The Family Took Shape

by Shashi Bhat

  They returned to their tables and suffered through the thirty-minute slideshow. Bollywood tunes played on repeat as the flirtatious aunties cooed at their bald-headed husbands. Endless photos of the bride and groom were magnified onto the wobbling screen. First they were naked babies. Here they were as mischievous toddlers, subsequently precocious children. And of course, hideous braces-and-glasses-wearing-early-nineties teenagers. Finally, with each other, suddenly outfitted with shapely hair and contact lenses and perfect teeth, as if the finding of love had been a process of exfoliation, a revelation of their secret physical appeal.

  Caterers served the dinner close to eleven, arranging gas burners under stainless steel trays of curries, and leaving bowls of warm naan on each table. The beautiful girl sorted her food, scrunching her face as she pressed her coconut burfi onto her brother’s plate, saying “Lakshmi Aunty’s are soooo much better,” a family reference, thrown so effortlessly into conver-sation. They spoke in code, this brother-sister pair. If Mira married the handsome boy, their family would absorb her. Sometimes, when a boy at school spoke to her, instead of gosh, he’s cute or I wonder if he’s single or whatever it was she should be thinking, she thought he would make a good brother, and then felt ridiculous. She forced herself never to be curious about her friends’ brothers, because she might start asking questions that were none of her business, and then she’d wish she’d just stayed quiet. But she wanted to know, did they use the same slang? Did they regard their parents in the same way? Did they talk about sex? If one of them walked in on their parents having sex, would he or she tell the other? Did they lie to each other? When they played Monopoly, did they argue over who got to be banker? Did they converse over breakfast or eat their cereal without comment? If some-thing funny happened in a silent room, did they share knowing glances? She would never know, and so her alternate universe would remain undefined, the universe where her brother was not an almost-brother, an unfilled-silhouette, a container that didn’t quite hold what it was supposed to, a cake mix in which someone had forgotten the eggs so that though it waited in the heated oven for the designated length of time, it never rose properly. She must never say this out loud to anybody.

  THEY SIPPED THEIR non-alcoholic champagne as the toasts ended and the dancing started. First, the bride danced with her father. In her heels, she stood an inch taller than him, and her hair made her taller, coiled and shining in a high sphere. The bride’s father appeared solemn in his dark suit, and he held his daughter’s elbow with a firm grip, but at the chorus, he smiled a little and gave his hips an ironic swing. Then husband and wife danced with their heads close together, speaking quietly in words that Mira imagined were inside jokes, inside joke after inside joke, moments of eye contact, words only they understood, a language as textured as Braille.

  Soon the slow song would switch to another slow song. The bride and groom would loosen their arms to wave in the other couples, and a few aunties and uncles would rise in pairs from their seats, holding their spouses and swaying sweetly and awkwardly with the quiet melody. Mira hoped the hand-some boy would ask her to dance, or maybe, because she’d already decided to be brave, she would ask him. Before any of this, Mira saw Ravi move from the dessert table to the centre of the room. She scanned the hall for her mother, and couldn’t spot her. She must have gone to the bathroom.

  Ravi loved to dance. He found the dance floor and shifted his weight from foot to foot over the maple parquet.

  “Yeah!” he said, grinning and clapping his hands with gusto. The room was silent as a field, except for the recorded music. Only bride and groom were on the dance floor, and it was apparent they didn’t know what to do. They moved to a corner, crowded out by Ravi. They were like honeymooners touring a safari, and one of the animals had gotten out of hand. Some guests chuckled hesitantly but the bride frowned. Ravi, encouraged by the laughter, expanded his movements. He twisted his hips so his shirt came untucked, lifted his arms and swung them to his own beat, raised his arms high above his head, his shirt lifting and exposing the thick hairs that covered his pale, folded belly. His huge teeth glistened between his wide, open lips. His movements were large; he bent and he shook with a terrible energy, and when the song ended, he kept going.

  “Ha, look at that guy!” said the handsome boy, sitting next to her all this time, seeing what she was seeing, “At least he’s having a good time.” He and his sister laughed together, laughed and laughed, though not unkindly.

