The Family Took Shape

by Shashi Bhat

  Imagine how perplexed a villain would be to have a child as pious as Prahalad, a boy who worshipped Vishnu with a devo-tion equal to Hiranyakaship’s villainy. When Mira’s mother pointed this out, Mira, too, became perplexed. Where would a boy pick up a hobby like worshipping Vishnu? She was expected to believe that he spent as many hours a day praying, cross-legged in a grove of trees, as she did attending school, or sleeping. Prahalad was not only good, but unbelievably good, the epitome of goodness, and it rattled her that children like him had existed, in some alternate, mythical world. She remembered, too, the stories her mother had told her about her own childhood, of jumping in burning leaves, of childish vandalism, of the time her younger sister had a ring stuck on her finger and she banged it with a stone to try and loosen it, stories of foolishness and adventure and danger, conflicting messages that made her wonder if her mother wanted her to take those same lively risks.

  “Vishnu is everywhere, is in everything,” Prahalad told his father. It must have infuriated the king, Mira imagined, to see his child — solemn-faced, or maybe with a small smile — speak so oppositely to his own beliefs. They stood in the palace foyer, she imagined, where even the ceilings were engraved with indecipherable patterns, and the marble floors gleamed cool as air conditioning in the oppressive Indian heat. Outside the mahogany doors, carved with dancers and plant vines entwined, the sky turned magenta and orange.

  “Where is Vishnu to protect you now?” Hiranyakaship said. He pulled out his sword. He threatened his own son with death. “Is he in here?” he gestured at a pillar and Prahalad quietly observed the white plaster, the loveliness of its imperfections, and knew that it contained God. He nodded, and the king slashed at it until the plaster crumbled, dust fogging the air. “Is he in here?” he pointed with his sword and another pillar and Prahalad nodded again while his father destroyed it, and the ceiling began to fall.

  It was out of the third pillar, which Hiranyakaship sliced mercilessly in half, that Vishnu emerged, not in his usual form, but in the shape of Narasimha, a half-man half-lion incarna-tion (“Nara means man and simha means lion,” Mira’s mother said) known for protecting his devotees. He leapt from the pillar, lion head blended seamlessly into human torso, lion claws extended smoothly out of human hands. Narasimha took the king in his claws and carried him to the threshold of the palace; he pierced his claws deeply into the king’s stomach and tore his flesh while the king screamed, his back arching, arms flung wide. Narasimha, a form neither man nor beast, held the king down on the threshold of the palace, neither inside nor outside, as the sky turned from magenta to black, neither day nor night; he killed Hiranyakaship, under a rain of marble and plaster.

  Mira’s family had driven once to a temple outside Pitts- burgh, unlike any temple she’d ever been to. They sat in wood pews, behind the congregation, rows and rows of worshippers of Narasimha. The people sang, in monotone, “You killed Hiranyakaship, You killed Hiranyakaship …,” the only words of the prayer song Mira could recall — she shuddered when she remembered it, thinking not of the incredible power of the form who had killed the king, who had, after all, saved Prahalad from death, but of Prahalad watching his father murdered by the hand of a god to whom he had prayed devotedly, on whose idol he had placed the petals of lotus flowers, whose name he had chanted before sleeping and upon waking. When Hiranyaka- ship slashed the pillars, had Prahalad prayed for God to kill his father? It was this image that stayed with Mira: Prahalad, dressed in simple cloth, gold around his ankles and wrists — he was a prince, after all — holding a garland of flowers to place on his god, looking upon his own family and seeing something different, something cruel.

  MIRA VOWED TO be good, and being good meant blind faith and being nice to your brother and perhaps even contributing to the household finances. She’d buy a new money jar for God and fill it with money — maybe even more than what was owed — and her mother would enter the God room and see the new jar sitting there, maybe a red jar this time. She would pick it up and feel its weight, and she might not even remember the iou note (she hadn’t before, after all). Perhaps she would only recognize that the jar had changed.

