the dewy skin and bright eyes of a little boy.

“You are too lenient with him.” Mrs. Sundaran glared at her. “One day he will be bigger than you, Naveena. Then what will you do? How will you control him?” Mrs. Sundaran held out a hand for the outfit with the adorable red vest. “Why don’t you leave and let me try.”

Not knowing what else to do, Naveena gave her the clothing and slunk out while Mrs. Sundaran wheedled, “Tejas, be a good boy for Pati and wear these nice, nice clothes.” A scuffling noise. Tejas screamed, “No! They scratch me!”

Naveena’s whole body felt electrically charged. In their own bedroom, her husband was pulling on his pants. She slapped the door shut. “You ask your mother to leave,” she hissed. “Get her an apartment or something. She can’t live here anymore.”

Anand sauntered into the walk-in closet and emerged threading a tie under his collar. “We’ve talked about this, sweetie. You know Indians are supposed to take care of their parents.”

“She doesn’t need taking care of.” Naveena, already dressed in a silk embroidered salvar kameez, pushed gold bangles over her hands, frowning at herself in the mirror.

“You agreed to this, remember?”

The fact that he was right, that she had agreed to this, made her angrier. “I didn’t realize she’d try to run our lives.”

“She just wants to help.” He buttoned his cuffs.

“She’s always threatening to spank Tejas.”

“When she was growing up, that’s what parents did.”

“And she talks all the time. I can’t even read to Tejas in the evenings because she goes on and on about her day, who she ate lunch with, what she saw on TV.”

“Just ignore her.”

“That’s what you do. That’s why she has to talk to me. I’m too polite not to listen!” She dashed a comb through her hair.

Anand stood behind her in the mirror, a head taller.

She shook her comb at his image. “You like having her here because now you don’t have to put away even one pair of socks.”

“You must admit, Naveena, that having her here makes life easier for you.” He adjusted his tie knot. “No more rushing around after work to make dinner.”

Leaning towards the mirror, Naveena pressed a self-stick kumkum dot to her forehead. “I don’t want to eat Indian food every day.”

“Maybe you should discuss a cooking schedule or something.”

“Why should I have to be the one to talk to her?”

“I’m not going to get between the two of you.” He headed into the bathroom.

Naveena clutched his arm. “She’s your mother!” Her words came out in a strangled shriek.

Anand slipped out of her grasp.

*

They arrived early to the party as Naveena’s mother had requested. Naveena, pierced with guilt for her rancor towards her widowed mother-in-law, vowed not to show any disrespect. As they walked up the driveway to her childhood home in the cool fall night, the air was thick with darkness. Deepavali started on the new moon. Naveena noticed, by the light from the porch, what her mother had drawn on the concrete. “Tejas, do you see these footsteps?”

Tejas squatted to examine the chalk outlines. “Whose feet are they?”

“They’re supposed to be Goddess Lakshmi’s as she enters the house to bring good luck.”

“Why is she barefoot? Her feet will get cold.”

“It’s not so cold in India,” Naveena explained.

“Does she have any shoes?” Tejas looked up at her with concern. “Is this her first time in Ohio?”

Naveena started to feel false, as she often did when trying to teach Tejas about religion—like she was putting over on him a belief in Santa Claus or the tooth fairy. After all, what sane person would worship a woman with four arms who floats on a lotus?

“Lakshmi is a goddess.” Mrs. Sundaran grasped Tejas’s other hand as Anand trailed behind. “She doesn’t feel cold.” No doubt her mother-in-law really did believe in the divinity of Lakshmi.

Inside the house, Tejas shed his coat onto the floor. He was dressed as a black skeleton with glow-in-the-dark bones.

Naveena’s mother rushed to Tejas, arms open. “Are you still wearing your Halloween costume?” she laughed.

“We tried to get him to wear the outfit you brought, Amma.” Naveena hung up her coat, picked up Tejas’s, and in a gesture of peace, reached for Anand’s.

“He is too stubborn.” Mrs. Sundaran mocked a slap at his head.