  “He’s a giant,” said the beautiful girl, with poetry in her tone. “The Wedding Giant.”

  “Who is that guy?” the boy asked, turning to Mira, perhaps by some instinct.

  “YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE danced, Ravi. It wasn’t your wedding,” their mother would say to Ravi on the car ride back to the motel.

  And years later, at her own wedding, when Mira would put her hands on Ravi’s large arms in lieu of the father-daughter dance, she would remember the handsome boy’s question and flinch in regret, at how she had hesitated, at how her answer had been only the cowardly one, when she’d pretended that she wasn’t sure.

  Around the Corner from Fantasia

  MIRA AND NATHANIEL were discussing “the war effort,” because Mira was learning about World War II in her grade eleven history class. She had phoned him to tell him how much she loved the nicknames, that “Allies” sounded just like the one you should root for, and then there were “The Big Three,” “the trusteeship of the powerful,” “the Four Policemen,” like a football league or a comic book — “Not to trivialize,” she said, because she didn’t want him to think her flippant about war, “The names just get me riled up, you know? They’re good names.”

  “What would you do if I had to go to war?” Nathaniel asked.

  They loved hypotheticals. What if they were pioneers, what if they were farmers in Maine in the 1850s, what if they lived in India in times of British colonialism, what if they were in a Dostoevsky novel, what if they lived in 1939 and he had to go to war?

  “I’d miss you,” she said, winding the phone cord romanti-cally. “I would send you epistles and never know if they had reached you. I would support the war effort by knitting socks for soldiers and rationing sugar and fighting for the vote and working at a munitions factory and by being generally frugal. Perhaps at the start of the war, I would make a declaration, swearing not to buy a new hat until the war was over, not knowing the war was to last another six years … a girl did that in a book I read once.”

  Because she was on the telephone and he couldn’t see her, she could eat while they talked. On a small plate, she had poured a bunch of chocolate-covered Digestive biscuits and was eating them continuously through the conversation, nibbling through the thin layer of chocolate and the crumbling, yielding cookie. In future months, every time she ate one of these, she would have a Proustian moment of involuntary memory, associating each bite with the low and ironic tones of his voice, and even-tually she would stop eating the biscuits entirely. Having to ration sugar would be such a discouragement to a nation, she thought now. She wasn’t sure what she would really do if he went to war, other than miss these conversations.

  IRA’S MOTHER HAD recently begun hiding food around the house. Mira returned from school hungry one day, having only half eaten her dismal packed lunch. Checking the fridge and cupboards, she found only ingredients — cornstarch, cake mix, sour cream — which was unusual for their house, so full of people who liked to eat. The kitchen that day looked like a Home Hardware display, smelling of plaster instead of food.

  Her mother had hidden the food because Ravi had become officially fat, but the subterfuge made no difference because Ravi was more determined to find the food than he was to lose weight. He searched for food like a trained pig snouting out truffles, Mira thought, but only meant it kindly — when she thought of pigs, she thought of clean infant pigs, and when she thought of truffles, she thought of chocolate truf-fles. Had she seen a real pig afte
r a real truffle, it would have been incongruous with the picture in her head. And she herself had become a bit of a truffle pig, following her brother’s lead until it became their daily habit to scour the house for its edible contents. In between frying pans inside the unused oven, Ravi found boxes of soft Indian sweets cut into harle-quin shapes, topped in silver leaf. The siblings disregarded this elegance to take giant careless bites. In the recesses of the hallway closet, behind a rainbow of refolded gift wrap and squashed gift bags, they discovered the metallic packaging of potato chips, blending in perfectly. Their mother had tucked chocolate kisses inside the rarely touched coffee mugs on the highest shelves. They peeled them handfuls at a time, crum-pling together the wrappers to form a fist-sized foil ball that rolled glittering across the glass dining table.

