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appearance he makes up for in gusto. He smiles cheerily, pulls his cracked feet closer toward him like a little child listening to his own story. And although I can’t understand a word of the story, I can understand that the raconteur is jubilant.
    Our temple is a pretty ramshackle affair. It is not even a temple, really; it is an old two-story house with gray wood paneling on the outside. It sits on a heavily trafficked road near downtown Cincinnati, squeezed among so many other old, wood-paneled houses that it is almost lost in the shuffle. The main floor of the house is not even used for the temple; it is where the pundit and his wife live, amid numerous framed pictures of Hindu gods, countless incense holders, and so many religious tomes that, aside from one orange couch bursting fluff at the seams and a TV so old it could have contained the first episode of The Honeymooners within its walls, the furniture is formed solely out of stacks of books—a Ramayana desk, a Mahabharata coffee table.
    But I shouldn’t badmouth my temple today. I am having fun. I am sitting just a few paces away from the pundit, who, just before this service, gifted to me a pair of hand cymbals. I eagerly await the end of his speech, when he cues Mrs. Jindal—a squat woman who always wears the same brown salwaar kameez and a pair of tinted eyeglasses—to play her harmonium, which she keeps at her side like a pet pooch. Cued, she moves the instrument in front of her and tickles the tiny ivories of her half-accordion, mini-organ of an instrument.
    It is to match the verve of the pundit-Jindal duo that, once their musical interlude begins, I start to use those hand cymbals as deftly as I can. The more Mrs. Jindal pumps out breathy chords from the harmonium, the more I jing jing jing , the peals bouncing off the peeling paint of the walls and into the ears of the men and women. The blessed thing about temple-going, immigrant Indian adults is that they appreciate the nuances of the ceremony, and it doesn’t take much for them to acknowledge the virtuosic nature of my playing. Between slides of my hands, I look up to see smiling affirmation from the men, most of whom are dressed in a white dress shirt buttoned over a V-neck undershirt. Or I look to the ladies’ side and see women just as plump as Mrs. Jindal lightly tapping one palm against the other in their laps.
    After the musical interlude, it’s back to the pundit’s droning, back to my confusion. I sit looking at the hand cymbals, enthralled by their gold. I hear a psssst from the women’s side: it’s my mother motioning for me to pay attention. She has perfected the skill of being able to hiss at me across the temple without disturbing anyone else. It is up there with talents like being able to touch her fingers to a hot pan without flinching; being able to tell, by how I say good night, whether or not I’ve brushed my teeth; and being able to remember random American celebrity names like Mary Stuart Masterson and Tony Goldwyn. In response to my multitalented mother’s admonition, I roll my eyes and try to focus on the pundit again. I know that I should be listening to his words, heeding whatever advice I can glean from his garbled Hinglishskrit, but it is not my nature to listen that way. Listening for me concerns very little actual listening and more the attention my eyes can pay. Nothing the pundit says sticks with me more than the trellis made by the cracks on his feet.
    A wave of guilt flows through me as I begin to space out again, and in that moment I feel even more Catholic than an altar boy.
    Soon it is time for aarti , which marks the end of temple. Everyone stands up, eager to sing “ Om Jai Jagdish Hare ”—that is, to stretch their legs. It is time for us all to walk to the altar, take one of the small gold trays that bear candles, and move it in a circle a few times before dropping a dollar bill onto the tray in a dual offering—one to lotus-borne Lakshmi, the goddess