  All morning, after she’d smashed the orchid, Mira thought up ways to be good, ways to make money. On the school bus, Mira stared at the back of the bus driver’s head and consid-ered lemonade stands, bake sales, garage sales — she could sell all their junk, make room before they moved. October was too late in the season for lemonade, and anyhow lemonade smacked of childishness; she would sell apple cider, buy jugs from the supermarket and heat it in a big steel pot with floating cinnamon sticks. Neighbours out pulling rakes through beds of leaves would smell the cinnamon and drop their rakes to come to Mira’s driveway, where they would drink apple cider in mismatched mugs — “The mugs are included in the price,” Mira would say — and hunt through sale items she would place neatly on tables with price labels marking each category. They would walk away with appliances under their arms, bags of toys dangling from their free hands.

  That morning at school, her teacher drew fractions on the board while Mira copied them in her notebook and thought of the little notebook she would use to keep track of her earnings. The class moved on to current events; they read an article about the prime minister from the Toronto Star, and Mira thought of starting her own newspaper, a neighbourhood newspaper. In the margins of her schoolwork, she wrote down what to include: a crossword puzzle with the street names as answers, a list of houses for sale in the area, birthdays of resi-dents. Perhaps she could even sell advertisements — for people selling cars or barbecues or offering swimming lessons in their backyard pools, or for people who wanted to announce their weddings.

  Mira was thinking about how she would have her mother photocopy the newspaper at work, on a different colour of paper each week, when she realized it was noon already and her classmates were standing up and clamouring over something. She stood up herself and noticed the pizza boxes arranged on the front few desks. So it was Pizza Day, the first Pizza Day of the school year; she tried to remember if her mother had filled out the form and sent in the envelope with money. The teacher had left for her own lunch break and the monitor hadn’t yet arrived so she couldn’t ask them to check if her name were on the list. The student in charge of Pizza Day hadn’t started calling out the names yet — his task was to call out each name and one by one the students would go up and receive their pizza on a paper plate, along with a plastic juice carton sealed with a foil lid, and a glazed donut wrapped in a square of cellophane.

  The same boy, Nathaniel Craig, had been in charge of pizza last year, and had acquired an expertise. He called the names out alphabetically, but, to be fair, he’d sometimes start from the other end of the alphabet. He did this today, and Mira, since her last name was Acharya, felt a terrible inward sigh. The waiting was somehow worse than any other waiting. The Zimmermans and Wongs were chomping away, crust-first or crust-avoiding, saving the donut for last or alternating bites of donut with bites of pizza then glugging down the juice. Mira could almost taste the foil of the juice wrapper, sharp against her lip, matching the acidity of the apple, and that donut, not airy and yeasty like ordinary donuts, but dense as gingerbread and slightly damp with frosting and from the condensation in the package. Nathaniel was proud of himself, Mira could see, of the loud Price Is Right announcer’s voice he used to name each student — “Come on down!” he yelled, drum-rolling on the desk, whooping when somebody had ordered two slices instead of one. He was a ham who’d been given responsibility, and was proud, too, of the martyrdom in accepting his own pizza last. By the time Nathaniel called her name, nearly every- one else would have finished their food, and Nathaniel himself would gulp his down, or go to recess with a donut in one hand and pizza in the other, but Mira was a slow eater. She wanted to taste everything, and she didn’t want to eat alone. Imagine if the school monitor came and saw her there, a girl in a dark, empty classroom, savouring a donut.

 
; But worse, she didn’t even know if she should wait. She might not be getting pizza at all. And then he’d reach the end of the list of names and see her waiting there, and tell her that her mother hadn’t paid for her pizza after all. He’d say it regret-fully, but also with disbelief — how could she not even know? She should start eating the lunch she’d brought, probably chicken nuggets again, lukewarm in the thermos, or maybe a bagel, the texture changed five hours after being toasted and spread with cream cheese, but if she ate her bagel/nuggets and then her name was called … she couldn’t eat both. People would see her. Boys in the class would assume she couldn’t eat that much and offer to take the pizza off her hands; she had seen similar things happen to other girls — “You can’t finish all that, can you?” a boy would ask a girl with a larger than average packet of chips and she’d look down at them, at her oily, crumby fingers, and pass the bag over.

  When Nathaniel paused to count the juice cartons, Mira seized her opportunity. “Nathaniel,” she said quietly, coming up next to him, “am I on the list?”

  He looked back at her, brushed the flop of hair from his face. He was a nice-looking boy, Mira thought. “Are you … I … let me check,” he flipped back to the first page of names on his clipboard.

