by Shashi Bhat
If Mira hadn’t drawn the initial dots neatly enough, or if they found no coffee table nearby and while playing had to balance the paper on Mira’s father’s wobbling leg, the squares took on the distorted look of longitude and latitude lines on a globe, narrowing and widening from one end of the page to the other. “A Mercator projection,” her father said once, and drew a world map on their finished grid lines, raggedy islands up top. He drew India as a rough-edged diamond. Mira asked him if he would spend the five-cent bill afterwards, and he said he would, “On a lawnmower,” but added, “unless you want it,” but Mira said no, because she liked the idea of his spending it, of handing the bill over to the cashier, who would smile and accept it into the circulation of bills — or did Canadian Tire money get reused? She wasn’t sure, but imagined it passing from hand to hand, each person adding another island, another lake, another provincial boundary.
It wasn’t rude, exactly, to play this game at dinner parties, since they played while Mira’s mother carried the conversation, or while the husband of the hosting couple was off getting paper plates or when there were so many people in attendance that Mira’s father didn’t have any conversational obligation. And anyway, they attended many dinner parties, as many as two a weekend, with sometimes a lunch party in between. The parties were casual affairs — buffet-style, children invited. Her father did sometimes have to pause the game for later when the conversation took off and he opined intensely about what- ever was happening then — the Gulf War, Roberta Bondar in space — and Mira would use that time to draw more dots. For his birthday the year she was five, she had taken a sheet of large-sized chart paper and marked it with hundreds of dots in different colours of marker. Her mother helped her spell “Ultimate Dots and Squares” at the top. She presented it to him on the morning of his birthday and he pretended to faint at the sheer volume of dots, and the mere thought of having to fill it, and she could tell that, under his pretending, he really was surprised. She overheard him tell her mother that it must have taken forever to draw those dots — “She’s so diligent,” he’d said, and she’d known diligent meant something good. Her father had died before they had used up all the dots and drawn up all the squares.
One of her father’s favourite shirts to wear to dinner parties actually had a grid pattern on it, like a sheet of graph paper, a wonderful coincidence, and after he died she found it in the laundry, a pen still in the pocket, and she’d taken the pen and coloured in exactly one square near the hem. After the funeral, Lala Aunty came and did all their laundry, and when Mira checked afterward, she saw that the square had stayed, faded, bleeding at the corners, but its shape otherwise intact.
HERE THEY WERE now, at another dinner party; it had been five years since the last. Lala Aunty had invited them, though their mother had tried to decline, the way she’d declined every dinner party since her husband’s death,
“Have one samosa, one at least,” said Lala Aunty, holding out the plate as she tipped her body in a cartoonish bow.
“One samosa? I could eat ten samosas!” said Baskar, the man lounging next to Mira’s mother on the couch, but he only took one.
Mira didn’t think anybody could eat ten samosas, especially not these ones made by Lala Aunty. (Lala Aunty’s real name was Lalitha Aurora, but she insisted on the nickname. “La, la, la! like a song,” she would say.) Mira took a samosa just to see Lala’s face light up at the lighter plate.
Unlike most aunties, Lala couldn’t cook at all. She thought she could, and it would have made more sense if she could have, since she hosted an Indian healthy cooking radio show called Eating with Aunty. The problem was that she liked to impro-vise. When Mira’s family first arrived at Lala’s house, the aunty had sat them down in the living room — Mira’s mother next to the man named Baskar and Mira in the chair across from them, while Ravi contentedly chose a cushion on the carpet — and she described the recipe to them all in great detail. This time, she had baked the samosas rather than frying them and she’d replaced the usual potato filling with a puree of vegeta-bles she declared more nutritional, such as Swiss chard and broccoli, which, after being swirled in the food processor, had become too watery to hold up the samosa’s triangular shape.
Mira heard Baskar’s teeth crunch over something as he chewed and she hoped it was cumin. Her family and Baskar were the only guests so far, although the party had technically started an hour earlier. Mira saw Lala’s husband hover roundly in the background, waiting for a good time to say hello, even though any time would have been fine. He peered out at them and smiled from various doorways, and eventually came out and said hello.
“Hello!” he said, “I am Lala’s husband!” He spoke to Baskar, whom he hadn’t yet met.
Uncle beamed at Baskar. He bowed exactly as his wife had and took Mira’s mother’s hand and then Mira’s own hand, kissing each lightly and off-centre, then darted away like a woodland creature.
THE REASON MIRA and her family came was that they had spent approximately three months in their new house, but had still barely unpacked anything. The kitchen was furthest along due to necessity; the toaster came out one day when Ravi wanted an English muffin, and Lala had unpacked the rice cooker for them, along with other small appliances, cutlery, trivets.