  They were bound in their compulsion. Neither could remember the actual feeling of hunger (“I’m hungry,” Ravi would say when his mother got home, though he had already eaten everything; it only meant he wanted more). They synchronized their chewing. Mira thought of eating as a hobby they had in common.

  “Do you want half?” Ravi asked her in the midst of one of their searches, breaking apart a butter tart and shyly handing it to her. She took it from him and stuffed it in her mouth. Ravi copied her and giggled, crumbs flying from his baby face. It occurred to her that if he choked, she could save him, wrap her arms around him, fist below the breastbone, push the air up and clear the bolus of food clogging his windpipe, but if she choked, she would probably die. Ravi would flail his arms and yelp as her eyes rolled back into her head.

  “Ravi, do you know how to call 911?” she asked him.

  “Yes, you just dial 9-1-1,” he said.

  “If I ever look sick, or like something’s just really wrong, and Mom’s not home, you call 911, okay?”

  “Okay,” he answered. His eyebrows creased, then loosened as he resumed eating.

  Mostly they conducted their feasts in the hour between when Mira came home from her high school and their mother came home from work. They ate under the pressure of this sixty- minute deadline, just barely enough time for the searching, eating, and then cleaning up (burying the wrappers in the trash, washing the dishes and putting them away). They left the television on and used the schedule of programs to mark the time. During the two sitcom reruns — usually Family Matters and Growing Pains — they uprooted fruit roll-ups under the puffy sofa cushions. When Ravi sat, he could feel them under him through the layers of cushion fabric and spongy matting, through the flesh of his bottom, like the princess and the pea. Mira chewed and chewed the fruit roll-ups until her teeth hurt and the condensed tang cut her tongue. The skin of their hands grew soft from handling the oily pakoras they found in the box of empty cassette tapes, and Ravi left a grease hand- print on the cream-coloured wall. Powdered donuts, packed in plastic, revealed themselves between pillow cases kept neatly under beds, and spilled their white dust over Ravi’s shirt. Mira opened a jangling storage container of serving spoons and found crystalline coconut candy concealed underneath. The candy felt abrasive against the insides of her cheeks and some-times left trickles of blood.

  Sometimes they even ate the results of Lala’s test recipes (packed into unlabelled Tupperware), though mostly their mother threw them away. The food supply was near limitless, because their mother had the habit of buying snacks in bulk at Costco. On Saturday shopping trips, Mira went with her and lunched on all the samples, while her mother added box after box to their cart.

  THEY OFTEN LEFT one or two of the food items still in the package, as though their mother wouldn’t notice the sharp decrease in quantity. Every couple of weeks, the food would shift to new hiding places; it was a wonder how many secret spots existed in their small house. Initially, their mother didn’t comment about the food, and Mira didn’t think she ever would. But one evening, as they all sat in front of the tv, their mother abruptly reached for the remote and turned it off. A singing girl on the screen stretched her arms mid-crescendo.

  “Who ate all the cookies?” she asked. The question seemed trivial and kind of funny, juxtaposed with her grave expres-sion. She looked at Ravi first. “How many did you have?”

  “Only two,” he lied. It was obvious he was lying, because of his delighted face.

  “Then how many did you have?” she asked Mira.

  “Mom, I’m fifteen. You don’t need to monitor my food intake.” She knew that would cut off the questioning, because lately they had been clashing, and Mira was sure her mother had been trying harder to get along. She was buying magazines with articles that said not to harass your teenage daughters about their eating habits. And there was no reason to harass her, because somehow Mira had avoided gaining weight — perhaps because she took frequent walks. She meandered with Nathaniel into the corners of Richmond Hill. She was fairly sure she had seen all of it now — she could locate all the bike paths, and knew which neighbourhoods were chummy enough to hold joint garage sales.

  “Why do you need to eat like that? What’s wrong with you?” Her mother said to Ravi. “Can’t you see we can’t even find clothes for you? Do you want to get sick? You’re going to have a heart attack. You know what a heart attack is? That’s what Suraj Uncle had. And now he takes seven pills every day.”

