Mira in the Present Tense

by Sita Brahmachari

I look at Nana and she seems to know what I’m thinking, as she so often does.

  “I’m having a good day today, Mira. I’m on a mission and nothing is going to get in my way, except maybe Laila!” she jokes, taking hold of my hand. Mum’s having to wrestle Laila into her pram. She’s arching her body, making her back as stiff as a rod. Mum tries everything to distract her, but in the end she has to press Laila’s tummy hard until she’s forced to fold like a rag doll. Quickly, Mum straps her in, before the next wave of protest begins.

  Laila’s in a rage and the whole street knows about it. I feel sorry for her, because she doesn’t really have a choice about what she wants to do. I’m helping Nana, and Krish is already out there doing his warm-up, but Laila just gets dragged about. She thinks she should be able to choose what she’s going to do too. Mum says when I was little she had a lot more time for me. I think Laila’s decided that she would prefer to help Nana and me with the painting, but there is no way that’s going to happen! I do feel sorry for her, but not that sorry.

  The flat is filled with Laila’s wailing. You can hear her screaming all the way up the path.

  “An excellent protester,” jokes Nana, covering her ears with her hands.

  We sit at the table staring at the white coffin, listening to Laila’s high-pitched wail fade into the distance.

  “Any ideas for painting?” asks Nana.

  I tell her about my dream, not all of it, not about the drowning. I don’t want to upset her because that’s the thing Nana’s most afraid of…drowning. I tell her how the coffin looked in my dream, about the doves, the silver butterflies, the leaping dolphins, and the little dog peeing into the sea. She laughs when I tell her about the dog.

  She puts on a CD. It’s Italian and I like the tune, but I can’t understand the words. The woman’s voice sounds like it’s skipping through the music: “diddli di diddli di diddli di, di di, di di di.” Nana mixes paint and dips a sponge into the colors, dabbing shades of blue, white, and green all over the coffin. As she paints, she tells me what the woman’s singing about…It’s a house, but the house she’s describing is really the whole world. Nana listens and translates.

  I want a house…with bright colors to…delight the eyes.

  I want a house, where you can hear…birdsong.

  I want a house full of laughter and…light…and…love.

  I want a house where no one is…hungry…or lonely…or sad.

  I want a house,

  I want a happy house, diddli di diddli di diddli di di di, di di di.

  “I can translate the diddli di bit,” I tell Nana, which makes her laugh.

  “You’ll make sure they play this at my funeral, won’t you, Mira?”

  I nod, though I’m not sure it’s going to be up to me to decide. What if no one else agrees with me? I’d be left with Nana’s voice ringing in my ears. This is the sort of thing that wakes me up at night worrying. Anyway, I don’t want to think about Nana’s funeral because right now she feels so alive.

  Nana hands me another sponge so I can start on the lid. Next, she takes her brush and dips it into the Lilac Pearl paint, swirling waves onto the sea…waves and gentle ripples. I watch how she works in the colors. Underneath, the paint is wet so the colors run into each other: blues, greens, and ochres flowing into the sea. Nana hands me her brush to finish the waves on the other side of the coffin. Then she takes another brush and starts to paint her first dolphin, leaping out of the waves.

  My nana can transform a hardboard coffin with her imagination. She can make it dance…diddli di diddli di diddli di di di, di di di. Another brush dipped in white paint, this time Titanium White, makes a dove rise out of the spray. Nana doesn’t stop for a second. She’s in the waves, leaping with the dolphins, flying with the doves. Last of all she paints the little dog with his leg cocked over the coffin corner. It’s a Piper dog with a wiry brown coat.

  “Here, Mira, dip your brush in the Yellow Ochre—Piper needs a pee!” she orders, handing me the pot.

  I take hold of the thickest brush and get ready to splatter the pee across the sea. The yellow spray hits the coffin sides, splatting back into Nana’s face.

  “You’ve peed in my face,” she laughs.

  Then she dips her brush into the blue paint and, with her thumb, flicks the end of the brush at me! This time the spray covers my face.

