The Most Precious Substance on Earth

by Shashi Bhat

  He’s looking at her now, as he announces that we’ll each give an impromptu one-to-two-minute speech on an object we have with us today. Jules retrieves her purse from the back of her chair where it was hanging, and fumbles through it with one long arm. I can see her holding each item and considering it—wallet, pen, lip gloss. She pulls out her keychain and holds it up for us to see. Dangling from her set of keys is a miniature stainless-steel piano.

  “I’ve played the piano since I was three,” she says. “I think it’s the most fascinating and lovely instrument. Ivory keys attached to tiny hammers, tapping on strings. All inside a hollow block of wood that stands on thin legs. Who came up with that? Bartolomeo Cristofori, I guess.” She laughs and the sound is musical, delicate and falling. “I bought this keychain at a market in London a few months ago, to remind me of this exhibit I saw at the British Library. They had one of Chopin’s handwritten manuscripts just right there in front of me.” The keychain jingles in her grip. She silences it, clasping her hands back together around the keys. She tells us she started composing a few years ago, but that it doesn’t come easily. She had stared at Chopin’s manuscript, moving her face close to the display case, deciphering words in his cramped script.

  “I’ve always been quiet. But at the piano it’s like I have permission to be loud. Soft-loud, pianoforte—that’s where the word piano comes from.”

  When Jules finishes, there’s brief applause. She returns to her chair and fixes her eyes on the table, waiting.

  “That was brilliant—” I begin, but Dave interrupts.

  “You need to speak louder,” he booms. “I doubt the people at the other end of the room could hear you.”

  At this point, the Toastmaster would usually intervene, but today Dave is the Toastmaster.

  “Dave, I’m evaluating this one,” I say.

  “I’m helping her out here,” he says. “Volume is key.”

  “Did you not listen to her speech at all?” I ask. “I don’t really think it’d be better if she had yelled it.”

  “Nobody said anything about yelling,” yells Dave.

  My eyes land on Annie, who slumps in her seat, exhausted. When I turn back to Jules, she’s trembling again, gazing down at the little piano.

  “You have to play to win. Don’t play to avoid losing,” Dave says to Jules. Her eyes are wet, but she doesn’t get up. She doesn’t leave.

  “I’ll go next,” I announce, standing. I reach into the tote bag I’ve brought. I had class right before this, and I’m prepared—in my bag is a binder of lesson plans, a pencil case, miscellaneous personal items, and the conch.

  I hold up the shell, iridescent and otherworldly, heavy and cold, ridges pressing against my hand. The open end is frilled pink like a girl’s dress. Whoever holds the conch has the power. I don’t say um once. I am perfect.

  A Human Shape

  I’M AT MY DESK, eating a sandwich with one hand and marking assignments with the other, when Jessica comes into class early. We’re workshopping her poem today.

  “Hey there,” I say stupidly, as she tucks her lean body neatly into her front-row seat.

  The poem is about her eating disorder, the draft written in loopy handwriting and purple pen. She’s not the first. In the seven years I’ve been teaching, there’s been one nearly every semester. There is something poetic about self-starvation—in its hunger and yearning. When I hear the word fasting, I always picture a waning moon. And though Jessica’s poem includes a tired metaphor about a broken ballerina, she also surprised me by describing hipbones as shark fins jutting from ocean water. It’s clear this poem is about her, which made it hard to give feedback. Try to experiment more with enjambment, I wrote. Too many similes? I queried. I considered writing: This poem makes me want to be sick.

  Grade 10 English is the period after lunch, but I spent my lunch hour visiting my father at the QEII, where he is recovering from a heart attack. I’m hoping I have enough time to finish eating and marking before class. It’s a sad sandwich, the kind an Indian bachelor might make if he were living alone for the first time—potato curry on Dempster’s multigrain, and one slice is the loaf end, because that was all I had left. And now Jessica is sitting in front of me, so I have to eat with restraint. I chew more slowly. I dab the corners of my mouth carefully with a napkin. For the next ten minutes, she watches me eat my lunch, which, I realize, too late, is composed entirely of carbohydrates.