  Nothing terrified Ravi more than the idea of taking medica-tions. He pressed his lips together and began to hum.

  “Stop that. Stop. That.” Mira’s mother said. Mira went and made some tea and phoned Nathaniel to tell him about this latest debacle.

  MIRA AND NATHANIEL had been in the same elementary school class for a couple of years, and had met again in Tolbar Park, fifty metres from Mira’s house. Mira balanced herself on the park swing, swinging, palms over the cold metal chains, sandals flung into the sand. She thought she looked pretty good. These days she liked to imagine herself from a third-person perspec-tive, how a person walking by might see her, and this helped her to always look her best. By some luck, Nathaniel did walk by, and saw her, and came down the park path and right up to her. In order to avoid kicking him, she had to stop swinging. She didn’t want to kick him, because he was fairly handsome. His hair looked exactly like a pile of golden raisins. When he opened his mouth, she prepared to give him directions. If he had only asked for directions, she still would have been pleased. Mira saw a kind of achievement in knowing a place well enough to conjure a mental map.

  “You know a house here got broken into last week,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  “I mean it isn’t safe, to be just swinging around alone at night.”

  It wasn’t really night, she thought, more like twilight, and the sky was bright blue. Mira thought he might attack her. How long would it take to start swinging again, to knock him over with her bare feet, leap over him, and run the fifty metres home? She could see the roof of her house in the V made by the tops of evergreens.

  “Why don’t I walk you home?” he asked.

  “Okay,” she said, as though she hadn’t just suspected him of being an attacker. In the three minutes it took for Nathaniel to meet her and then accompany her home, Mira’s entire dialogue consisted of: “okay” (twice) and “goodnight” (as he handed her his phone number). Later, she analyzed this scene and decided that her silence had been the principal source of her charm.

  THEIR FIRST DATE was at the Richmond Hill Heritage Village Day Festival, and she didn’t know it was a date until she was walking up a set of stairs and he put his arm around her as they leaned together to read the descriptions of items for a silent auction. His forwardness surprised her because she so rarely touched other people — it was alarming, but she figured she would eventually become desensitized, the way third world children seemed unable to feel the flies that landed on them. Nathaniel had six siblings and played soccer. She thought large families and sportsmanship contributed to these inclina-tions towards touch; he put a hand on her shoulder when he wanted to get he
r attention to point at the man in the town crier costume, who rang a bell and said hear-ye hear-ye and wore pantaloons in the town’s colours; he rested his palm on her thigh as they sat to watch a group of teenage trumpeters feebly play “Amazing Grace.”

  “My tenth-grade band played out here for the Remembrance Day parade,” she said. “And the Santa Claus parade, actually. And during last year’s Earth Day, they set up a stage for the choir to sing.”

  “This town has a lot of festivals,” he said.

  “Also, my Girl Guide troop met here,” she told him. “My mother and Ravi used to pick me up here …”

  “Who’s Ravi?” He pronounced Ravi “Raaavi,” even though he said it right after her and so should have said it the same way.

  “My brother.” That was the very beginning of telling him things.

  “I didn’t know you had a brother,” he said.

  “Yup, so the two of them would come to pick me up. I waited outside. And across the street, where all that construction is, there used to be a strip club painted pink, called Fantasia, like the Disney movie. For a while, we gave directions by it. Where’s the library? Just south of Fantasia. The high school? Around the corner from Fantasia. The townspeople despised it. I used to sit here and watch the women standing there half-naked, smoking.”

  He kissed her then, suddenly. She wondered if the mention of half-naked women had prompted him, and she imagined that the trumpeters were watching them, evaluating her response. Because he was kissing her, right out there in public and every-thing, she didn’t get to tell him about the time she’d gone inside, or about the fate of Fantasia, that somebody had mysteriously set it on fire and she had witnessed it, the red flames clashing with the pink walls, smelling like burning grease. Or about how afterwards, she had snuck past the yellow police tape to collect a piece of the remaining brick as a keepsake. She had a habit of wanting to remember things, pictorial details, like the building’s exact shade.