  “You look like Shiva,” she says admiringly.

  When we get our breath back from giggling, Nana dips her hand into the blue paint and presses her palm against mine like a high five. She holds my wrist and presses my right hand hard and flat against the side of the coffin. Then she places her left hand next to mine to make her own handprint as if we were one person with a left and right hand of the same size. Two bright blue handprints, one left, one right, one mine, one Nana’s. Only when you look at the lines on the palms of our hands, can you tell they belong to different people.

  The doorbell rings. I hear Krish’s voice before I open the gate. He pushes past me, practically knocking me over as Mum parks Laila on the porch in her pram.

  “Guess where I came?” Krish shouts.

  “Shhhh,” hushes Mum, pointing to sleeping Laila.

  “Nana, Nana, guess where I came?”

  “Now what was it? The under tens?”

  “Yep!”

  “How far was it?”

  “Five K, and the start was up Parli Hill. That was a killer!”

  “How many runners?”

  “About a hundred.”

  “Considering everything…I would say you came…in the first twenty.”

  Nana plays with Krish like a cat with a mouse.

  “Nope.”

  “I don’t know, Krish…tenth?”

  “Try again.”

  “Fifth? Fourth? Third? Second?”

  Nana knows he’s come first, because Krish wouldn’t be making a fuss if he came second or third or anything, in fact, except first.

  “Nope!”

  “First place!” yells Nana, clapping her hands in excitement and reaching out to give Krish a hug. “It takes such stamina to do what you do. I used to try and race when I was your age, but I just couldn’t keep going.”

  Nor me, I think.

  We first found out that Krish could run when he was six. We were staying with Nana Kath and Granddad Bimal in the Lake District, and we went to this country fair, where they had all sorts of sports including fell running, which basically means you have to run up a mountain and down again. Why would anyone want to do that? Mum said the people entering the race would have trained a lot so it might not be a very good idea, but Krish just walked straight up to the starting tent and signed himself in. Then the man stuck his official race number on his T-shirt. Number fifty-two.

  We watched him running up that fell, above Grasmere Lake, scrambling up and up for miles in the pouring rain and finally disappearing into the cloud. I didn’t like that feeling of not being able to see him; neither did Mum. She paced up and down, biting her lip, her eyes scanning backward and forward across the fell for a glimpse of Krish’s bright blue shirt. Then I saw him, my brother, skidding and sliding down toward the bottom of that mountain, smeared in mud from head to foot, so you could just make out his eyes peering through the dirt as if he’d fallen into a bog. When Krish appeared through the rain-mist, Nana Kath jumped up and down, like she was on springs.

  She announced to everyone around us that number fifty-two was her grandson and that her own Granddad Billy, my great-great-granddad, had been a famous fell runner.

  It looked as if Krish was going to come in third place. Then suddenly, right at the end, he made his arms and legs pump faster, and pelted straight past the other two boys.

  “Aye, there’s no doubting, the lad’s got it in his blood,” croaked the old man in the green tweed cap standing next to Nana Kath.

  Krish had this look of complete determination on his face, like he just had to win. Nana Kath, Mum, Dad, and me, and the old man with the cap were all che
ering him on, and I saw Granddad Bimal, who was sitting in the car, punch the air as Krish ran for the finish line.

  After the race, Krish had to stand in the middle of this podium, on the first place stand, which is the highest bit, and two other boys, who came in second and third place, stood on either side in the pouring rain. The loudspeaker played “God Save the Queen,” like it was the Olympics or something. Dad said that was a bit over the top, but I thought Krish was lucky to be standing on a podium in the middle of those mountains…Even in the pouring rain, it’s one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen. It’s like he belonged. Watching Krish standing there did feel like a historic occasion in our family, even though they announced the winner to be someone else…“Chris Levenson.”

  It was then that I saw Granddad Bimal hoist himself out of the car and walk very slowly over to the trailer where the man was chattering away on the loudspeaker. The next thing I heard was Loudspeaker Man’s voice.

