Your Gods

by Sara Siddiqui Chansarkar

While you’re out on a work trip, I bring in the mail, empty the trash, heat halal kebabs, and eat with my fingers. I’m about to turn off the lights, head upstairs, and sink into your pillow when I feel eyes on me. I turn around and find your gods watching me expectantly from the shrine you’ve established in the kitchen.

I’ve never touched them—the silver Ganesha, the gilded Ram-Sita, the bejeweled Krishna—afraid I would either taint them or betray my faith, my Allah.

Seven years ago, when I came home after marrying you secretly at the registrar’s office, my family’s response was harsh: my sisters glared, Ammi stayed silent, and Abba called me a kaafir, slammed shut the doors in my face.

I knocked again and again, I called, I wrote, I pleaded, then gave up after two months. But you continued calling my sisters until they coaxed Ammi into talking to me over the phone. She kept this a secret from Abba who never budged. I was dead to him, he said.

During one such conversation, Ammi told me Abba was unwell. She didn’t tell me it was cancer. No one informed me about his death. I learned weeks later from a friend. Abba had instructed everyone to not tell me. He didn’t want to see my face, not even through his dead eyes.

Ammi requested that I leave the town and the country to settle somewhere far away from them. My shadow would only ruin the prospects of my sisters getting married into respectable families, she said.

Heartbroken, you and I moved out of India, but the ache traveled within me, burrowed inside my marrow. Despite the love you inundate me with, at times, the pain of being alienated cleaves my heart, and when it becomes unbearable, I curse the college where we met, the honesty in your eyes as you proposed, the moment I said yes.

The wind chimes in the porch tinkle, reining my wandering thoughts back into the kitchen where your gods are waiting, their bodies now shadowed by the cabinets and the blinds.

I don’t trust my judgment anymore. After that one momentous life decision, I’m skeptical of the trivial ones. I take tentative steps towards your gods. In my heart, I know you wouldn’t hesitate to do anything for me. I decide to ask Allah for forgiveness later. At this moment, I can’t leave your deities unattended, plunged in darkness.

I scrub the lamb smell from my fingertips, insert a cottonwool wick into the oil lamp, and light it, cupping the flame until it’s steady. Remembering your routine, I burn an incense stick and place it on a wooden stand at your gods’ feet. The jasmine smoke swirls across your gods’ faces, glowing like little suns.

Sara Siddiqui Chansarkar is an Indian American writer. She is the author of a short fiction collection Morsels of Purple and a prose chapbook Skin Over Milk. She is currently working on her first novel. Her stories have been published in numerous anthologies and journals including the Best Small Fictions 2022 and 2023. She is the winner of the National Flash Fiction Day Micro Contest and the runner-up for the Larry Brown Short Story Prize. Outside of her day job as a technologist, she is a submissions editor for SmokeLong Quarterly. More at saraspunyfingers.com, on Twitter @PunyFingers, and on Instagram @sara_siddiqui24.