  “Eyy, what’s the hold-up?” said John Ferguson.

  “No cutting, Mira,” said Eugene Chao.

  “Who’s cutting?” asked Allison Miller, from the back of the crowd.

  “I just want to know if —” Mira started saying, but John Ferguson had taken the clipboard from Nathaniel.

  “Hmmm,” said John. “Let’s see, let’s see. Well I see your name here, Mira Acharya,” he said her last name wrong, the ch sounding like a k. “But the question remains: did you order pizza?”

  Mira waited patiently.

  “Payment required,” he said. John had a pudgy face and a thin body. Mira thought there might be a blockage in his esophagus that prevented the food from travelling down. The class watched.

  “Oh, John, just tell her if she’s on it,” said Cynthia Martin, who Mira secretly liked a lot and imagined riding bicycles with, if only she could figure out how to cross the barrier into friendship.

  “I’ll tell her,” said John. “But first, she has to do a dare.” The class had recently taken up games of truth or dare. Mira rarely participated, but had lingered at the periphery of such games and watched as girls and boys were made to slow dance, music-less, in the centre of a ring of onlookers counting down from ten or fifteen. For the Truth portion, girls usually asked people the identities of their crushes — once, Cynthia had asked a boy to name his crush and he’d named her, and they had dated for one week and even kissed publicly on the wooden porch of a portable classroom. Boys who requested truths usually asked each other whether or not they mastur-bated. According to the results of the game, none of Mira’s classmates had ever masturbated, or peed themselves, and all had known all along that Santa Claus was fiction.

  “I dare you …,” said John, thinking and thinking, though probably he already knew what he was going to ask. He was milking the attention. Maybe he would ask her to kiss Nathaniel. She wouldn’t mind it. She might even push his hair from his forehead first. For a second, she was glad she hadn’t yet eaten any pizza. Even slow dancing would be nice, arms on shoulders and waists, and nowhere to look but at each other. The class had a recent obsession with slow dancing because there was a Halloween dance coming up. It occurred during the last period of the Friday before Halloween, in the gymna-sium, where the organizers would turn off the lights to mimic nighttime and all the cool kids would leave the gym in protest when Mariah Carey was played.

  “I dare you,” said John, “to throw a donut at the clock.” Everyone’s head swivelled to look at the classroom clock. It sat high on the wall behind the teacher’s desk, big-numbered and plain, ticking slower than usual.

  “Yeah, but whose donut?” asked Eugene.

  “I volunteer my donut,” said Adam. “I can still eat it after, right? Like, keep the wrapper on.” He wanted to be a part of things, thought Mira.

  “She won’t even be able to hit it,” said Eugene, with disgust.

  “I can hit it,” said Mira. Mira knew she had excellent aim.

  Cynthia started laughing. “Ha!” Cynthia said to John.

  Mira often spent whole afternoons throwing a tennis ball at the side of her house, aiming for particular bricks. They had a basketball hoop over their driveway, drooping a little because her father had installed it before she was born, but still, she’d had practice, she knew she could throw a donut and hit the clock, especially a donut as dense as these. She could throw a donut and hit John’s head, if she wanted to. She smiled to herself. What a pleasant thud the donut would make.

  Donut in hand, Mira positioned herself to face the clock. Cynthia started to chant, “Mira! Mira!” and the class joined in. Mira stretched her arm a couple of times — not too many times, lest anyone think she was posturing — she wound up, aimed, and threw. She knew the donut would reach its target, and she knew, too, that the cheap clock on the wall would not withstand the attack. The packaged donut travelled through the air with hardly a rustle and hit the clock. The clock slid down the wall and clattered on to the floor, batteries skittering and rolling away. Adam ran to the clock and picked it up and held it above his head so everyone could see its cracked face.

  The class was quiet and then it started cheering. John slapped Mira’s back with his hand — she wished it were Adam — and the class exited en masse for recess. Mira realized only later that she’d never discovered at all whether her name was on the list, but she didn’t care. She ate her bagel and didn’t mind it, sitting on the edge of the portable porch, with Cynthia sitting next to her, still laughing — “Nothing this year will be better than that,” said Cynthia.