  “I have an apology to make. I am standing here with—”

  “Dr. Bimal Chatterjee,” Granddad interrupted him.

  “Quite, and the doctor lives locally, married to a Cumbrian lass…” That made Nana Kath smile, to be called a lass. “It’s his grandson who has just won the Junior Guides Race. He’s the youngest ever child to win this race, and my apologies because I mispronounced his name. It’s not Chris Levenson…”

  Then I heard Granddad’s voice again with the proper pronunciation of Krishan’s name, which actually sounds quite different from how we all say it.

  “It’s Kri-shan Levenson.” Granddad’s bass-drum voice echoed through those mountains and for a moment people stopped to listen, as if they were trying to identify strange birdsong. It felt as if the mountains were listening too, to the news that there’s another fell runner in the family. Maybe the old man was right…it’s in the blood.

  Since I started my period, every time I think of anything, there’s blood involved somewhere. Krish will never have to feel like I do now; he can just run free, not worrying about what’s happening inside his body. Suddenly Krish and me are living in separate universes because of the blood. I don’t even think I could run today and I have never in my life felt further away from flying.

  We’ve always been different, even in primary school, Krish and me. The things I like to do aren’t really about winning. Even art at school is not the same as it is with Nana. I know I can do it, but I hate the kind of project where you have to look at an artist’s work, like Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, and learn about the techniques he used, and then paint your own vase of sunflowers. You just get everybody trying to do the same thing, and nowhere near as well as Van Gogh, which, to me, is not really the point of art. With art like that, you don’t get a chance to work out of your own imagination, except for once in primary school when there was a competition and we could do anything we wanted. I made this collage with photographs and food and flowers. I used the inside plastic bit from a cookie tin and painted each plastic case a different color, depending on what I was putting in it…the container that had a picture of me swimming in the sea I painted pale silvery gray and stuck a tiny holey stone inside. Then I painted another with a photo of my dad and Krish before they went to a Tottenham match deep blue…that sort of thing. I put an old, golden frame of Nana’s round it and stuck it together with superglue. When it was finished, I was secretly quite proud of it, but even at the time I knew other people would think it was weird so I tried to smuggle it into school under a towel but, of course, on my way in I had to bump into Demi.

  “What’s the big secret?” she asked me, peering under the towel.

  “Nothing,” I lied, pulling away from her, but before I could do anything about it, she’d snatched away the towel so I was left standing in the middle of the playground holding this enormous frame. I felt as if I was standing there naked.

  “What is that supposed to be?” she shrieked at the top of her voice, which, like a magnet, drew her crew toward her. She might as well have stood there with a sign advertising an opportunity to tease Mira Levenson…and of course her friends came running.

  The worst bit is I actually won that competition.

  “A most original entry,” Mr. Needham announced as he examined the frame with a puzzled expression. I had to walk up the aisle to the accompaniment of sniggering behind my back. Whenever I think about it, it still makes me cringe. I could just imagine what they were thinking (for “original” replace with “weird”). That’s nothing like the glory of winning a race, is it?

  “What happened to you two?” Mum jolts me back into the room, staring from Nana to me. “Have you had a paint fight or something?”

  “We’ve been having a wild time,” Nana laughs. “What do you think, Uma?” Nana stands aside so Mum can see the coffin, which we have, more or less, finished.

  Krish walks round it, his eyes filling up.

  “You’ve made it look like a painting.”

  “It is a painting, duh!” I say.

  “No it’s not, it’s a coffin,” shouts Krish, the tears stinging his eyes.

  “It’s a painted coffin,” explains Nana, wrapping her arms around Krish.

  “I don’t get it. What’s the point of painting it if it’s just going to be burned?”

  “What’s the point of running in a race?” argues Nana.

  “Because I love running.”

  “Well, I love painting. This coffin will probably be my most valuable work of art.”

  “I don’t get it, Nana,” Krish sulks.

