The Family Took Shape

by Shashi Bhat

  Mira doubted that he would need foil so urgently, but said, “Actually, Uncle, I’m positive Aunty kept more foil in the basement. More everything, really. Foil, Ziploc bags, Saran Wrap, and all that.”

  “In the basement?”

  “In the crawl space,” she said. Many times, she had seen Lala Aunty emerging from the tiny door with materials for food storage.

  “Oh, but my arthritis. I don’t know how I will get it out from there,” Uncle said.

  Baskar began massaging her mother’s shoulders. Mira turned away.

  “Uncle, let me just drive over there and get it out for you,” she said.

  “I can go, Mira, if he needs help,” called her mother.

  Baskar groaned.

  “I’ll go,” she said to her mother, covering the receiver.

  “Are you sure? That isn’t necessary, only that I wish I had more foil,” Uncle said.

  “I’ll go too,” said Ravi.

  “No, Ravi, you don’t have to go, stay with us,” said Mira’s mother.

  “Fifteen minutes, I’ll be there,” Mira said to Uncle. From the kitchen counter, she took her keys, put her shoes on, opened the door, and waved at her mother, who was getting up to put away the banana chip bowl, and Baskar, who turned the television off and lay over the sofa like a lumpy slipcover. Ravi imitated him, stretching out over the loveseat and yawning, hanging his head over one of the armrests.

  She drove down Highway 7, imagining what it would be like to be afraid of driving at night. There was a sense of danger in sitting inside a quiet, dark machine, rolling along the dark city streets, the lights of passing cars white and magnified, stretching into long cones. Her night vision was good, but still she was sometimes tricked by glare on glass. And her father had died in a car accident, and it occurred to her that she didn’t even know what kind of car he had driven. Toyota Tercel? Pontiac 6000? Her brother, ironically, was a skilled, brave driver, untouched by those associations. Baskar had said there was a posting for a delivery driver job at his company, and that he could give them Ravi’s resumé and a recommendation. She hoped he would follow through. Lala Aunty would have made sure he did.

  Reaching Uncle’s driveway, she could see his shadow trav-elling around from the yellow square of one window to the next. She watched him for a minute before getting out of the car.

  The broken front door had been labelled in his block letters, “Lift door to open.” She reminded herself to see about getting it fixed, took off her shoes, and rang the bell. The outline of Uncle’s body moved behind the narrow block glass by the door.

  “Mira, here you are. You drove safe?” Uncle took her hand and brought her inside. “Do you want an apple to eat? Or an orange? I have both. Or maybe, no, maybe used up the apple already.”

  “That’s all right, Uncle. I’ll just run downstairs and get you the foil?” then felt a little guilty, as she had nowhere to get to. “Come have an orange with me,” he said again, and so she agreed. On the kitchen table and counters and chairs and any other available surface, Uncle had placed newly cooked dishes of food. Mysore pak crumbled beautifully in cupcake wrappers, and steamed vegetables held their colour under the kitchen pot lights. Innumerable curries — made with rich beet root and translucent cabbage and soft, formless eggplant — surrounded them. She isolated and identified the aromas: fresh chopped coriander leaves, roasted mustard seeds, asafoetida warming in oil. The reason no apples remained was that they filled a fruit salad, mixed with quartered purple grapes, narrow coral-coloured slices of papaya, and white cubed pears, all fattened and flavoured with ice cream and mango pulp. She hadn’t known Uncle could cook. It seemed it was his own kind of mourning, a hunger tangibly replaced.

  Uncle gave Mira a tangerine and she peeled it in one long strip, adding it to a vast heap of peelings already dampening an old Toronto Star. She ate the sections and watched him wrap a dish in his last piece of foil.

  Then down into the basement she went, down unfinished wooden stairs she felt she might fall through. The basement was predictably cavernous, but also like a split-level within a split-level. Mira had never been inside the crawl space, which spanned half the basement. She knelt in her jeans on the cold concrete and stared at the door.