Naveena frowned and turned away.

Amma enfolded Tejas against her. “He looks cute no matter what he wears.”

In the dining room, Naveena stood Tejas on a chair to watch his two grandmothers touch lit matches to the oiled wicks of the tall brass deepas, newly polished for the holiday. As each wick bloomed into flame, Tejas exclaimed, “Another one! Now there are three! Now five!”

“Tejas, did you know Deepavali is the festival of lights?” Naveena’s father trained the lens of a video camera on his grandson.

Once all the wicks were lit—Tejas counted up to 25—Naveena’s mother invited Mrs. Sundaran to say a prayer. As that woman went on and on, showing off her memory, Naveena bowed her head with the others, although the Sanskrit words meant nothing to her.

Thankfully, the doorbell rang. More guests. Mrs. Sundaran was forced to wrap up her prayer.

*

For several days, Naveena tried to stay out of Mrs. Sundaran’s way. If Mrs. Sundaran was in the family room, Naveena played with Tejas in the living room. Once Tejas was in bed, she fussed over her plants in the dining room, but eventually Mrs. Sundaran found her and buttonholed her with endless chatter. Naveena needed something more to do in the evenings, so she looked busy.

On Thursday evening, when she took Tejas to the library, Naveena brought home several books for herself. She showed them to Anand in their bedroom. They had covers featuring rays of light, or people gazing in wonder at a blue sky full of fluffy clouds, with titles like Life After Life and Touched by the Light.

“Why?” Anand asked.

She climbed into bed next to him. “I’ve always been sort of curious about this type of thing.”

“You’re curious about death?”

“Not death itself. What happens after death.”

She opened the top book on the stack: Near-Death Experiences and the Survival of the Soul. The back cover stated the author got his medical degree from Harvard. A doctor wrote this book. Then was it true? It couldn’t be true—could it?

The book started with the story of a woman who’d been in a car accident.

I was traveling very very fast through a long, narrow tube or tunnel. Suddenly I popped out and I was up near the tops of the trees. I could see my body down below in the crushed car. I floated right through the tree limbs and then I was in a huge cloud kind of thing, but I could still see clearly. It was a beautiful cloud of light. I knew this light was God, and I felt so peaceful.

Anand was underlining something in the tome he was reading. Naveena wanted to tell him about what she’d just read, but maybe he’d think it was silly. She closed the book.

“Going to sleep?” Anand asked.

“Yeah.”

He put his book aside and turned out the light. She shivered under the covers and slid closer to Anand. Why should the thought of God be so frightening?

Friday morning, while Anand and Tejas were downstairs and she was supposed to be taking a shower, she sat on the unmade bed and kept reading. When she heard steps on the staircase, she shoved the book under the covers and rushed into the bathroom.

All day Friday, at work, she kept thinking about the book. That night in bed she read about a teenager who, during surgery, went into cardiac arrest, left his body and, in the company of angelic light-beings, visited his home, where his family was having dinner.

On Saturday morning, Tejas had a birthday party to attend. “Can you take him?” she asked Anand while they were having breakfast.

“Why don’t you come too? After we drop him off, we can get a cup of coffee.”

“I’m not feeling well.” She was shocked at her own lie. As soon as she ushered Anand and Tejas out the door with the wrapped gift, she escaped upstairs, ignoring Mrs. Sundaran’s questions. Finishing the first book, she started another. When she heard Anand and Tejas come in the front door, she clapped the book closed and hurried downstairs.

“How do you feel?” Anand asked.

“Fine,” Naveena said.

“Really?”

Then she remembered she’d told him she wasn’t feeling well. “I guess the rest helped,” she lied. Her father always said that one lie begets another.

That night, Naveena huddled under her blanket listening to the house creaking. Had she known all this at one time—about the beings of light? Before she was born, she must have known. Between lives, she must have known.