  “Because the dolphins and the doves and the waves will stay in people’s memories…just like you, winning that race today. I bet your mum will never forget that,” Nana says, turning to Mum, who nods and smiles but says nothing because she’s on the verge of crying too.

  Krish collapses onto Nana’s sofa, his stick-thin legs folding under him.

  “You look all washed up,” says Nana, slumping down by his side.

  “So do you,” Krish lobs back.

  Nana tips Krish’s chin upward, planting a kiss on his cheek. Krish squirms out of Nana’s grasp as he attempts to rub her blue handprint off his face.

  “I suppose we may as well all be blue together,” sighs Nana.

  I pack my school bag.

  Tuesday, 3 May

  Mobile

  Books

  Pencil case

  Gym uniform

  Packed lunch

  and…

  Panty liners, sanitary towels…even some tampons…some of each…just in case. Even the names are a nightmare. I mean “sanitary towels”—could they think of a worse name for them? But then I imagine myself getting a job in advertising and having to invent a name for all this period stuff, and guess what I come up with? A big fat blank. The advert I find the funniest is the one where the pads have wings and they have little pictures of birds flying around, because the last thing you would ever feel like doing when you’ve got your period is flying. I mean, as if, with that pad stuck inside your pants and the ache in your belly.

  In my mind, it wasn’t supposed to happen like this. Millie was going to be first, just like when we started wearing bras. Up until now Millie has always gone first with everything. This is how I imagined it. Millie would start her periods and I would follow maybe a couple of months after. I wouldn’t have wanted it to be too long after, just enough time for Millie to have become a specialist in all things period-y. We would have had one of our random sessions round at hers when no one else was in, like we did the time when we were trying to work out what bra size we were. It turned out there wasn’t a size small enough (!), but we still tried on her mum’s silky bras while Millie started up a commentary about how the “fashion note” of the season was to wear your oversized bra on the outside of your clothes.

  “Prada is so last year! Proudbra is this season’s must have item.”

  Then, as we heard Millie’s mum coming in, we practically died of laughing trying to undo the catch on the bra I was wear
ing, and stuff all the underwear back in her drawer before we got caught.

  So, in my head, Millie and me would have had a laugh about the whole period nightmare and, by the time I got to the stage of packing my bag, I would definitely know what I should be using (and how to use it), because Millie would have told me. Instead I just feel a bit sick worrying about the whole thing.

  “Are you ready, Mira?” Mum shouts up the stairs. “It’s nearly half past eight. What are you doing up there?”

  What I am now doing is dabbing some of Mum’s foundation onto my enormous spot, but the make-up just makes it a million times more obvious, so I end up washing it off.

  Just one last thing I say to myself as I stare at my volcano-sized pustule in the mirror…I close my eyes and beg Notsurewho Notsurewhat to please, please, please make Jidé Jackson be off school today so he doesn’t see me like this. For a moment I think about trying it on for another sickie, but then the letterbox clanks and Millie makes my mind up for me.

  “All right?” asks Millie, her owl eyes zoning right in on my zit.

  Millie is far too polite to comment. I should tell her right now. This is the moment I should tell her, and then, when she starts her period, it would just be like the bra thing all over again, but the other way round, with me helping her. Except it won’t be like that. This is so unfair of me, but I feel a bit annoyed with her for not being able to help me out. It’s not her fault that I’ve started first, but in a way I feel as if she’s let me down.

  “All right,” I say.

  There is a Notsurewho Notsurewhat after all! At morning registration Miss Poplar announces that Jidé and Ben are out at some sporting event. At least that’s one less thing to worry about. Maybe the pustule will have shrunk by tomorrow.

  Each time I go to the loo, I am convinced that someone will hear me unzipping my bag and unwrapping the pads. I swear suddenly the acoustics in the girls’ loos are of a concert-hall standard. Just undoing the stupid pads, each wrapped in its own “discreet envelope” cover, makes so much noise I have to flush at the exact same time as I open the packet and tear off the sticky strip. It works if you get the timing right.