  In the rectangular black space, the ceiling was so low she would have to stay kneeling. She scanned the area before entering. The crawl space didn’t have additional light, so she could only see its contents from the glow of the rest of the base-ment, which didn’t reflect too well. The foil was visible in the far back corner, maybe ten metres away, in long narrow boxes with glistening metal teeth. The room smelled of camphor and cloves and of dust, dust which coated her hands as she touched the floor. She could make out old clothes in leaning piles, drooping candles, pieces of garden rope, Dasara dolls with human faces, and one large carved wooden chest. For a second, she didn’t think she’d have the nerve to enter; she would have to return up to Uncle and pretend there had never been any foil at all.

  What made her go in anyway was the vague thought that her fears and her family’s fears, too, were only the usual ones — small spaces, heights, driving in the dark, dying alone. Mira pointed her body in the direction of the aluminum foil, partly sure that she wouldn’t be able to turn backwards. And then she was crawling in the crawl space, and could hear Uncle as he paced upstairs from room to room in his rendition of grief’s repeating pattern: adjusting the lighting, phoning the only people he knew, cooking perfect versions of all the mediocre foods that his wife had once made.

  Sublimation

  ON THE FLIGHT to India, Mira spoke to her baby as though the baby would understand.

  “Tungsten is the metal with the highest melting point,” she said, adjusting and tucking a blanket and then pattering the tips of her fingers lightly on her son’s arm. “The only letter of the alpha- bet that doesn’t appear on the periodic table is the letter J.”

  Maybe this wasn’t how one should talk to a baby, but chat- ting kept him quiet, and the trip to India took fifteen hours, not even including the six-hour layover at Heathrow, where she had sleeplessly pushed the stroller through Harrod’s and purchased an expensive tin of hard candy, which she had eaten piece by piece over the second leg of the trip, trying to guess each flavour by taste alone. The journey had nearly ended, and they had caught their connection to Kerala. The baby had been awake since they’d left Mumbai. Every time she heard her son begin to whimper, Mira had a dipping feeling of anxiety in her chest. He might not ever stop crying. They might escort her off the plane. She’d discovered the best way to quiet the baby was to ease into mild, one-sided conversation. Naturally, she began to run out of things to say. She had started by telling stories — The Three Little Pigs, Little Red Riding Hood, even a French play she had once memorized, Le Cerf-Volant Magique, though she’d learned these stories so long ago that she kept forgetting the orders of events. Since the baby had been born, she and H had been stocking up on children’s books. The baby’s room already had a bookshelf. Flipping through them, she was a little surprised to realize she didn’t enjoy all the truth-bending in children’s literature: the personification of animals and suspension of disbelief. She wanted her child to read about the real world, however simplified and beautified; she preferred to find the wonder in things that were actual and concrete, things she could see for herself.

  Mira wasn’t a natural mother. She was self-conscious about baby talk, hadn’t yet mastered the cooing glissandos of moth-erese. It was H who fed the baby with spoon helicopters, whirring mashed bananas in figure eights through the air as the baby jiggled in anticipation.

  While pregnant, H had suggested that she should have nude photos taken. She had thought he was joking, but he wasn’t. Mira declined, but after that, every time she showered, she stopped to look at her unclothed body in the bathroom mirror. Her body looked like ovoids overlapping, burgeoning with heavy, fluid weight. It was gorgeous but fo
reign. Though she could take folic acid and refrain from drinking, she felt she had very little effect on what would develop inside of her. She read books full of pregnancy words — ovum, pablum, womb, embryo — that sounded like words spoken underwater, or like the suction of an emptying drain. At the pharmacy where she worked, her stomach was hidden behind the counter; the regulars must have just thought her face was getting fatter. When the baby was born, people said it looked like her, but she couldn’t see it.

  She had brought the baby to India for his Namkaran, his naming ceremony. She and H had planned to travel to India for their honeymoon, but they had postponed it after she had been hired for a job right after her graduation from pharmacy school. H had fewer holidays now, and would meet her there in two weeks for the ceremony. Secretly she hoped to grow used to the baby in this time, and that he would latch on to her during H’s brief absence.

  Flight attendants slowed their carts near her seat, offering beverages and extra blankets.