On Sunday morning, as she showered and dressed, her head felt stuffed with tangled thoughts, like a dryer full of unsorted clothes. She needed a cup of coffee. At the bottom of the stairs, she noticed Mrs. Sundaran in the living room, in front of her altar, head bowed and eyes closed. Naveena walked past, into the kitchen. She was in the process of opening the cupboard, taking out coffee beans, when she stopped.

What would God say to her, when she died, about the way she’d been treating her mother-in-law? She refused to call her “Amma” as Mrs. Sundaran had requested. She only pretended to listen when Mrs. Sundaran talked. She maligned the woman in her mind.

Naveena left the coffee things on the counter, retraced her steps, and crept into the living room, into the pool of light from the window, and lowered herself to the carpeting beside her mother-in-law.

Mrs. Sundaran opened her eyes. She smiled. “You would like to pray with me?”

Naveena tried to smile back. “I have a question.”

Mrs. Sundaran nodded.

“Um.” Naveena swallowed. “When you pray, how—I mean, what do you imagine God looks like?”

“Just like this.” She pointed to her altar, displaying statues and pictures of heroic Rama with bow and arrow; monkey god Hanuman; Saraswati holding her veena; blue Krishna with a peacock feather in his hair; elephant-headed Ganesha; and Lakshmi, of course.

Naveena cleared her throat. “I’ve been reading these books. People died and . . . they saw God and then they came back to life.” Her voice had descended to a whisper. She tried to project her words. “And they say God is a beautiful, resplendent light.” This was a quote from one of the books.

“Different people have different ideas.” Mrs. Sundaran passed her hands over two tiny lit deepas on a silver tray, and cupped her palms to her eyes. Then she lifted the deepas and held them out. After a moment’s hesitation, Naveena waved her hands over the flames and pressed her fingertips to her own eyes, going through the ritual her parents had taught her.

Mrs. Sundaran set down the tray and kneeled, bowing her head to the carpet. Naveena watched. Then the older woman stood and walked out of the room. The pooja was over. Naveena heard her mother-in-law climb the stairs. After a moment Naveena stood up too and headed into the kitchen. She wondered if God would give her credit for trying.

*

“Something happened,” Naveena said. Anand sat next to her on their bed. She’d been upset since coming home with Tejas from the grocery store. Right after dinner, she’d retreated under the covers. She had wanted to cry, but hadn’t been able to.

“Tell me what happened.” He caressed her hand.

“It was so sad.” Still lying down, she curled against his knee. “In the grocery store parking lot, we saw a mother and her son, maybe three years old. He was sitting in the seat of the shopping cart. She had a half-eaten apple in her hand. She said, ‘You want it?’ He said no. She threw it away between some cars and said, ‘Now you don’t have it.’ He started to wail. She ignored him. He reached out to her, and she slapped his hands away. He started pulling at his fingers, bending them backwards. It was like he was trying to hurt himself! I feel so sad that the mother couldn’t love her own child!” Now the tears came, a hot flood burning down her face.

“Why are you so sure the mother couldn’t love him?”

“She slapped him for no reason! And he was trying to hurt himself by pulling his fingers back. He knew his mother didn’t love him.”

“I got smacked plenty of times,” Anand said. “And some kids are very flexible. It might have just been something he liked to do. A habit.”

Naveena rubbed at her eyes. “She was a young mother, too young, and she . . . you know, some kids are abused.”

“That’s true.”

“How can people abuse little children? It’s so horrible!” She started sobbing again.

He stretched out and draped his arms over her. “You’re too sensitive.”

She pressed against him. “I want to help that mother love her child.”

“We can’t help everyone in the world.” His gentle fingers stroked her hair.

She pushed away and sat up. “Yes. We can.”

“How?”

“We can pray.”

He sat up and crossed his legs. “I thought you didn’t believe in God.”

She took his hand. “God does exist, Anand. You know those books I was reading? People have actually seen God. It’s scientific fact. People have died, and have seen God, and have come back to tell us about it.”

“Hm.” Anand shrugged.

“You should read these books.”

He raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips.

