The Family Took Shape

by Shashi Bhat

  She brought the vacuum cleaner down from upstairs, hoist- ing the cord over her shoulders, bracing the appliance’s weight against her body. She went to plug it in, but there was a spider waiting on top of the electric socket.

  Another spider appeared from under an electric brass lamp, coming purposefully towards her, and she screamed. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d heard her voice so loud, and was embarrassed by it, but secretly pleased. And anyway, the basement was soundproofed. The spider actually skittered away. She screamed again, first at that single spider, then at all spiders. The sound rolled around the corners of the room. Mira screamed unintelligible words, and then curse words that she had heard before, which seemed to be waiting inside her. She felt foolish, too loud, but ignored it, hoping some entity in the room would understand her and carry the message across the country to Vancouver, to Lucy Chin, who had never heard Mira’s voice above its shallow whisper.

  THE NEXT WEEK, when she went to the basement, she broke something on purpose. On the curved edge of the wooden shelf of gods, there stood a blue porcelain urn. Her father had built the shelf when he was alive, had sawed it and attached the swooping brackets in the basement, before the basement was finished — she imagined him with a workshop set up in one corner, sanding lovingly, sawdust suspended in air. He’d bought the urn, too.

  She’d come down to the basement not to clean it, but because her mother had sent her to get the money that was inside this urn, and bring it back upstairs. “I’m pretty sure there’s money in there, there should be,” her mother said. But when Mira opened it, there was only a piece of paper that said “iou $463.” I owe you. An iou to God. I owe you, God. This was the jar where they put their offerings to God, a dollar or two, every time they prayed. It had been her father’s idea, to collect it over time and donate it to the temple, though the temple had its own urns, more like filing cabinets, with rectangular slots for coins. When they went to the temple — not often, once every couple months — her mother would reach into her black swoop of a purse and pull out quarters, giving them to Mira and Ravi to deposit. Mira always listened for the clink, estimating how much money was inside by this sound. She wondered if one of the priests was assigned to open it, and if he ever took any for himself. Or maybe all the priests sat together on the floor and rolled the coins into paper for the bank, and then they all went to the bank together, swathed only in white cotton, each of their wire-haired potato chests covered only by a diagonal sash.

  She supposed there were obligations you had to God; she could guess this from the religious stories her mother told her. You were obligated to be good, to be honest, to respect others, to treat people fairly — there was a lot of overlap, it seemed, with the pointedly secular discussions of character and values they had at school. “We must learn to respect others,” the teacher had said, and one boy who nobody liked had raised his hand and asked, “Why?” and then “Why?” again at her response, and he whyed approximately a million times at every- thing the teacher said, and though her class was annoyed with the boy, and though it was only a class full of nine-year-olds, even they could see that the teacher couldn’t think of a good answer.

  But to owe good behaviour to God made more sense. God had given you basically everything — life, your family, good weather — probably God was the one who had made Lucy Chin move away. She had certainly prayed for it. It was okay with her if being good was a favour, if everything good that happened was a debt to be repaid. But if bad things happened — here was where it became complicated — didn’t she owe God less? Every time her brother started laughing uncontrol-lably at the dinner table, every time Lucy Chin bruised her calves, was it not a deposit back into her bank, a reduction in her loan, one fewer occasion where goodness was expected of her? Her mother owed God four hundred and sixty-three dollars. She would have to be better, now, or find the money somewhere. It had probably gone to her brother’s therapy group.

  The porcelain urn had taken on the cold temperature of the basement. She felt it in her hands and then she didn’t, because she had thrown the urn on the floor. It broke beautifully. And she had never heard such a satisfying sound as that smash. The pieces were blue on their surface — a dark, glazed, kiln-developed blue — but white on their insides, unfinished and dry. Immediately, she went for the dustpan and bent to sweep, and even that was satisfying, picking the big pieces out first and then brushing up the small ones, catching stray lint along with them.

