The Family Took Shape

by Shashi Bhat

  “I’ll do all of them,” he said, as he ducked his head into the plate and kept eating, nodding and mm-hmming.

  When they went home, they gathered in the prayer room — more like god photos tucked into a pantry in the finished basement, much smaller than the prayer room in their old house — and performed a puja to Saraswati, the goddess of knowledge. They placed a painting of her on a centre shelf. The goddess rested in the cushion of an enormous white lotus flower and held a veena in her lap with her front pair of arms. She wore a white sari; the artist had painted its folds pale pink and trimmed the hem with gold, and Mira thought about what combinations of paint colours had been used to make the gold look so real and about how respectful you must have to be while working on a religious portrait, to avoid wearing shoes or accidentally swearing if you made a mistake. Ravi rang the tiny prayer bell while Mira placed carnation petals, one at a time, at Saraswati’s feet, and Mira’s mother lit the brass lamp and held it up to the goddess as though to better see her face.

  It was customary during a Saraswati puja to keep a few books in front of Goddess Saraswati. Mira’s mother set The Hobbit on the shelf with its green landscaped cover facing up. The worn white folds of its binding lay parallel to the goddess’s feet. This time, it was the only book they kept there.

  RAVI CAME HOME with his graded test, having gotten all but one question wrong. The question he answered correctly was, “What is the name of the place where Smaug lives?” and Ravi wrote “On a mountain.” The teacher had given him full credit, out of misplaced sympathy.

  “The Lonely Mountain,” Mira’s mother said. She said it in a too-calm voice, one that Mira hadn’t heard in a while but remembered and knew its volume and unsteadiness would escalate. Ravi had come down the stairs and handed the test to her in the kitchen while she cooked dinner. The microwave finished its time but nobody opened it. Mira’s mother held the test in her hand and asked, “Did you not understand not one word? Not one word? And didn’t say anything did you?,” suddenly speaking so loudly it hid the sound of the test paper crumpling in her hand as she shook it. “How can you say you want to be in the normal class then? How? You remember how you came home and yelled here, normal class normal class?” Ravi pulled in his shoulders like a gull, as though his shoulders would cover his ears, and then he covered his ears with his hands. He kept entirely still, with the exception of the big toe on his left foot, which he shook and shook as though it contained all the energy of his whole body; it reminded Mira of something Uncle had said — that Buddhists believed the mind was like a fluttering butterfly, always trying to land.

  While her mother yelled, Mira got up from the kitchen table and went out the side dining room door and up the stairs to her brother’s room. He’d left his backpack on the bed, and she went over and opened it, took out his English subject notebook wondering if he’d written down anything at all. Ravi had written things, phrases spread out in blue ink pressed hard into the page, copied verbatim, If I say he is a Burglar, a Burglar he is … the phrases growing into sentences and then entire passages, poems of the dwarves also copied neatly but with enjambment discarded … Chip the glasses and crack the plates! … That’s what Bilbo hates.

  In between the words, Ravi had drawn pictures in different colours of ballpoint pen: A tall figure who must have been Gandalf, thinner than the space between the lines of paper, his beard floating lightly sideways, a hobbit squatting squatly to eat from a whimsically patterned plate, voluptuous goblets and mean-looking elves and a shrivelled-up Gollum wearing a ring so big it took up half a notebook page, with scattered curvy lines blossoming from around him like rays from the sun, presumably to indicate invisibility. She left the book open on the bed, open to Smaug the dragon lounging in red pen, the perspective garbled so parts of his body seemed to belong to different dragons, or seemed to bulge as if eaten creatures lay whole inside.

  That evening Mira saw the shadow of her mother walk through the night-lit hallway to Ravi’s room.

  “I finally got to talk with that teacher of yours,” she said. “She’ll let you take another make-up type test in one week or two weeks, she said.” Mira heard her mother sit in Ravi’s chair and open the book. “So then, now we will go through the important parts only.” She coughed once, and said quietly, “An Unexpected Party.”

