The Family Took Shape

by Shashi Bhat

  “Ohhh, look at that, that’s good right?” Lala Aunty asked.

  “Better than I could do,” said Mira’s mother.

  “I’ve never been bowling,” said Cynthia.

  “We’ll take you,” said Lala Aunty.

  “No, I don’t really want to,” Cynthia said, and went to get fries.

  “Ahhh, the old Dime Store,” Uncle said. Everybody looked at him. “That’s what they call the 5-10 split.”

  The game continued. Aunty ate several brownies, Uncle wowed them with bowling facts. The bowlers moved in stag-gered patterns. Mira thought it was like watching an array of lines and circles. A person was just a set of lines with a circle on top. The bowling ball was a second, odd-placed head, star-tling when it took its hollow spin. The lines-and-circle person paused there, waited for the crash, and retreated slowly back-wards part of the way before turning. The next figure lifted a ball and played out the same actions. Except it wasn’t just that one team; all the players in the whole spacious space moved those movements. Each team had four-to-six people, and occasionally two players from different games would act in synchronicity, parallel as they released and returned. They were like some kind of media player music visualization, matching a tune that might have been audible under the sounds of people talking, occasional claps, a vague announcer’s voice, and heavy urethane rolling over wood.

  The bowling alley lights shone white and unforgiving on the strange features: smiles that didn’t form correctly, over-large placid foreheads, unfocused gazes, round moon faces, fleshy hands, legs that didn’t stand, wheelchairs wheeling bulky and metallic, distended bellies, underdeveloped chins, thick glasses, hairless skulls, and coarse-haired, shuddering, dis- proportionate limbs. The bowlers kept their almost-unison, exclaimed in warbling voices, blundered beautifully with terrible motor skills.

  “Have you seen that movie, Freaks?” Cynthia asked Mira in a whisper, but they all heard. “It’s this really old Tod Browning movie about a bunch of sideshow freaks, like a midget and a bearded woman and people with crazy shrunken heads. But what was cool about that was that they didn’t use costumes or cgi or whatever, so they used real, actual freaks, people who looked like that for real. And at the end there’s this part where they’re all just sort of running together and yelling ‘gobble, gobble, gobble’…”

  Cynthia kept going and Mira thought, I have to make her stop talking, oh god how do I make her stop talking? I have to defend him, because I have never defended him, and I can’t let this idiot friend of mine say these idiot things, and I have to do something before Aunty does, because there is only so much control you have over the shape your family takes.

  “Stop it,” Mira said.

  Mira’s mother looked at her in surprise. Aunty and Uncle stayed silent.

  “Pardon?” Cynthia said.

  “Just stop, okay?” she said, and hesitated here. What did one say in such confrontational situations? Her chest was pounding, and she wished she hadn’t started this. “This is a tournament for the Special Olympics,” she said slowly, “… and these people here are special … and Ravi is special, too, and he might not be like you with your perfect brain, but don’t you ever use the word freak near us again,” and then Mira laughed inappropriately because she saw Cynthia’s disbeliev- ing expression, and after all, this was her one good friend in a school of people and she couldn’t lose her. “Forget it,” Mira said. “Nevermind.”

  And as she was thinking of how to recover the situation, she saw that Ravi had finished his game and come to stand with them. There he was, standing just behind Uncle’s shoulder, listening with the alertness of a feral animal. Lala Aunty excused herself for the bathroom and Mira’s mother and Uncle cleared throats and scratched arms and retied shoes while Cynthia said, “Crap, I’m sorry.” Ravi was looking across the room at his teammates, and Mira knew that he had heard her repeating the word “special” like a bargain store announcer, and was now noticing their irregularities for the first time.

  THE NEXT DAY, though the tournament was supposed to continue, Ravi declared, simply, that he wasn’t going. It was breakfast time and they were in the kitchen, always in the kitchen it seemed. The radio was off and just the three of them in their pyjamas and morning hair.

  “I’m not going to play bowling anymore,” said Ravi, hunched over his cereal spoon.

