In the opening pages of The Prayer Room, George and Viji Armitage are flying to England after their impulsive wedding in Madras. The stoic, callous Brit and the free-thinking, resilient Indian do not exactly seem to be a match out of Bollywood, and they know it. Sent through separate lines at customs, Viji looks for her husband at the baggage claim, feeling herself "lost in a sea of British people … hair that was brown and lighter brown and lightest brown. They all looked like George. Which one had she married?" And even while comforting his wife after a humiliating exchange with her father-in-law, George thinks, "He didn't love her, of course, no more than he would have if they were still in Madras, meeting in the evenings and parting wordlessly each night."
At the beginning and throughout the book, Shanthi Sekaran (this is her first novel) demonstrates the conflicts possible in a cross-cultural marriage – perhaps too plainly. On the one hand, we have seen a dazed Indian bride before; on the other, Viji's past makes her more than a mere stock character. Still, it is difficult to imagine readers who could align their sympathies more with George than with Viji. Even after the shock of marriage wears off, her obligations to an aging father-in-law and, later, a demanding set of triplets drain her. Portraying Viji as a victim tests the reader's patience and the story's momentum. A robust, if ambling, plot, and Sekaran's clear gift for strings of insightful, potent detail, ultimately serve to explain what exactly is the nature of the crime.
Early in The Prayer Room, the couple moves to California for a teaching job that George has been offered. They begin to settle into the staid suburban environment in which they will soon raise triplets, befriend a divorced Indian woman who lives in the neighbourhood, and care for George's coarse, aging father. This mundane plot becomes engaging only because Sekaran subtly interweaves not just details but also weighty emotion and complex thought, letting the story emerge deftly between the sentences. At one point, Viji wonders when her husband will leave her behind. She looks at the rosebushes and the "so very American" carpets, which calm her: "She'd never had wall-to-wall carpeting before. The curtains were majestic and the furniture sturdy. It spoke of decades. It was beautiful and it was hers. She'd chosen none of it." Longevity in a foreign land, beautiful and privileged exile, the difficulty of being lonely while never being alone – these themes are evident in the objects themselves. Sekaran's ability to turn a phrase – to describe a face as "a package of small glories" – certainly kept this reviewer reading.
These small glories draw the reader past crudely sketched first impressions. George's earliest descriptions of his young wife are insulting, misogynistic and mildly racist: "How sluggish she was, with her languid blink and her swaying foot, how like a cow. He expected her to flick a fly away with her ear." (Never mind the unflattering comparison he then makes to his ex-girlfriend!) But a decade mellows him. When he thinks, "His children were disgusting. He wondered how they could eat around themselves," he is no more likable. But the writing is impartial, the rebuke habitual, ignored and kept to himself. Here, he is harmless.