  * * *

  While examining him after his stent surgery, the doctor told my dad, “Oh, you’re Indian. You’ve been eating too much butter chicken!”

  “I told him real Indians don’t eat such things,” my dad said to me. He was sitting up in his hospital bed, the powder blue bedsheet folded beneath his elbows, and the back of his hand thick with medical tape, as he gingerly unwrapped an orange popsicle. “And our South Indian diet is very different than what you see in restaurants here. In fact, it is the utmost healthy cuisine.” After sniffing the popsicle, he set it aside. My dad eats nothing but rice and vegetables. He doesn’t eat butter, salt, cream, or fried foods. I’ve never seen him eat a dessert, though he once claimed to have a weakness for maraschino cherries. He’s been a vegetarian his entire seventy-two years, except for one single bite of a hot dog he took at my tenth birthday party. He still regrets that hot dog: “All of you were eating them,” he said, “you and those friends of yours, eating hot dogs with such relish”—he laughed at his intentional pun—“and I thought, this is a real North American item I must try…”

  “Don’t blame the hot dog,” I told him. “My doctor friend said Indian men have notoriously small arteries.” I was sorry as soon as I said it, because my mother, who I had forgotten was in the room with us, started to cry. She was wearing the same shade of blue as the plastic chair she was sitting on, and it looked as though she’d grown four metal limbs.

  * * *

  One by one, the rest of the students arrive. Some days my class appears particularly hostile—there’s the sullen boy who always crosses his arms, and the girl with the false lashes who rolls her eyes when I use Pretty Little Liars as a hip pop-culture reference (I can’t blame her—the show isn’t even airing anymore). I wonder how aware they are of their facial expressions. The best semesters are when I have nodders, students who nod whenever I say anything even half true. “Poetry is still relevant,” I say, and their heads go up and down like bobbleheads on a jostled shelf. In my Psych 101 class in university, I learned that if you’re talking to someone but don’t know what to say next, you should start nodding. This motivates your conversation partner to keep talking. Nodding can influence the nodder’s own thoughts too, so even if I believed that poetry was entirely irrelevant—which I don’t, but I’m just saying— if I nodded vigorously enough, I could convince myself otherwise.

  I begin class by talking about the episode of Pretty Little Liars I streamed last night and how that show has way too many suspicious hunks. I say something trite about body image and the media, as an easy segue into talking about Jessica’s poem. “Sooo, what did we like about this poem?” There’s a set of identical twin girls who seem to be texting each other. I see one twin type on her phone and the other twin suppresses laughter, and then she types and the first twin smirks. If only they weren’t laughing, I could pretend they were texting about what a great teacher I am.

  “I like that this poem is relatable,” says a boy in a Mooseheads jersey. I’d been calling him Mike the first month of the semester because that’s the name on my attendance sheet, but then he told me he prefers being called Matt—except in the moment I can never remember which name to use. So now I just make the M sound and muffle the part after that.

  “This poem flows really well,” says Nose Ring. I like her, despite her use of poorly defined verbs. She wears unassuming hoodies and keeps the hood on throughout class. The hood hides dark hair, which pairs unusually with her grey eyes. Her appearance
was already sort of bewitching, and then she showed up mid-semester with a pierced nose. If she weren’t my student, I’m pretty sure we would be friends.

  “Well, what’s up with this rhyme scheme?” says my devil’s advocate student, and then I hear “I don’t know if anorexia is really worth writing about” from my controversial student. The class erupts into a fantastic debate about whether some topics are more worthy of a literary rendering.

  “Just look at Seinfeld,” says our one nodder. “It’s a show about nothing!”

