THE MOTHER WORRIED when her Catholic son married a Hindu woman. To protect him, she sent a plastic glow-in-the-dark statue of the Madonna for his bedside table. She included a note: Our Lady, Help of Christians, will always watch over you, Baba. A dutiful son, he set up the Madonna on his nightstand. Every night he would say his prayers, bow to the Madonna, and make the sign of the cross. Then he would kiss his wife good night and fall into a happy sleep.
His wife would often stay awake, remembering how her mother-in-law refused to speak to her at the wedding, how she had walked down the aisle without looking up.
Many nights, she would open the diminutive wooden doors of the wall temple over her nightstand and recite silent mantras for peaceful sleep. She would gradually unwind, till sleep took over or traffic noises abated.
Now, the lit Madonna kept her awake. As she tossed and turned between wakefulness and light sleep, she looked at the statue and heard herself ask, “You were sent to protect him, a Christian. What about me?”
To her astonishment, the statue got brighter.
She stared at it and asked, “Why the downcast eyes?”
A voice said, “It wasn’t easy to be an obedient, unwed teen mother.”
Emboldened, the young wife continued, “I don’t believe in you. Will you still protect me?”
The answer came: “I will. I am a mother.”
At dawn, the new bride wondered if she had dreamed that conversation. The voice of the statue had seemed so real.
The next night, she contemplated the divine mothers in her wall temple: a gold Lakshmi seated on a lotus, her hand in blessing gesture; a silver Saraswati, radiating wisdom with a veena and book in hand; a copper warrior Durga on a lion, holding a trident. She moved the Madonna to the silk cloth among the divine mothers. She lit lamps and placed a silk flower before each image, including one for the miniature Ganesha, remover of obstacles. She chanted, closed the temple doors, and went to bed.
Her husband joined her a while later. “What happened to the Madonna my mother sent?” he asked. Then he noticed that his wife had miraculously fallen asleep early.
A faint light on her wall caught his attention. He walked over and opened the tiny temple doors. Inside stood the Madonna, beaming.
Brunda Moka-Dias is an emerging writer and has published a story in Lost Balloon. She is an educator and lives in New Jersey.
Photo by Oziel Gómez on Unsplash