“Come help me, Shilpi,” Lala Aunty had said to Mira’s mother, tilting her head and beckoning like a movie heroine. “How am I to know where you want all this-that things kept?” Mira’s mother had responded by putting a cup or two on the shelves.
The fridge door had no magnets on it and the linen closet had only one towel per person. The rest of the towels, along with the extra bedsheets and pillow cases, remained neatly folded, bars of Mysore sandalwood soap tucked between them for freshness, inside one of the many boxes that crowded their new, shrunken home.
They had come to the party for a break from boxes and bare walls, and to please Aunty, who had known Mira’s father for several years. He had been a chemical engineer, and she had interviewed him once on her show. Lala Aunty never lost contact with a single person she had a conversation with. She invited bank tellers out to lunch with her and, after meeting the Canadian prime minister’s wife once at a cultural confer-ence, had obtained her home phone number.
Mira had never been to Lala Aunty’s house, though her mother had. The home’s decor seemed to mimic the decor of Aunty’s favourite South Indian restaurant, Udupi Palace, which served the exact same dishes Mira’s mother made at home every day. (She still cooked them dinner; it wasn’t like she’d abandoned them. But she cooked with one strange, small frying pan, without hunting for pans of a more appropriate size.) On Lala Aunty’s wall someone had placed ornate plaster carvings that looked heavy but probably weren’t, portraying Bharatanatyam dancers with imprecise faces, noses placed too high and mouths that smirked too readily. Stainless steel dishware crowded into glass shelves around the room, underlit with neon pink light. A pewter salt-and-pepper set in the corner nearest to Mira identically matched the shakers at Udupi Palace. There was also an oil painting of a warped bowl of fruit, which Lala Aunty told them she had done herself. It was so tall and so wide that, rather than hanging it, she had stood the painting on the floor, after pushing aside the red IKEA furniture to make room.
Predicting the absence of children her age, Mira had brought a book with her, a book of ghost stories and urban legends, tales of chicken-fried rats and oven-baked babies which she read dutifully along with the ones she liked better — the one about a woman’s neck held on by ribbon (how could a ribbon secure a neck?), the one about the boy whose skillful hiding in a game of hide-and-seek got him trapped in an airtight chest in the attic. She propped the book on the fat arm of the chair, so during the occasional boring passage she could glance over it at her mother.
Gradually, more guests started to arrive. Lala Aunty offered to take their coats even though it was summer and nobody had any coats. “May I take your jacket?” she asked one wo
man in a fitted sleeveless selwar kameez.
“Ohhh, Lala, you and your jokes!” the woman said.
A few of the guests were radio folk and some were neigh-bours, others colleagues of Uncle, who taught Hindi classes at the university. Some guests seemed entirely arbitrary, like Baskar, who turned out to be a manager at a factory that made computer ink, and couldn’t remember how he had met the Lalas at all. “Here or there,” he said to Mira’s mother when she asked. Baskar balanced his quarter-eaten samosa on his napkin, almost dropping it when Mira’s mother explained that she’d met Lala Aunty at her husband’s funeral. “Oh, I’m very sorry,” said Baskar, and moved exactly one centimetre away from her on the sofa, so their legs no longer touched. Baskar wore appalling, frayed, bulky jeans that caused Mira to remember her father’s perfectly ironed pants and how he’d once demonstrated to her his sitting-down test to make sure his hems didn’t rise and reveal too much of his socks.
Maybe twenty people had arrived, and more kept coming.
“It has been a thousand-million years since we have seen one another!” exclaimed Lala to one extremely thin woman. Lala Aunty had a habit of hyperbolizing time, of exaggerating a few days into millions of years, and this habit gave such greetings and many of her anecdotes a fairytale beauty. Lala Aunty embraced the woman, whose elbows pointed out like warped branches.
Shoes piled up near the entrance and two or three indus-trious five-year-olds began moving the surplus to the laundry room. Ravi helped them, too, though he was almost thirteen now.
“Not mine!” said one old man, shaking his head amiably at Ravi, who had tried to nab his loafers before he’d even removed them. “I need the support of my orthotics.” Ravi moved on to the next pair and the man wore his shoes for the rest of the evening, happily trampling many other people’s feet, socked and bare.
“Sit down, sit down,” said Lala Aunty, guiding the ladies and men into the living room. Two more people crammed on to the sofa with Mira’s mother and Baskar — suddenly their legs were touching again — and four more pulled chairs from the dining room and arranged them nearby. A scattered assortment of candy-coloured cushions lay around the floor as extra seating. The guests crossed their legs or pulled their knees to their chests or searched the other rooms for chairs (depending on whether they’d worn skirts or pants or Indian clothes), and some stood seatlessly in between, so there were four levels of heads — floor sitters, sofa sitters, chair sitters, and standers, divided like the distinct layers of trees in a rain-forest. Some children, including Ravi, bounced around like frogs.
