by Shashi Bhat
The aunties admired H’s new watch and praised Mira on her modest choice. Gautham, bored by the music and the talk of watches, stood and took Mira’s arm, pleading with her to come with him. He led Mira to the room where he had left the piece of camphor untouched for days on the windowsill.
“Mira Athige, it is gone! So many days I watched it grow smaller and smaller. And today, it was no more!”
“Sublimation!” Mira said, almost as excited as the boy. “It went directly from the solid state to the gaseous state.” His nephew looked confused, and Mira took a moment to explain it to him, punctuating her phrases with Havyaka words.
“It vanished,” Gautham said, still not quite understanding, but Mira nodded. She put her finger to the windowsill and wiped away the dash of white residue that remained.
NORMALLY, THEY HELD Namkaran on the twelfth day after birth, but they had bent the rules so Mira’s baby’s ceremony could take place in India. The great aunt dressed the baby in new clothes, wrapping the raw silk around his warm round shape. She lined his eyes with black kajal and dotted a beauty mark on his cheek. The family had prepared the front yard for the ceremony, spreading thick straw mats over the flat ground. They had created a temporary roof for the area with a wide piece of fabric printed with swirls of purple, using twine to tie the corners to pillars and trees. The fabric undulated, ballooning in the breeze, creating shade over their bare heads.
A Hindu priest led the prayers, sitting shirtless at the front of the crowd that included the family and nearby neighbours. He cleared his throat frequently and adjusted the dhoti around him, his stomach piling over his waist. They offered petals of jasmine and hibiscus and chrysanthemum. The baby cuddled in H’s lap, occasionally wiggling his arms and feet or gaping his mouth at the relatives. Following the priest’s instruction, H took a small, clean betel leaf and curled it into a semicircle, holding one end to his mouth and one end to the baby’s ear. He whispered the name, “Abhinay Gurunath Narayan,” letting the leaf carry the sound to his son, who chortled and turned his ear to his shoulder. The crowd laughed. Mira dipped her right ring finger in a dish of honey and touched it lightly to baby Abhi’s lip. He flattened his lips together to taste the honey, and the crowd clapped. Then the aunties and uncles rose from their seats to present him with gifts, trinkets, and pieces of baby jewellery wrapped in silver paper.
THAT EVENING, WHEN H joined the other men to watch cricket on the television, Ram took Mira and baby Abhi to an upstairs room. He shooed away the gaggle of children and moved an old wooden chair to the centre of the room. Mira settled into the chair, holding Ravi, and closed her eyes. She heard Ram begin reciting words, his voice coming from different direc-tions as he circled the chair, softly clicking his tongue. It was an experiment, she thought, just an experiment. Except that she didn’t understand the exact starting conditions; she only knew the simple, desired outcome. Mira tried to clear her mind, concentrating on textures, on her bare feet sticking lightly to the red-painted floor. She sensed the crawling of skinny yellow geckos on the wall behind her, making their way up the furni-ture and then darting away from each other. The voices of chatting, laughing, singing women wafted from downstairs, the rhythms of rapidly spoken Havyaka floating through the shuttered, glassless windows, pattering against her ears. Air from the windows brushed against the sweat on her arms and cooled her. The baby didn’t move, but Mira felt his breathing, a little congested, as the small body contracted and expanded sleepily against her chest. Mira’s breathing slowed to match the baby’s, and as she inhaled she could smell Abhi’s light scent, like talcum and cooked almonds and fresh milk.
She thought maybe, too, she could smell camphor, a scent she would always cling to because it reminded her of hope and faith and belief, and of breathing eucalyptus deeply through a cold, and of her brother praying with his back rounded in her mother’s basement prayer room, and of the first time she had learned about sublimation in chemistry class, and of how beautiful she thought it was that a solid could disappear into air.
Acknowlegements
I OWE GRATITUDE to Marc Coté and the rest of the brilliant people at Cormorant Books, without whom this book would still be a file on my computer. Thank you to The Writers’ Trust of Canada for their early support. Thanks, too, to everyone at the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, in particular to Jean McGarry, Alice McDermott, and my workshop classmates for their incisive comments and wholehearted encouragement.