  It was the first time she’d ever intentionally ruined anything, a sort of coming-of-age. And even so, it wasn’t like she’d planned it, or that her intention had been the ruining. There was a smooth, solid mass of porcelain in her hands, and then there wasn’t, then it was sharp pieces on the floor. It was a transformation. What she had intended had been only to let go of it, to feel that instant of something to nothing.

  “How much was in there?” her mother asked her when she came upstairs. Her mother was folding laundry with the televi-sion on.

  “I couldn’t find it,” said Mira, and her mother said it must be behind one of the God statues, or moved into a cupboard, and that she would look for it herself later.

  MIRA KNEW HER family didn’t have any money. It had been a surprise when, two weeks ago, her mother had arrived home from work with a stack of flattened boxes tied to the top of her car. She took them down and asked Ravi to help her carry them into the house, which he did, bending at the waist and balancing them on his back, so that he looked like an airplane.

  Inside, they began assembling the boxes, and Mira whis-pered, “What are they for?” She wanted to think her mother had brought them home for a game, for building cardboard cities in the basement or backyard — they could paint black silhouettes of skyscrapers over the boxes, the windows yellow Post-it squares, and a background of blue night sky, with a slim moon and a sparse spatter of stars, and she could turn off all the lights and go inside and take a bag of potato chips and eat them slowly, crunching and letting her tongue absorb the salt and wondering if anybody knew where she was — but these boxes were brand new, not old supermarket boxes, and her mother wouldn’t have spent money for no reason, and she was nine now, she’d known people who’d moved.

  Later that week, her mother drove them to see the new house, just the outside of it, because there were people still living there. It was in their neighbourhood, basically, not far. “Look, a brick driveway, Ravi,” her mother said. The house was inoffensive — a brick driveway, one young tree, a vague rock garden in a kidney shape — but it looked like a miniature house. Their house now had rooms that nobody slept in and closets full of her father’s engineering textbooks. Where would the textbooks go?

  The living room Persian rug stretched to a full three times Mira’s height. During house cleaning, she and Ravi would each take an end and roll it up so her mother could sweep the hardwood — the rug was heavy and they breathed hard with the effort, and rolling it revealed the satiny label sewn on back that said BLUE TABRIZ and EATON’S. It had a gorgeous fringe that her mother scolded her once for braiding. She lay on it sometimes and counted the hidden creatures in its pale blue and red and black and amber patterns; there were leaping horses and morose lions, mountain goats and strange flowers and leafy branches, arranged symmetrically between its intricate borders. There could not be a room in the new house that was big enough for this rug. She confirmed this with her mother, who said, hesitantly, “Well, maybe we’ll roll it up at one end and hide it behind the sofa.”

  In a miniature house, she didn’t think they’d all be able to avoid each other when they wanted to. If she cried in her room, everyone would hear her and come running. When Lala Aunty came over, she’d be unable to escape her voice. Other than houses, what else of their possessions might be traded in for miniature? Maybe they would drink from smaller mugs and eat from smaller bowls, to make room in the cupboard. They’d roll the rugs in half, saw the furniture down until it fit against the na
rrow walls. She would have to stop eating potato chips, to keep from taking up more room.

  Mira’s mother gave Mira and Ravi each a large box and told them to pack up their rooms. First Ravi tried to put the comforter from his bed in his box (he didn’t even try to fold it, Mira observed, just piled it in and punched it down with his hands, but it rose back up like pizza dough), but their mother saw him and laughed for the first time all week and said, “Just focus on the toys and clothes for now, Rav.”

  Mira put her many collections of erasers and stickers and My Little Ponies into the donation box. She kept her rock collection, though she’d lost some interest when, to save money, she’d stopped buying those mini chunks of pyrite and mica at the store and now picked her rocks off the street (it was stupid, she knew, because they all looked the same). She folded her clothes up into neat small bundles, except for her T-shirts, which she used to wrap up each of her more breakable possessions — ceramic cats from the dollar store, a hanging mobile of papier-mâché butterflies she’d made — and she put the plushest toys on top, though she was growing out of them, and doubted if there would be room in the new house. There wouldn’t be room for any of their family’s silly collections. The miniature walls would not have shelves built by her father, to line with Ravi’s Hot Wheels cars. It would help them out a little, if they opened up the box marked “Norman Rockwell Decorative Plates,” and found all the contents broken.