  “His eyes are so big,” one of them said, an Indian girl with a neatly cultivated British accent. “And he’s so well-behaved. He’s barely even cried!” She widened her own dark eyes and shook her head at the baby, then moved to the next row. Mira mumbled about melting points and precipitates, and the baby intoned a series of pitches and exposed his gums. She hoped that the baby’s first word would be scientific and impressive, maybe “amnicentesis.”

  The plane landed, and the baby began to cry from pressure in his ears. Mira gave him his pacifier. As soon as the plane stopped, the air conditioning turned off, and the temperature inside the cabin began to rise. There was some mix-up at the gates, and it took another hour before they let them exit the aircraft. Passengers stood in the aisles and complained loudly about their connections. They pulled bags from overhead bins, and as a man opened one compartment, a backpack fell out and landed on an elderly woman’s neck. She began to shout at the man about how she was going to sue him, trying to get his name. Finally the doors opened, and the crowd pulled forward.

  The heat in the Mangalore airport felt nearly unbearable. It had been more than two decades since she had last been to India, and she had no memory of this humidity, how drops of perspiration could replenish themselves continuously on the surface of her skin. Her handkerchief grew damp from constantly wiping her forehead. She was still wearing clothes appropriate for the Canadian winter and ended up stripping off the layers of sweaters and balancing them on top of a cart. The baggage belt moved slowly, in stops and starts, and Mira placed herself right at its opening, worried somebody would make off with her luggage. Finally she spotted her suitcase with several others, already off the belt. A malnourished, dark-skinned employee in an olive green uniform was perched on top of it.

  “Adhu enna suitcase,” Mira said in her faltering Havyaka. Speaking this language was even more difficult than speaking to the baby. The man smirked and insisted that she let him pull her suitcase so she could handle the stroller. She agreed after hesitation, because her mother had warned her against these fellows — “coolies,” she had called them. It was mere metres to the arrivals area, but Mira didn’t have the energy to argue with the man. She tipped him with her only bill, twenty Canadian dollars, worth nearly a thousand rupees.

  “Mira!” she heard a voice call out, and turned to see her mother’s sister Jayashree skittering towards her. She looked like a narrower and tanner version of her mother, her bones bending out at awkward angles, her shawl tied behind her in a firm knot. Her feet, encased in brown rubber sandals, made loud brushing and smacking noises against the floor. Her brother Ram, tall and golden, jogged up behind her.

  “Jayashree Aunty!” Mira faked energy, reaching out her arms shyly to embrace her aunt. Ram shook her hand up and down. He was one of the few men who looked appealing in a moustache. It animated his face, fluttering as he spoke.

  “Flight and all was good?” he asked, waving away the employees who hovered around waiting to see if they needed help loading. He spoke in English. Her mother’s family mostly spoke in Havyaka, but for her sake they would flit in and out of English, and sometimes Hindi, by accident.

  Jayashree cooed at the baby, picking him from his stroller and kissing his cheeks. She tossed him up and down and handed him to her brother. Ram held him up in front of him, his laugh wonderfully resonant, but then stopped abruptly. He said something quickly and quietly to Jayashree that Mira didn’t catch.

  “Chelo. Come, come, I have a Jeep waiting,” Ram said. “We’ll go direct to Ajjimane, no stops, unless should we go to temple?”

  “Ayyyo, they haven’t taken bath,” said Jayashree, hitting him on the arm, and he hit his own forehead with his palm.

  “What am I thinking?” he thundered, and he ushered them quickly to the waiting vehicle.

  They clambered into the back of the Jeep, lined with a bench on each side for them to sit. The back door was completely open, with no glass, and Mira clung tightly to the baby with one arm and with the other hand she clutched a leather loop on the ceiling. She had changed into a light cotton sari in the airplane bathroom (a feat in the confined space) but since she didn’t wear them very often she struggled with trying to keep the pallu in place. Hurtling over the unpaved roads, the Jeep made too much noise to talk, so Mira stared out the back.