  “No?” asked his mother, and shook her head at Mira.

  When Ravi left the room, Mira stood up from the table to put her orange juice glass in the sink. Then, she leaned over the island until her face nearly reached the other side, where her mother was standing, adding skim milk to coffee.

  “You never should have taken him out of the normal high school class,” Mira said. “After all that work to get him in there in the first place.”

  “Mira, that was ages ago,” said her mother. She set down the milk. “You remember those exams. He wasn’t sleeping.”

  “You think he liked it in there in 314? He hated it. He knew they weren’t normal. He knew it. After twelve years of school, his diploma has a fucking retard stamp on it. They didn’t even let those 314 kids leave the classroom at the lunch hour. His whole life practically he ate lunch with freaks. He hated it.”

  Mira was startled when she saw her own face in the window of the microwave, glaring and monstrous.

  “I don’t know what you want me to do about it now, Mira,” said her mother, and left the kitchen. There was only the sound of her bare feet sticking to the tile.

  Out the kitchen’s semicircle window, on the side street, Ravi rode his bicycle, the frame engulfed by his huge soft body. He wobbled around at a slow pace. It took effort to ride a bicycle that slowly and keep balance; Mira imagined an invis-ible force holding him up against gravity, which was, of course, invisible too.

  They didn’t know it now, but at the end of the summer, Ravi would receive no payment for his driving job. His employer was taking advantage of him, would claim he had failed the trial period, and wouldn’t reimburse him for gas, so his compensation for those hours of work was only one dark arm and thousands of kilometres of mileage on the family car. After Mira left for university, Ravi would rejoin a bowling league to fill the open time, a bowling league populated by ordinary people, and though he didn’t win as often, he still brought home an occasional ribbon or certificate and pinned them all up on his bedroom wall, and if you walked by his room and saw that wall, you might really think it was the room of a champion.

  The Girl Who Couldn’t Be Hypnotized

  THEY MOURNED RAVI’S luck thoroughly, without hope for resurrection. Months and then a year passed without paid work; he volunteered at their mother’s office. When Mira graduated from high school, it was without excessive cere-mony, and when she left for university, the transition was in some ways seamless, because she kept coming back. She came home every weekend, spent the weekdays craving home. She could have predicted that she’d miss her mother’s chappatis, discussions with Uncle, silence, and watching tv in a room unpopulated by girls in tank tops. But then there were the atypical longings, for the shadow of her brother’s head moving around the hallway at night, for her mother’s face, twisting as she scoffed at typos in the newspaper.

  She desperately missed Cynthia, who she phoned once a week and who had adapted swiftly to university life. In the back- ground of the phone calls, she always heard a heavy bass line from a subwoofer, and other voices to whom Cynthia kept turning — “Mira, you won’t believe what’s happening,” she’d say, and then what was happening would turn out to be some girl putting a lot of marshmallows in her mouth or that the girls in their dorm kept finding pubic hair on the toilet and couldn’t figure out whose it was. Cynthia never said she wished they’d gone to the same university — why would she? But Mira thought if Cynthia asked her just once, she would transfer right out of this supposedly elite place.

  Her own boringness felt amplified by
her surroundings; her sense of humour was fading from a lack of conversations. In the few exchanges she did have, she’d think of a joke and then hesitate to use it. The few times she said something funny, everyone looked surprised. Through the door of her room, she heard girls bantering, propping their bodies up against the walls of the corridor. She’d try to wait for them to leave before she went to the bathroom, but would generally run into a couple of them group studying in the lounge with their notes spread on the hard carpet, or evaluating each other’s outfits before jetting off to parts of Toronto she’d never seen.

  As a result, she became the best student she had ever been. Her particular passion had always been chemistry, and this was elevated here by the scale and quality of the lab equipment — the gleaming test tubes and pipette tips they threw away instead of bothering to clean, the unrusted metal scoops she used to measure compounds so precisely on the digital scale. She titrated and distilled and centrifuged and autoclaved; her lab partner mostly just wrote stuff down.