  BY JANUARY, RAVI was back in room 314. Two years went by, and Mira couldn’t remember if he’d passed that second test at all. She only remembered taking the copy of the book when Ravi was done with it, putting it under her bed, where it remained, surviving many vacuumings.

  When her mother pointed out in the newspaper a play version of The Hobbit, playing in a small theatre downtown, Mira talked Cynthia into going to see it.

  “Smoke rings! Blow smoke rings, Gandalf!” Cynthia said to a bearded but otherwise ordinary gentleman taking a cigarette break outside the theatre, as she and Mira slipped past him into the theatre doors.

  They bought their tickets and admired the programme, decor- ated in typography that looked like withered tree branches. “God, I’m hungry, why didn’t we eat before this? There has to be an intermission, right?” Cynthia asked, rifling through the booklet. “LOOK, those men are deformed,” she said, pointing.

  “No, they’re hobbits,” said Mira. Some of the actors were walking through the lobby. Their outfits looked pieced together from Goodwill and army surplus finds. One kept removing his fake teeth to talk.

  Mira and Cynthia went inside, and when the play began, they snickered through the scenes of stumpy creatures dancing foolishly with hats and fists in the air. Hobbits had their pants pulled high to make their figures seem shorter; Bilbo’s cheeks had an unnatural rouge. But she hadn’t expected the scenery to be so convincing. The whole theatre kept changing colour, the light would shudder from stone blues to reds so red they made the transparent air appear opaque, rich with colloidal dust, and the next second the room would shine orange as a pill bottle. Mira felt gentle surprise at this reminder that light could be controlled, pointed and aimed thin as a ruler, or filtered in lace patterns over the plaster floor. When men in rags stood on stilts, she let herself believe their height, though she knew she would mock them later (“Why can’t all men be that tall?” Cynthia would ask, and they would fake sighs). Mira thought that forests had never looked so lovely in real life, littered with white paper instead of dry leaves or dirt. The fake version was infinitely more beautiful than any forest she’d seen; she wanted to go home and fill her apartment with rented birches.

  Cynthia turned to her and whispered, “Bo-ring.” Mira saw Cynthia waiting expectantly for her to laugh. She didn’t want to, and the theatre was so silent and so resonant that any laugh would have been inappropriate. And then, embarrassed by how the play had affected her with its beauty and its compel-ling darkness, she laughed so loudly that Cynthia shushed her, then muffled giggles into her playbill. A creature stood centred on the stage, arched his back to expose his costume ribcage. The two girls wisecracked through the rest of it, Middle Earth not being anything that mattered much anymore.

  It wasn’t of any importance, a world from a book they’d all paid a lot of attention to once. There was that old argument about how half the things in school never applied to real life anyway. She thought of all the places she would never need to locate on a map. She would never need to solve a factorial or know anything about Medieval Europe or build an indestructible toothpick bridge, would never be required to read a story amazingly, captivatingly aloud. And Ravi would certainly never need to know why the hobbit had sought the Lonely Mountain, not in his job pushing grocery carts in the same Richmond Hill plaza where Mira went shopping for used cds. Lala Aunty found him the weekend work when he turned sixteen, advising that the experience might look good on his resumé later on. He’d held the job for six months now, and Mira sometimes wondered if he’d ever do anything better than this. At the music store, she hovered by the front window, the cds on the r
ack making a clicking sound as she absently flipped from one to the next and watched her brother move the carts from all over the parking lot. He would do this through the worst days of winter, and in the summer, despite his mother’s sunscreen applications, his skin would turn dark. He pushed the carts, clattering and broken-wheeled to the front of the supermarket, and after the customers had borrowed and discarded them, he pushed them back again.

  Le colosse

  THEY WERE ATTENDING a wedding in Pittsburgh, though they hadn’t been invited, and didn’t even know the bride. “Go as my representatives,” Lala Aunty had said, reminding Mira of her school’s model UN conference, for which, as one of only two brown people in the school, she was assigned to be a delegate for India.

