My Mother's Prayers Follow Me to Cities
I stopped believing years ago; her faith still covers my rent somehow.
My mother has never been to Mumbai, but her prayers have a better attendance record in this city than I do. I stopped believing at nineteen, quietly, the way you stop wearing a sweater that no longer fits, and somehow this changed nothing about the fact that every good thing that happens to me arrives four days after she asks God for it by name.
I keep a ledger. I want to be upfront about that, because it is the most embarrassing thing about me. In the notes app of a man who owns three books on rational thinking, there is a file called Coincidences, and it is eleven years long.
Entry one: 2015. I am broke in Bangalore, eating one proper meal a day and calling it intermittent fasting so it sounds like a choice. I do not tell her. On Thursday she calls and says, I prayed for your provision at dawn... something felt heavy. On Monday a company I interviewed with in March, and which had rejected me in March, emails to say the selected candidate backed out.
Entry seven: 2018. Pune. My landlord, a retired colonel who once itemized a bill for a scratch I did not make, knocks on my door in the week my freelance client vanishes owing me two months of invoices. I assume eviction.
He says his daughter is moving abroad, he is lonely, and would I accept reduced rent in exchange for eating dinner with him on Sundays. I say yes before he finishes the sentence. My mother, when I finally mention the client disappearing, says, I know, I have been praying since the fourteenth. The client vanished on the fifteenth.
I have explanations for all of it. Survivorship bias. Frequency illusion. A mother who calls often enough that some calls are bound to land near good news, the way a stopped clock is right twice a day. I recite these explanations to myself like verses, which is an irony I did not notice for years.
Here is what her praying actually looks like, so you know what we are dealing with. She gets up before the birds do. Winter or June, it does not matter. She washes, she covers her head with a dupatta so old it is more idea than fabric, and she sits on the same six square feet of floor she has occupied since before I existed. There is a candle in that corner in winter because the power cuts out and she refuses to pray to a torch beam. I grew up falling asleep to the sound of her whispering and woke to the smell of the match.
When I left home at twenty-two she did not cry at the station. She put her hand on my head, said something under her breath with her eyes closed, and then said, loudly, do not eat street food in the rains. The prayer was for God. The street food was for me. Division of labor.
For years I found it suffocating from a distance. Every city I moved to, the phone calls followed. I prayed for your interview. I prayed for your cough. I prayed for that friend of yours, the sad one, what is his name, Aakash. She prayed for Aakash for two years. Aakash does not know this... Aakash is doing inexplicably well.
The turn came last October, and it was not a miracle.
It was a notebook.
I went home unannounced because a wedding got cancelled and the ticket was nonrefundable. The house smelled like it always smells, cardamom and phenyl and the specific dust of that street. She was at the market. And on the shelf by her prayer corner, where the religious books live, there was a fat school notebook with a cracked spine, the kind that costs forty rupees, and I opened it because I am my mother's son and privacy is a rumor in our family.
It was a ledger.
Column after column, in her small slanted Urdu-English hybrid. Names. Dates. Needs. Neighbors I had forgotten. My father's blood pressure, tracked in prayers the way other people track it in readings. A girl called Shabnam, prayed for daily through what the margins suggested was a bad marriage and then a divorce and then, triumphantly underlined, a teaching job in Jaipur. Aakash was in there.
My name was on every page.
Every single page, going back years, the entries changing as my life changed, his exams, his job, his loneliness, his rent, his cough, his heart.
And then, on a page from three winters ago, an entry that stopped my breathing for a second. It said, in her hand... for my son, who does not believe. Let him not believe, but keep him anyway.
Let him not believe, but keep him anyway.
She was not praying for my return. I had assumed, with the arrogance of the lapsed, that every whisper was a lasso trying to pull me back to the fold.
It was not.
She had made peace with my unbelief years before I had made peace with it myself, and had simply rerouted the request. She was not asking God to fix me. She was asking Him to cover me anyway, the way you keep paying the insurance on a house whose owner insists it will never rain.
My mother has been on her knees for thirty years so that I could stand anywhere I liked.
I put the notebook back exactly as I found it, off by maybe two millimeters, and she never mentioned it, which means she noticed and let it go, which is its own kind of prayer.
I do not know what I believe now... That is the honest answer, and I have stopped auditioning for a cleaner one. What I know is that when I got back to Mumbai I wrote about her for the first time, really wrote, a poem about family and the debts inside it that no one intends to collect. It ended with the candle. I posted it on a community wall for poets, half hoping nobody would read it, and a stranger commented, my father keeps a list like this, I found it after he died. I sat with that comment for a long time. There are apparently ledgers like my mother's all over the world, quiet account books of love, kept by people who will never show them to us and never stop writing in them.
Then, in February, the phone call went the other direction. Gallbladder surgery, routine, but she is sixty-eight and routine is a word doctors use to calm you, not a promise. The surgery was scheduled for 6 a.m.
I did not pray.
I want to be truthful. The words would not have meant from me what they mean from her, and she would be the first to say God can smell a courtesy call.
But at 4:30 that morning, in my dark flat in a city she has never seen, I got up. I washed my face. I found the emergency candle in the kitchen drawer and lit it, because the overhead light felt wrong for the occasion, and I sat on the floor beside it and kept her hours. I held her name in my head the way you hold water in cupped hands, and I did not let it spill until the phone rang at nine and my father said, all fine... she is asking if you have eaten.
I looked at the candle, nearly gone, my one entry in a ledger I do not officially keep.
Keep her anyway, I thought, to whoever handles these things.
She believes enough for both of us. Bill me.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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