  As an elective, she took adolescent psychology, and became obsessive over it, even though they spent most of class time watching coming-of-age movies. Mira wondered if she had come of age yet. These are adults, she thought, looking at the preening people around her in class. If she dated a classmate, she would be dating a man, and she’d have to refer to him as handsome rather than cute, though she compromised in her head by using the word “guy” and describing him as “dashing” or “attractive.” The course’s textbook became her bedtime reading. She scanned the textbook index for words that were relevant to her life.

  She didn’t bother fully unpacking her belongings in her dorm. In November, her cardboard boxes still contained rolled-up sweaters and unopened packages of pens. On the Friday of the first November weekend, she stuffed her textbooks in her backpack along with underwear and a toothbrush — everything else she had extras of at home — and caught the subway in her usual routine. Even the walk to the subway stop made her uneasy, disoriented her. When walking downtown, to see which way was south, she had to stop and look for the cn Tower, and when she stopped, she disturbed the flow of the crowd around her, who parted and kept walking, brief-cases swinging. She once saw a car halted in the middle of an intersection, trapped by the unfortunate timing of traffic lights. The cars around it honked in violent cacophony, and the crossing multitude of pedestrians — gloveless, shivering, stylish — swore and jeered; one pounded the car’s hood with his fist as he passed.

  She took the train to Finch and then caught the go bus to Bernard Terminal, where Ravi picked her up and drove her to the house. It took forty-five minutes total.

  On the bus, she looked out the window at Yonge Street and half-napped, head knocking against the Plexiglas, falling in and out of dreaming of a time-shifting Richmond Hill. A decade and a half earlier, the town had produced a book chronicling its history, Early Days in Richmond Hill, and her dream started there, with the old pictures of churches and women in hats and carts rocking along behind horses. The dream progressed through the decades like a time-lapsed film of plant growth. She knew the city’s age by the buildings, everything eerie yellow and grey, except the pink of Fantasia, constructed and disap-peared, and then the buildings turned steel and blue and new. The churches stayed where they were and that’s how she knew it was always Richmond Hill and never some other town, and also by Yonge Street, which remained constant — as streets should — though the dirt and gravel turned to pavement.

  After putting her bag in her bedroom, she went to give her mother a lottery ticket, a small gift she’d purchased at Bernard Terminal. Her mother was in the kitchen, reviewing a dinner menu Lala Aunty had written out on several Post-it notes and stuck all over the refrigerator door. Mira had planned to spend the weekend doing problem sets and maybe renting a movie; she had forgotten that her mother was throwing a dinner party Saturday evening, or sort of a dinner party-baby shower, where both husbands and wives attended and played silly baby games and ate the same South Indian food they always ate but had cake at the end (pink or blue or yellow, depending). These parties were really thrown by Lala Aunty, who spearheaded the food preparation and guest list (inviting her usual hodge-podge of families), and oversaw the cleaning.

  This time, when Lala Aunty showed up, she bustled around their house, inspecting the stove for splatters and making sure the bathrooms had toilet paper, and abruptly gasped to Mira and her mother, who were peeling fruit over the sink, “Oh my GOD, I haven’t planned any games! I brought so many prizes — ” she gestured at bulging canvas bags she had left near the front door, “— and forgot the games themselves!”

  “That’s okay, we’ll just let people talk to each other …,” Mira’s mother began to say.

  Lala slapped at her waist. “Are you kidding me? A baby shower without games, no way. Mira, go on the internet and plan some games, will you? Quickly quickly, just two-three games.”

  Mira grumbled once or twice about being ordered around, then went to her mother’s computer and searched through baby shower websites for games that wouldn’t scandalize this group (she eliminated the one where all the guests tried to estimate the circumference of the pregnant woman’s stomach using long ribbons of toilet paper and the one requiring her to melt chocolate into a diaper) and collected together all the required materials in a big cardboard box, which she tucked under the dining table for later.