  “Blast,” she’d said to Cynthia. “I wanted to be the Czech Republic.” And the other brown girl overheard her and took offence and gave her a lecture — face serious, hair shaking with the persistent nodding of her head — about having pride for where you came from, and people walking by them in the school hallway heard and so it quickly turned very embarrassing, but embarrassing in a different way from the embarrassment of attending a wedding uninvited. Lala Aunty was unable to attend herself because she was already a guest at two other weddings in town that weekend, but she had assured them the guest list was massive and nobody would care. If nobody would care, why go? It didn’t make sense, except she knew Aunty pitied them and probably thought for them this would be a vacation, an occasion for them to get out of Ontario, for Mira to use her passport somewhere other than the school gymnasium.

  Their motel room smelled like smoke despite the non-smoking designation, and was an hour from the Pittsburgh temple. At five o’clock in the morning, they had two hours to get dressed and drive to the temple. There were no towels in the room, but the office was closed so they would have to go unshowered, which distressed Mira’s mother and gave Mira a sense of illicitness, of blasphemy. She could feel the dirt thick-ening on her like a new skin.

  Ravi lay on the bedspread holding a blue marker, which he used to draw swooping lines on a pad of stationery. The lines swooped until there was no white space left on the paper. Already on the bed next to him was a pile of similar papers, torn from the pad. “I want to go for a walk,” he said. He tossed the marker and stood up in a stretch. He unhooked the door chain and unlocked the deadbolt.

  “Not too long, okay,” his mother said. “You still have to change clothes.”

  He tugged open the heavy door and paused in the doorway before slapping a hand to his large thigh and lumbering out into the parking lot. His outline against the still-dark outside looked a bit like Alfred Hitchcock.

  THESE DAYS, MIRA felt that the primary emotion of her life was embarrassment. Just hours earlier, she’d fallen down the front steps of a rest stop. Her knees banged against the concrete but she stood up quickly anyway, trying to recover prettily but failing; her windbreaker flapped around her like the wings of a pterodactyl. She saw a woman look at her and look away.

  She was always falling (down stairs, on ice) or falling behind (some school adviser had let her sign up for too many classes, “You’re smart, you can handle it,” she’d said, incorrectly) or falling in love (with unattainable men — teachers mostly, or magazine pictures), and worse than all physical and meta-phorical falling was the constant falling feeling she had, as though the organs inside her body were sinking, dropping away — to where?

  Because her last name was Acharya, teachers with seating plans kept her near the front of the room, and one kept asking her to erase the chalkboard. Such an elementary school task would have once given her pride, but now as she stood she couldn’t bear the thought of all those others staring at her back; she had never seen her back but believed it consisted of bony shoulders in a broad frame. The chalk brush went over the board and in her lack of efficiency she left wobbly streaks of dust. She pictured her back muscles moving inelegantly, a naked body shifting under a thin sheet, a crab scuttling just below the sand. Standing only 5’3”, she needed a chair to reach the top corners, and what if she fell off the chair? Or what if, in her anxiety, she erased important information that the teacher didn’t want erased, such as the exam date, or the quadratic formula — she doubted that would make the teacher reciprocate her love.

  Her anxiety carried into piano recitals, held each quarter. Now that she was fourteen, she desperately wanted to quit. At the last one, she’d frozen at the keys. Her mother took a photo at the moment before it came clear there would be no performance; in the picture she looked like someone pretend- ing to play the piano. The problem was that she’d memorized the piece as a whole and if she missed one note she had to start over, but you can only start over so many times before the audience starts yawning — “I think I need the book,” she whispered to her piano teacher, who, standing too far away and blinded by the stage lights, couldn’t tell what Mira was saying and just shook her head, so Mira stood up and bowed as though she’d played the whole thing, and the audience — who were just parents after all — half clapped and half waited as though expecting her to sing.