“God will take care of everything. And one of those books talked about guardian angels. I can pray to God and ask those people’s guardian angels to protect them.”

“OK,” he said slowly.

Naveena closed her eyes for several moments, and then opened them to see Anand gazing at her, two worry lines on his forehead.

“I prayed for them,” she said.

“Do you feel better?”

She nodded. “A little.”

“Well, as long as praying makes you feel better . . .”

“Mommy? Mommy!” Tejas’s voice on the stairs.

“Up here, Tejas!” Naveena shouted. She wiped the edge of the sheet over her face.

Tejas bounded into the bedroom and threw himself onto the bed. “What’re you doing, Mommy?”

“Talking to Daddy.” Naveena patted one of his legs.

Tejas rolled onto his back and flicked his tongue in and out like a lizard. “What’re you talking about?”

“Oh, just something.” Then she realized he might be interested in what she’d been reading. “Listen, Tejas. Remember when you asked me what God looks like?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ve been reading some books in which people died, and they saw God.”

“Naveena.” Anand stood up. “Is this appropriate?”

“What could be more appropriate than talking about God?” Now that she finally had some answers for Tejas’s questions, she wasn’t going to let Anand discourage her.

Anand disappeared out the door. Tejas rolled off the bed, prepared to follow.

“Tejas, stay here.” Naveena sat on the edge of the bed. “Listen, I’ll tell you what God looks like.”

Tejas, still on the floor, curled himself into a ball

“God looks like very bright light,” she told him.

“Oh,” he said.

“A light brighter than anything you ever saw, a whole bunch of light, but it doesn’t hurt your eyes.”

“Oh.” He scooted to face her. “How did those people die?”

“Different ways,” she said. “They had an accident or something. But the point is, they saw God, and they came back to life.”

He was staring up at her with round eyes.

“Tejas. This is scary for you, isn’t it?”

He shook his head, but his eyes were still wide.

She slid onto the floor and gathered him in her arms. “Don’t be scared,” she murmured. “I won’t talk about it anymore.” She cradled him in her lap and kissed his cheek. He had so recently been with God, but he’d forgotten.

*

“Come here, Tejas.” It was Mrs. Sundaran’s loud voice, coming from somewhere in the house. Naveena and Tejas had just entered the house through the back door into the kitchen. Naveena wondered where her mother-in-law was. There were covered pots on the stove, so the cooking must be finished.

Mrs. Sundaran appeared as they were taking off their coats. “Tejas, you must help me with my pooja today.”

“NO!” Tejas shouted. “I want to watch TV.”

Mrs. Sundaran grasped Tejas by the arm. “You can watch your TV later.” She tried to drag him with her.

“NO!” He shook her off and raced into the family room.

“You must make him come with me,” Mrs. Sundaran said to Naveena.

“Why?” Naveena was bewildered. Was today a particular religious holiday that required children to participate?

“He must learn about God.”

Naveena wanted to escape upstairs, but her mother-in-law stood in her path.

“Now is the time to teach him,” Mrs. Sundaran said. “If you would allow me to bring Tejas home from school at least one or two days in the week, I will teach him many prayers.”

Naveena remembered sitting next to her father at their altar and repeating tongue-twisting Sanskrit words. She’d done it because it made her father happy. It had nothing to do with God.

“We must insist,” Mrs. Sundaran said. “He must learn about God. You have grown up in this country and you are confused about religion. Since you are not teaching him about God, I will.”

At the accusation that she was “confused,” the hairs rose at the back of Naveena’s neck. She shuffled through the mail on the kitchen counter to avoid her mother-in-law’s eyes. “How do you know I’m not teaching him about God?”

“I don’t see you pray. I don’t see you in front of God.”

She put down the mail. “That altar is not God. God is everywhere. You can pray to God anytime and anywhere.” She wanted to shout these words, but forced herself to keep her voice low.

“God may be everywhere, but do we pray everywhere? We just go about our life without a thought for God. When we sit at the altar, we remember.”