  The guests started arriving around seven, though the e-vites had said six. They came with gift bags, CorningWare full of food, and boxes of chocolates that they’d picked up at Shoppers Drug Mart. Because it was a baby shower, most of the guests were closer to Mira’s age than Lala Aunty’s or her mother’s. Lala Aunty’s friends were getting younger and younger; she seemed determined to be young by association. Mostly these young people were new immigrants from India, with ages difficult for Mira to pinpoint. Some she addressed as “Uncle” and “Aunty” even though they were only twenty- five, because they seemed older. The men wore shirts tucked in and congregated immediately in the living room to discuss — what, she wasn’t sure. The women arrived, some frizzy-haired and some sleeker, in fitted selwar kameezes with long transparent sleeves, and directly sought the kitchen to start the search for serving spoons in sizes best suited to the foods they had brought. It was impossible to guess which wife went with which husband unless you saw them enter in a pair, which normally didn’t happen because the husband would drop the wife at the door and then go search for a parking spot. Husbands were often thinner than their wives or much taller or nearly shorter. Some young couples had great gaps in their levels of attractiveness; that was Mira’s favourite kind of couple, the muscular with the dowdy, the frowning with the vivacious, odd couples, the products of semi-arranged marriages and internet romances, standing together like vari-ables to be multiplied, and they did multiply, cobbling little families who over the years would grow to look more and more like one another as the frumps picked up fashion advice from their daughters, the dour cheered up from the accom-plishments of their sons, the bubbly personalities flattened and the brawny-bodied softened from allegiance to their nine-to-five jobs.

  Ravi showed people where to leave their shoes, and Mira collected their jackets (which they wore despite the warm weather). The house grew heated with the crowd of bodies. The pregnant woman whose name Mira couldn’t remember — Sheila? Shyla? — lowered her papaya-shaped body into a comfortable armchair which Lala Aunty had pulled into the kitchen. All the women congregated around her, feeling at her stomach and offering up their nieces as babysitters.

  “Are we all here, shall we start the games?” asked Lala Aunty. She called the men in from the living room and they stood around the perimeter of the kitchen, crossing their arms and leaning against the counter or the refrigerator. Mira’s mother made sure the stove was off and ushered children in to sit on the tile floor, and had just managed to quiet the rowdiest one when the doorbell rang and chaos exploded again.


  “Come in! Come in!” the uncles shouted, though they wouldn’t be heard outside the door, and the aunties started chattering about dinner and the deliveries of their own children while said children raced toy cars around their feet and Mira ran to answer the door.

  A boy stood there on her front step — no, a man, an adult, a guy her age, anyway — and he held a tub of Neapolitan ice cream.

  “Your hands must be freezing,” said Mira, and then, “I remember you.” She remembered him but couldn’t place him, but of course he must be some acquaintance of her mother’s or Lala Aunty’s, but he was her age, and the word attractive certainly applied. He was about Ravi’s height, but seemed taller because he was much thinner, and had an unusually even skin tone, the brown as uniform as Lala Aunty’s pleather handbag.

  “I don’t know why I didn’t put it in a bag,” the guy said, and the word “bag” surprised Mira by matching the word she had only just used in her head. She took the ice cream from him and he wiped the condensation from his hands on the sides of his shirt, which was white with pinstripes that seemed to stretch his frame out farther. Mira moved backwards so he could enter, trying to think of what to say next, and wondering why he had been invited, and whether he had a wife who had already arrived, who was already in the kitchen, her age indistinguishable from Mira’s mother’s. Before she could speak, a large group of uncles and aunties wandered near, and she felt a gnarl in her chest at having missed that moment of aloneness with him, when she might have shown a personality that was impressive, or at least endearing.

  “Harshvardhan, you decided to come after all!” Aunty exclaimed from the back of the group. Harshvardhan — what a name, thought Mira, whose mother had blessed her children with only four letters each. Perhaps he shortened it; it was obvious from his accent that he’d been raised in the U.S., and all the Indian people she knew here tended to nickname themselves for convenience — Ashumantha became Ash, Venkatramana became Venki — and their full names on official documents always seemed to describe different people entirely.