  Kerala was nothing like Mumbai. She knew Mumbai from documentaries where she had seen the old streets and the filth that covered them, the humans and dogs starving openly under Bollywood billboards. Uncle had told her that the city had its moments of beauty; he described schoolchildren in navy flooding the streets after classes, flowing en masse under a radiant blue sky cleared, for a moment, of its smog. He said that on some days, the scent of vendors roasting spiced peanuts or sweet ears of corn could actually overpower the city’s human stench. Palm trees surrounded the concrete buildings in lines, leaves flapping under the weight of rain in monsoon.

  But in Kerala, she saw no tall buildings breaking the sky. The road on which they drove meandered atop a mountain, and on each side Mira saw brilliant green rice fields divided into squares, cushioned in knee-deep royal blue water, reflect- ing an angled image of their Jeep as they passed. Children ran half-naked but healthy alongside them, rolling rusty bicycle tires with sticks, as though from a different era. Cows stood stoically and emitted loud “ommbayyy” sounds, their suede sides shuddering with the vibration. Their vehicle passed the occasional house, their plaster walls painted deep blood red. The soil here contained iron, turning it rust-coloured, like powdered tempera paint; it stained the children’s feet as they flapped hot against the road. Until Mira had seen Kerala, she had never thought colours existed with such brilliance. Their hues appeared richer in Kerala, saturated, as though if you touched the plants or objects or even people, the pigment would rub off on your hand. It made Mira think of the bright wetness of Bingo markers. She felt like a character in The Wizard of Oz, landed in this Technicolor place where every red resembled rubies, where her own tears might be blue instead of clear and where, when a woman blushed, she felt it as if in her own skin.

  The Jeep turned off the road at what seemed an unmarked spot in a field. Mira couldn’t see anything that might have signaled the entrance to the home where her mother had grown up; Ram and Jayashree knew by heart where to tell the driver to turn, and suddenly a road into a valley emerged. They disappeared down the road, easing bumpily down the steep incline, rocks flying out from under the wheels. At the bottom of the road was a metal gate painted orange. A skinny cousin stood balanced atop the gate and unlatched it, swinging along with it to let them through, whooping at them and waving.

  “Nilsi … nilsi,” Ram yelled back to them as he leapt from the stopped Jeep onto the dry ground. Nilsi meant wait, Mira remembered, and she stayed where she was, unsure. “The bitches are ferocious,” Ram shouted to her, and Mira startled at the language before realizing he meant the guard dogs that were running wildly around the property, ju
mping and snap- ping their jaws. Two uncles helped Ram round up the dogs and tie them safely away. Relatives began spilling from the house like ants, crowding around and opening the door and taking her suitcase and the baby easily from her. Three small chil- dren she didn’t recognize hugged her legs and took her hands and pulled her out. They chattered at her, calling her three different things — Akka, Athige, and Chikamma — and she struggled to remember what each one meant. Akka was what you called your older sister or a sister-type, Athige was your older female cousin, and she couldn’t recall about the last one; really, none of these relationships made sense to her anyway. Luckily, since she was older than all the children, she could just call them by name and didn’t need to bother with any of the titles. She worried about meeting more of her aunts and uncles and deciding how to refer to them.

  The children gave her a tour, a boy of maybe thirteen named Gautham proudly translating some of it into English. Mira’s mother’s house consisted of three buildings forming a U shape. Her grandparents had died years ago, but fifteen people still lived in the house permanently, and Gautham told her they always had at least five visitors. Mira’s grandfather had built a schoolhouse up the hill and all his children except Mira’s mother had become teachers who hiked up there every day in their beaten sandals.

  Two of the house’s buildings were painted glossy red, and the third, newer structure had been recently whitewashed. There were slate roofs, and the windows didn’t have glass, but instead had peacock blue shutters they could shut at night. The children led her from room to room so quickly that her sock feet kept sliding across the white marble floors (she had been wearing sneakers under her sari and left them at the entrance but kept her socks on, not thinking of how much dust they would collect). Stopping in front of one closed door, Gautham motioned for her to look inside, and Mira pushed it open to find a modern toilet. Even though there was a bucket of water instead of toilet paper and water had been splashed liberally all over the room, Mira was impressed. She had dreaded crouching with the last of her pregnancy belly hanging over that dark hole in the ground.