  THE FIRST INDICATOR that they needed money had been when she’d overheard her mother tell Lala Aunty that Mira’s father hadn’t had any life insurance. Obviously, Mira had thought, since he had died. “You paid everything out of pocket?” Lala Aunty had asked.

  “At least cremation was cheaper than burial,” her mother had responded, monotone, before dropping her head into the pile of receipts on the kitchen table.

  She wasn’t completely sure what life insurance was, but funeral costs, Mira realized, must have been expensive. She had been too young to remember the funeral, but knew there had been two hundred people present (“So many people loved your dad,” Lala Aunty had said to her once) and knew that food cost money and that even the temple charged for use of their hall. But the funeral had been several years ago; they must have paid it off by now.

  Since then, Mira had kept track of the other costs — the house, the car, the phone, the electricity, the water. When Mira turned the faucet on to fill the bathtub or to rinse a dish, she considered how much the water was worth. She paused the water when she brushed her teeth. How did they measure how much water she was using? she wondered, unsettled by the idea she had of a large basin in the sewers below her house, collecting what went into their drain. She imagined this basin with markings on the side, like a big measuring cup, collecting and measuring every time she rinsed and spat, every time she peed. Was the amount of water that came out when you peed the same as the amount of water you drank? How did they discount the times when you drank juice, or had water at somebody else’s house, or used somebody else’s bathroom? She sensed that there were gaps in her knowledge, and sought to fill them. She wanted to know the price of electricity; she wanted to know why the numbers on the signs outside of gas stations changed so often, and how much it cost to drive from here to her school or from here to the Science Centre, to explain why it was that her mother took the car out late at night sometimes to fill the tank — “I have to get it while it’s cheap!” her mother would say, grabbing the keys off the elephant-shaped key rack on the wall, gone for fifteen minutes and then back, the car humming and full.

  What else cost money? Her brother’s therapy group, which met once a week, her brother’s drawings lessons (Mira had discontinued), Mira’s piano lessons, Mira’s school trip to the Science Centre, Mira’s clothes (she was shooting up), Ravi’s clothes (he was picky about clothes), the food they ate, which was always plentiful but always what she knew to be cheap because she saw her mother compare labels at the grocery store. Luckily, South Indians generally ate rice and lentils. It was the granola bars that her mother fretted over, the cookies and the potato chips and the imported fruit (they all preferred mangoes to apples), which disappeared so quickly from their house. Sometimes Mira and her mother spent an hour and a half at the grocery store. They would put an item in their cart and then halfway to the other end of the store, her mother would decide they didn’t need it, so she would walk back to return it or get a different brand, or she would decide the sale was so good that she would go and get three more. Then Mira waited with her just next to the row of checkout lines, while her mother went through the cart, pointing pointing pointing at each thing, double-checking her coupons and adding the prices quietly in Kannada, the language they spoke at home. Mira liked that, how her mother did her math in another language.

  Her mother mowed the lawn herself, waving away the boy going door-to-door. The mail was always bad news. They threw the catalogs out to avoid temptation. The bills were sorted and sorted again. Her mother only called India once a month on Sundays, chatting in a fake cheery voice, and afterwards she would sit in the family room alone and watch a Hindi movie on tv, and even Ravi knew not to bother her for those three or four hours. And then they had cancelled the cable and lost the Asian Television Network, so her mother flipped through their few channels, sighing and saying that there was nothing to watch.