  “But that’s not literature!” another student practically shouts. I think he’s on the debate team. I’m not even participating in the discussion, just sitting back and picturing this moment as a scene from one of my favourite movies, Dead Poets Society or Mr. Holland’s Opus or Dangerous Minds or Sister Act 2. Excellent movies about excellent teachers, where all they have to do is deliver some quotable quote—“Play the sunset,” or “Once a marine, always a marine,” or “I’m not really a nun”—for their classes to pass the standardized exam or win the national choir competition. Twenty minutes pass and I conclude the discussion by gently discouraging a suggestion from one of the twins that the poem be written in the shape of an hourglass.

  I give a brief lecture and then assign an in-class writing exercise. Five minutes before class ends, I check to see if they’re still writing. Jessica is not writing. Her head is bent down, almost touching her paper, and her arms are stretched out in front of her, her pencil clenched in both hands. With their flexed tendons, her arms remind me of the braided cables that hold up a suspension bridge. It might be a yoga pose. Her hair, falling over her arms, is of such an indefinite brown that when it goes grey, probably no one will notice.

  * * *

  Two weeks later, I’m marking poems at my parents’ house in the North End. My dad has returned from the hospital and taken a leave of absence from work. He has no plans to retire yet, though he keeps saying he will once his daughter’s future is “settled.” Now he spends his time discovering innovations from a decade ago. “I have registered on Twitter,” he tells me. He’s reading tweets on his laptop screen while another window streams Slumdog Millionaire. Lately, he’s been really into Indians who have achieved Hollywood success. “Indians have come such a long way,” he says, googling pictures of the actors. One features the ragamuffin children from the movie wearing tuxedos to the 2009 Oscars; another has them lined up at the Mumbai visa office. He turns the screen around to show my mom.

  “We were just like them!” he tells her. “Many years back, of course.”

  “Speak for yourself,” says my mother, chopping a large pile of vegetables.

  My dad and I are at the kitchen table, and my mom is cooking dinner with ingredients I’ve never seen in our house—kale and flaxseed and avocados. I’m trying to imagine how she’s going to combine it all, as I watch her pull out an egg carton from the fridge. I am certain my parents have never eaten eggs before, a suspicion that’s confirmed when my mother cracks the egg by tapping on it with a spoon. She then breaks it over a bowl and attempts to separate the white by using the spoon to scoop out the yolk.

  “The nutritionist suggested egg-white omelettes,” my dad says.

  “And salmon.” My mother shakes her head.

  “And she said to stop eating white rice,” my dad adds. “Can you believe it? I’ve been eating white rice two meals a day since I was a small boy.”

  My father launches into a story about growing up in a house in rural Kerala. It sounds like the home of a cartoon gopher: clay walls, red dirt floors, root vegetables piled in a corner on a scrap of burlap. My father’s sister still lives in that house, her back perpetually bent at a ninety-degree angle from years under low ceilings and doorways, and from carrying heavy things for long distances. My father claims that as children they took ten-kilometre walks with bags of rice hoisted up on the tops of their heads. This image clashes with the one I have of him yanking bags of rice from the trunk of his SUV.

  “But one day,” my dad continues, “there was no rice in the house.” They went ten days without rice, eating curries made from gourds as they waited to harvest and sell their areca nuts so they could afford to go to the store in the nearest town. “For an Indian, rice is everything,” he says, closing his eyes. I remember the time he made mushroom risotto from an Uncle Ben’s packet, standing over the stove and stirring, tasting it with a surprised frown on his face, then stirring again, patiently, as though he could coax it into tasting better.

  I don’t know how to respond. How do you trade stories with people who have lived so much more life than you have? With people who have experienced real hunger?

  Despite my hesitation, I root through my pile of poems, find Jessica’s, and read it aloud.

  “I don’t know what to do with this,” I say. “We discussed it in class, but it’s like there’s something missing from the discussion. Everyone loudly tiptoes around the fact that she’s writing about herself. Of course, it’d be worse if they did acknowledge it…”

  “How do you know the poem is true?” asks my mother. “Maybe she just watched some TV show and took the idea from there.”