  There was the time a boy asked her what she weighed and she lied. She said 102 pounds and he said that couldn’t be right because he himself was 121 pounds and she most definitely weighed more than him, and he went and told the nearest group of people — “Mira lies about her weight!” The truth was that while she probably did weigh more than 121 pounds, she hadn’t weighed herself in a while and didn’t know. Once, she vomited, outside, on school property. The flu had come upon her as unpredictably as a mugging, and one minute she was talking to another girl and the next she had her hands up to her mouth as if to hold it back and then there was vomit in her hands, around her mouth, on the ground, and the other girl had stepped back, stepped away. One time in biology she said “orgasm” when she meant to say “organism.”

  YEARS LATER, IN college and afterwards, when Mira moved to a city away from her family, she would remember, in her moments of loneliness, being fourteen, and this ritual of getting dressed in a room with her mother — how it embarrassed her — the quiet intimacy of pinning a sari, of gold against skin and skin against fabric.

  Ravi was still out on his walk, and in the meanwhile, Mira’s mother draped the length of her sari over the red cotton under- skirt that concealed her unshaven legs (she had planned to shave them in the shower that morning), and Mira faced the wall as she put on her bra as fast as possible, cringing at the unfamiliar coolness of air against breasts. When that was over with, she put on her selwar kameez. She’d chosen a dark-coloured one specifically so it couldn’t show sweat, but now she worried it was too tight at the armpits and across her chest. She lived in fear that one day it wouldn’t zip. The whole effect was that she looked square and gilded, and no matter how much she blended, she couldn’t get her makeup to look like her real face.

  “Don’t obsess, Mira,” said her mother without looking, removing her jewellery from its case once piece at a time — the mango-shaped earrings, a stiff diamond necklace about a half inch wide, a bracelet constructed with twists of embossed gold. It was a lot of expensive jewellery for someone who never went anywhere. Her father had bought her mother the diamonds, on a trip to India before Mira’s birth. Now the diamonds spent most of their time at a safe deposit box at the bank.

  Mira heated the straightening iron by the poorly lit sink, and while she waited, she turned her head in different angles at the mirror, hoping to capture herself at her best, and knew that if she ever found that angle, she would hold her breath to let the image blossom and take root, in the same way that upon waking, she sometimes held her head completely still, to keep from forgetting a dream.

  ON THE OTHER side of the room door, there were loud voices. Mira’s mother sprinted to the door barefoot and soundless, the end of her sari trailing after her. Mira followed her and saw Ravi standing in the parking lot. His eyes were tightly closed and he pressed his hands to cov
er his ears, his fingers twitching and branching upwards. He still wore his pyjamas, the pants too short to reach the tops of his sneakers, exposing a few inches of untanned hair-covered ankle.

  A man in an old grey T-shirt stood a foot in front of him. His face leaned into Ravi’s as he yelled, his words echoing and magnified, “What were you trying to seeee? What were you trying to seeee?”

  “Sorry! Sorry!” said Ravi, turning sideways to face away from the man, and emitting a high-pitched hum.

  “What happened?” asked Mira’s mother, pulling Ravi’s elbow. “Stop it,” she said to him.

  “Who are you?” The man looked at her up and down. Mira felt a clutching in her esophagus. What freaks they were, he must be thinking, these Indians in fancy clothing at five in the morning.

  “I’m his mom. What happened?”

  “I caught this guy looking in our window. What’s he doing wandering around my room in the middle of the night? Huh? Tell me, what is he, some pervert? He scared my wife to death! She’s scared to death in there! I should call somebody. I’m going to call somebody.”

  Mira attempted to perceive her brother objectively, that enigmatic blood relation of hers who, though barely sixteen, was massive, bigger than she and her mother combined. Even this angry, yelling man appeared miniaturized next to him. Ravi’s head shook like the head of a sunflower. Since puberty he had bulged outward from all sides, fat and skin spilling out over the edges of his clothing; it had become an issue of contention in their household. His chest, too, had a feminine plumpness, and Lala Aunty had adopted the awful habit of slapping him there, “Good going, Rav,” she would say when he helped clear the table, then the slap and the jiggle. His skin had turned, too, into an uneven surface, bumps and flakes, in another unfair development that touched his body but not his mind. His brain was very much the same as always.