  ONE MORNING, FOUR days before they were to move out, Mira had woken up on her twin mattress — which her mother had placed on the floor after dismantling the bed frame — and looked up to towers of boxes on each side of her, which had been shoved into Mira’s room to make space elsewhere, and, still half-asleep, she thought she saw them shift. They hadn’t been careful about placement, and the boxes surrounded her, like the city she had imagined building when the boxes first arrived, except precarious, and full of heavy things. She must have kicked one in her sleep. She was awake now, and sure the box had moved — it had moved, in fact, was moving now. Mira darted, feet tangled in the blankets and then bless-edly free, while the boxes fell, toppling and crashing over the bed, like toy blocks, like life-sized Jenga pieces.

  “Oh my god,” her mother said, in the doorway suddenly, in her pyjamas.

  Mira was fine, but in the other room, Ravi, frightened by the sound of the crash, screamed and twisted in his blankets, pressed his eyes together until their lids made a crescent shape, held his hands to his ears.

  AT BREAKFAST, RAVI was still upset. He slapped his hands on the table and Mira’s cereal shook in its bowl. “Why did the boxes fall?” he asked. “WHY DID THEY FALL?”

  “They fell because we didn’t stack them properly,” said Mira’s mother. “From now on, we’ll be more careful. We’ll keep them away from the beds.”

  “We’ll be more careful,” said Ravi.

  “Yes,” said their mother. She was making lunches, putting chicken nuggets in a red thermos.

  “But why did they fall?”

  “They weren’t balanced,” said their mother.

  “But will the other boxes fall, too?”

  “No, we’ll keep them balanced,” said their mother. She stared off for a minute. “Balanced like a good breakfast,” she said.

  “But couldn’t they still fall?” Ravi said.

  “STOP IT!” shouted Mira. “Stop asking about it!”

  “Mira,” her mother said sharply.

  Ravi put his hands to his ears again, his elbows two triangles.

  “STOP IT!” Mira shouted again, and stood up quickly, leav- ing her cereal. She stomped up the stairs, but couldn’t stomp very loudly, because there were boxes and bags and a stack of magazines blocking her way. Her mother was coming after her, and Mira went faster, leaping over a radio, sidestepping a basket of laundry.

  “Mira, we don’t have time for this!”

  Mira chose the bathroom instead of her own room, because the bathroom door had a lock. She stomped in and locked the door and turned around. She was seethi
ng. How dare he act as though the boxes had fallen on him, as though he were the one who had awakened to near-death? It was she who had scrambled from her bed, to desperately find footing in a half-dream world where everything seemed to be falling. She took her fists now and squeezed them and looked around the room and spotted the orchid plant, in a slim green pot, which she picked up and threw as hard as she could on to the floor. As she threw the orchid, she let out a noise, a “rrraaaa” sort of noise. Her mother kept rattling the door handle.

  On the bathroom floor, the orchid’s soil had dirtied the grout of the tile. The orchid itself was intact, but its roots had been exposed, and stuck out hideously from the base of the stem. The pot was shattered, and under it, one of the bathroom floor tiles had broken in four pieces. Mira covered the broken tile with the bathroom rug and unlocked the door.

  THE BEST, MOST well-behaved child Mira could think of was Prahalad, who wasn’t somebody she knew personally, but rather a boy from a myth, the son of a king. “King Hiranyakaship was a terrible man and a terrible king. He hated God. He committed atrocities,” he mother told her. Her mother told Mira and Ravi this story when they had committed their own atrocities. Atrocities, Mira loved the word, simultaneously space-age and ancient, chemical and dark; she wanted to brew atrocities in a laboratory, build atrocities on the moon. Lord Brahma, whose three crowned, white-bearded heads Mira could picture vividly because she had seen his character on the long-running Mahabharat tele-vision series, had granted King Hiranyakaship the boon of near-immortality. “All living beings must face death,” Mira’s mother said Lord Brahma had told the king, when he had asked to live forever. So instead Brahma had given him the choice of how he would die, and the king, cleverer than most villains, chose the finest and narrowest of death moments, deciding he would be killed by someone who was neither man nor beast, in a place neither inside nor outside, at a time neither day nor night.