  WHEN THE TEACHER found the clock later, nobody admitted any- thing. After all, they all shared the guilt. All had witnessed the daring, the throwing, the clock-breaking. The teacher assumed the clock had fallen of its own accord. At the end of the day, taking her coat from her locker, Mira made the mistake of looking the wrong way and catching the eye of Ravi’s old bully — she still didn’t know his name. “What?” he said, and opened his eyes wide at her. She didn’t feel afraid. He had never even told any authorities about what her mother had done. You could get away with anything if you had no witnesses or the right witnesses, she saw that now. You could get away with throwing donuts at clocks, or with cruelty, or with chasing people down with your car. You could break things — urns, plant pots, clocks — and no one would even really miss them, and no god would jump out from the broken pieces, wanting vengeance, baring his godly teeth. If God existed now, he stayed in hiding.

  By the end of the week, they had a new clock on the wall, identical to the old one.

  YOU COULD MOVE to a small house if there was nobody there to stop it from happening. Before they packed the globe, Mira looked at the spot where Richmond Hill must be, a little north of Toronto. It wasn’t even marked, so if she pointed her finger at her old house and new house, she didn’t even have to move her finger. They taped up the last boxes and her mother mopped the floor with an old towel one last time. On the night they moved, her mother went out early to run errands, to pick up the new house keys and drive a carload of their belongings over, things they’d kept unpacked so they could access them quickly. She left Mira in charge of cooking dinner out of the few items they’d kept behind. Mira boiled a pot of pasta for herself and Ravi, and heated up sauce in the microwave, then mixed the two together. Mira was carrying the pasta to where Ravi sat on the kitchen floor, waiting — the movers had already taken the table and chairs. Ravi twitched and smiled, held his knees with his hands and rocked forwards and backwards. He looked at her sideways. “What?” she said, and opened her eyes wide at him, her hands on the sides of the CorningWare to which she’d transferred the pasta. He made a high-pitc
hed sound and she threw the dish of pasta on to the floor at his feet. The sauce splattered on to Ravi’s socks and he pulled his legs up to his chair.

  “Hey,” he said, “hey.”

  “Shut up,” she said. “You clean it.” She was shaking; she was angry and she didn’t know why. Her brother started to pick up the pasta with his hands, scooping it and placing it back in the dish, which was smeared with sauce across its side but which hadn’t broken.

  Mira went downstairs to the empty God room, repainted white now. She screamed at the spiders, though there weren’t any. When she went back upstairs, she found her brother at the table, eating the pasta from a paper plate. He’d attempted to clean the floor but had left semi-circular streaks of sauce. Mira found the towel her mother had used earlier and soaked it in soapy water, then mopped the floor properly before her mother came home.

  Her mother didn’t notice a thing. She washed the steel pot and the CorningWare dish and the spoon or two that remained and dried them and put them into one last small box. Mira and Ravi put on their backpacks, each of which contained a toothbrush, pyjamas, a towel, and clothing for the next day. They helped their mother check the house for anything they had missed, and then got into the car. The car murmured while its headlights illuminated the house’s double doors. It was eight p.m. and the sky was dark blue, and moths alighted on the outside front light fixture before Mira’s mother turned it off and locked the front door. As the light went black, the moths flew away, but Mira could see them, their swiftly moving wings, and to her they looked like pieces shattering, though they moved of their own accord.

  Another Dinner Party

  MIRA’S FATHER HAD always kept a pen and notebook in his pocket, or if not a notebook, then an assortment of papers picked up here and there — folded-up flyers and torn news-paper ads, car wash receipts and to-do lists — and when the family went to dinner parties, if Mira had no company, her father would take pen and paper from his pocket and they’d play a game of dots and squares. “Dots-and-squares, dots-and-squares …” he’d chant rhythmically as he watched Mira draw a grid pattern of dots all over the back of a five-cent bill of Canadian Tire money. She drew the dots in even rows, like holes on a pegboard. The game went: Mira drew a line connecting two dots; her father drew a line connecting a different two dots. All lines were parallel or perpendicular, and formed the sides of potential squares. Each player tried to make a square, while simultaneously preventing the other from making a square. It wasn’t a difficult game, but there was comfort in its patterns — she drew a line and he drew a line and she drew a line and he drew a line and oh-a-square! And so it continued until the paper was filled, a pleasing tessellation.