Excerpt from The Far Field by Madhuri Vijay, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

My mother, with her lightning tongue and her small collection of idols on a shelf in the kitchen. My mother, with her stubborn refusal to admit the existence of meat or other faiths, who crossed the street when we passed a halal butcher with his row of skinned goats, their flanks pink and shiny as burn scars. My father did not eat meat either, but he was quick to add that it was personal preference; according to him, there was "no logic-based argument against the consumption of meat." I myself had sampled bites of chicken and mutton, even beef, from friends' lunch boxes, and, apart from an initial queasiness, I liked them all. The one time I made the mistake of telling my mother, she held out her arm and said, "Still hungry, little beast?"

She could be vicious, and yet there were times, especially in a crowd, when she was pure energy, drawing the world to herself. She was already tall, but at these times, she became immense. Her mouth would fall open, and her crooked incisor, which looked like a single note held on a piano, acquired an oblique seductiveness. Men approached her, even when I was present. During a function at my father's factory one year, his floor manager tried to flatter her. "That's a beautiful sari," he said, his eyes on her breasts. The floor manager was an energetic stub of a man, who had been with my father since the beginning, had slept on the factory floor so they could save on a watchman. I had attended his son's birthday parties. Now he was looking at my mother's breasts. She was eating a samosa from a silver-foil plate, and there were crumbs on her cheek. Without pausing in her chewing, she said, "The conference room is empty. Shall we go?" The floor manager swallowed hard then glanced at me, as if I, a child, might tell him what to do. He sputtered something about getting her another samosa, and almost tripped on his flight to the buffet table. My mother shot me a quick, arch look before walking away.

It was only when she prayed in front of her idols that she shrank, became a person with ordinary dimensions. Every morning, she tucked flowers around their brass necks and lit the blackened lamp and stood for a minute without bending or moving her lips. My father wisely refrained from making his usual speech about the irrationality of organized religion, and she, in turn, chose not to point out that his beloved college LP collection, carefully dusted and alphabetized, was as good as a shrine. Likewise, my mother never insisted that I prostrate myself or learn the names of her gods, though I sometimes wish she had. She never forbade me from joining either, but it was implicit. And in that lay the fundamental irony of our relationship, and the clearest evidence of how she saw the world: my mother considered me, her only child, a suitable accomplice for the greatest secret of her life, but when she prayed, she wanted to be alone.

From The Far Field. Used with permission of Grove. Copyright © 2019 by Madhuri Vijay.