  “Yeah, that’s possible. But almost everything they write that’s not science fiction is about themselves. Some will even admit it. And the writing just feels real. Like what you’d write in a diary. As her teacher, aren’t I obligated to treat the piece as though it’s true, even if it isn’t?”

  “In that case, don’t you think you should inform someone?” asks my mother. “Her parents? Or the counselling office?” My mom has somehow burned the omelette. She reaches up to turn on the stove fan.

  The guidance office in our school is a volleyball coach in a skirt suit. It’s clear: a girl in my class is gradually destroying her body. But then, aren’t the smokers out by the parking lot doing the same?

  “The first time somebody turned in a poem like this, I handed it back with a note saying she could talk to me if there was a problem, or I could make her an appointment with the counsellor,” I tell my parents. “She never came to me, but one of my student evaluations that year said I should ‘mind my own goddamned business.’ ”

  “Hmm.” My mother scrapes burnt egg from the pan into the garbage disposal. She rinses the pan, gagging at the smell.

  * * *

  Perhaps it’s mass hysteria: all the students in my Grade 10 class start writing about their bodies, too. We read one poem about budding breasts that actually uses the word budding. There’s one about skin picking that I recommend the author submit to the school arts magazine. There are only two boys in my class, and Mike/Matt writes about the pressure to take steroids, and the debater writes about being short. Jessica proposes a class project: “Let’s build a plaster woman.” She explains that we could each contribute a plaster body part, even the boys, to symbolize a non-binary view of gender. Then we will fasten the different pieces together with wire.

  “We could write lines from our poems on it,” suggests the false-lashed eye-roller, and the nodding student begins to nod, and soon everybody is nodding, and I agree, since really you can do anything in an English class as long as you assign a writing response afterwards.

  The next day, they bring in rolls of plaster of Paris bandages and economy-size tubs of Vaseline. We fill empty yogurt containers with water from the washrooms and space them out on the desks. The devil’s advocate, a girl with elfin ears and a pixie haircut, plays music from her tablet, a mournful playlist full of violin solos. It’s not what I thought my students listened to, and I wonder how well I know them, despite my exposure to their thinly veiled autobiographical writing. The humble notes of a bassoon form a soundtrack to nineteen people covering themselves in plaster by dipping crumbly sheets into cold water and moulding them around greased upper arms and calves and necks and noses. The class resembles a plastic-surgery recovery room. The devil’s advocate carefully covers her chin,
the waffle-weave bandages spreading upwards like wings.

  The twins each volunteer a breast, and the controversial student, who’s on the rugby team and wore shorts today, says she’ll do her upper thighs. They build a privacy curtain by draping jackets over chairs and backpacks stacked in a mammoth pile. When Mike/Matt heads over to the pile to retrieve his backpack—“Gotta check my phone,” he says—I point him back to the other side of the room.

  “Can we use your stomach? You have such a flat stomach,” one of the twins says to Nose Ring, who’s sitting in a chair next to Jessica, so deeply buried inside her white hoodie that I think of ET on the bicycle.

  “She’s not interested,” says Jessica, tersely, maybe a little jealous, even before the girl declines.

  “I was going to do my hand,” I tell Nose Ring. “Why don’t you do yours instead?”

  “Yeah, that sounds okay,” she agrees, shrugging. She turns back to the twins and offers them her hand, palm facing up as though to accept spare change.

  “Why would we want your hand?” the second twin asks.

  Jessica says they can use her stomach, and instead of going behind the privacy screen, she lifts up her shirt and knots it high above her midriff. The twins rub Vaseline on her skin and begin applying the plaster, one sheet at a time, sculpting and smoothing the layers over her waist and ribcage until it takes on the shape and rigidity of a corset.