Mrs. Sundaran strode into the family room. Naveena watched as she grabbed Tejas by the arm and tried to lift him bodily from the sofa.

The boy, half dangling, screeched and tried to wrench his arm from her grasp.

“Come with Pati!” Mrs. Sundaran reached for his other arm. “Tejas, be still!”

Naveena ought to do something. She ought to rescue her son. She ought to help her mother-in-law calm him down. She grasped the edge of the counter for strength.

Limbs flailing, Tejas screamed. His feet churned, and he kicked his heel into his grandmother’s knee.

Mrs. Sundaran raised her palm and, with the flat of her hand, smacked Tejas across the face.

Naveena ran, lunging at her mother-in-law, grasping the air around her as though trying to strangle her shadow. “You go away!” she screamed. “You leave this house! We don’t want you here!”

Tejas became still, eyes round, looking from his mother to his grandmother.

Mrs. Sundaran let go of Tejas and stepped back. She wiped her face with a tissue.

“Don’t you ever hit Tejas again.” Naveena’s voice was a bold shout, but her whole body trembled.

Mrs. Sundaran bowed her head and left the room. Naveena stalked after her, watching as her mother-in-law’s legs, clad in their usual knit pants, climbed the stairs, taking one firm step after another.

Tejas appeared at Naveena’s side and clung to her leg, looking up at her with big eyes. She put a hand on his head.

Halfway up, Mrs. Sundaran stopped, pressing her fingertips to her temples. “I did not live with my grandparents. I never knew them.” Mrs. Sundaran’s low voice barely reached Naveena. “I didn’t have a grandmother to teach me anything. And my mother was too ill. Whatever I know, I had to teach myself.” She started climbing again. At the top of the stairs, she disappeared around the corner, clicking her bedroom door closed.

Tejas still clutched Naveena. She collapsed to the floor of the entry hallway and drew the boy onto her lap. In the quiet house, Naveena rocked Tejas, his bony little fingers curled tight around her forearms. “Everything’s OK,” she murmured. “Everything’s all right.”

“Pati didn’t have a grandmother,” Tejas whispered.

Naveena had never before heard Mrs. Sundaran say anything about her own childhood.

*

When Anand came home, Naveena set the table. But Mrs. Sundaran did not come down for dinner. As Anand washed his hands at the kitchen sink, Naveena quietly told him what had happened. “Go check on your mother,” she murmured.

“She’ll come down when she’s ready.” He dried his hands and sat at the table.

After dinner, while Anand finished loading the dishwasher, Naveena climbed the stairs and knocked. No answer. She pushed open the door. The room was dark, the curtains closed. Her mother-in-law was asleep. Naveena approached. Mrs. Sundaran looked unguarded, her hair coming loose from her braid, her face relaxed. Her breath was even and slow.

Naveena put a hand against Mrs. Sundaran’s forehead. It was hot, but then Naveena’s hands were always cool. She leaned over and pressed her cheek against the older woman’s cheek. This was what she did with Tejas when she suspected he was ill.

She’d never before been that close to Mrs. Sundaran.

Downstairs, Naveena said, “Your mother has a fever. What should we do?”

Anand, stretched on the recliner, was showing Tejas a video on his phone. “She knows how to take care of herself.” They both giggled at the video.

Naveena filled a quart bottle with water, climbed upstairs, and placed it on the table next to Mrs. Sundaran. As Naveena descended, she turned to the living room doorway. Mrs. Sundaran did her pooja here every morning and afternoon.

Naveena entered. The silver tray in front of the idols was clean and ready for pooja. The tiny deepas were filled with ghee and fresh cotton wicks. In the box next to the altar, she found matches, struck one, and touched it to the wicks. Then she pulled out a stick of incense, lit it, and waved away the flame.

She began chanting, softly, the first prayer she’d ever learned: Sarvé Bhavanthu Sukhinaha. Sarvé Santu Niraamayaaha.

May all be happy. May all be healthy. Her father had taught this to her when she was a child.

A rope of smoke poured up from the stick and perfumed haze fell around her.