“Do you have a pen?” Mira asked Baskar, eyeing the front of his maroon golf shirt, which bore no pockets. She was bored of her book — the baked baby story was a bit much given the meal she was about to eat — and thought she might invent a game to play alone with paper and pen. Solitary dots-and-squares, or a word game.
“Ahh … let’s see … no miss, I do not,” said Baskar, smiling at Mira and then her mother.
“But,” Mira asked carefully, “didn’t you just say you work at an ink factory?”
“I do, yes,” said Baskar, “but it’s computer ink, toner. I can’t even remember the last time I used a pen myself.”
Mira returned to her book and imagined Baskar typing out his grocery lists on his computer, printing them out. How did he check the items off the list?
Lala Aunty moved through the guests, offering plates of samosas and crackers and a lumpy pumpkin pâté. She brought out sparkling bottles of pomegranate and mango juice and poured them scarlet and yellow into glasses of various odd heights. “We have wine, too!” she exclaimed, and everybody looked around excitedly because none of them ever drank wine.
Uncle handed out napkins at his wife’s request. When he’d finished, he went nimbly from one end of the room to the other and then to the adjacent rooms, turning lamps and light switches on and off. After each switch, he stopped and looked at Lala Aunty, as though considering which tones of light made her look best.
The thin elbowy woman rested her weight on the back of Mira’s chair and began a conversation with Mira’s mother.
“Do you listen to Lala’s show?” the woman asked.
“Every Sunday morning,” Mira’s mother said. Mira thought of the Sunday mornings in the new house, when she ate a slow breakfast of toast on a napkin so she wouldn’t have to dirty one of the four unpacked plates, and Ravi, having usually finished his toast in two bites, pleating it first like a paper fan, lay on his stomach in the hallway, silently drawing pictures, the crayon patterns taking up the grain of the wood floor, while their mother turned the volume way up so Lala Aunty’s voice would fill the house and make it feel less new. Ferment the batter overnight in the oven, said the disembodied radio Aunty, no heat needed, off only, and leave room in the pot, don’t get greedy about it, or the batter will overflow and then your oven will smell. Her mother wrote it all down, sometimes verbatim, like a handwriting exercise.
“You know, her recipes turn out pretty well when you make them yourself,” said the woman.
“Have you tried the samosas?” asked Mira’s mother.
“Oh yes, they are awful, aren’t they? One time,” she confided, “Lala made some kind of sweet. We couldn’t tell what sweet it was supposed to be, and I think she used Splenda, but you know you can’t use anything but sugar with Indian sweets, and anyway they were so hard we couldn’t bite them, and you know what my son told me he did? He said he just tossed it up in the air — in the air! — and didn’t even check to see where it landed. Somewhere in this house, there is an unidentifiable sweet, rotting under a table or inside a plant.” They both gig- gled and then the woman fell awkwardly silent. They took large bites of their samosas when Lala Aunty came around.
“Stop eating those samosas,” she said. “It’s dinner time!”
Everybody who had been there before cringed. A line formed at the food table. Uncle handed them plates. The table was set with a teal tablecloth and dotted with candles that kept being nearly knocked over. The foods didn’t seem to be Indian, but rather sort of fusion concoctions in swampy shades of brown and green.
“Is this a lasagna?” asked a short man with a booming voice that Mira recognized from the Hindi music radio program.
“Ahh, not quite,” said Lala Aunty, serving him a gigantic amount. “It’s more of a savoury pie.”
“Yum, I love banana bread,” said a woman with a blue hat, as Lala Aunty placed a piece on her plate.
“That’s actually a lentil loaf,” she said.
The doorbell rang then, but nobody answered it. The door opened and a woman stood there in a full silk sari, looking unsure of whether to enter. Lala dropped the serving spoon she was holding and hurried to the door.
“Come in, my dear,” she said, “You’ve been a hundred hours standing on this porch.” In three seconds, she had taken the woman’s imaginary coat and ushered her to the front of the food line. She loaded the woman’s plate without speaking.
Mira watched Ravi take a lot of everything and wondered if he would regret it. He went to sit in another room, one that had a television, with the littlest children. Book tucked under armpit, Mira reached for a serving spoon towards the safest-looking rice dish. Noting her hesitation, Lala Aunty packed Mira’s plate with everything else, far more food than she would have taken herself.
“Don’t be shy, come have more!” said Lala Aunty.
“I will, it all looks so good,” said Mira, full of manners, because looking at the food, arranged and bedecked, she had the sudden feeling that Lala Aunty must have spent a lot of time.
She turned to sit and saw that a woman had taken her chair, and her mother’s too — at the latter she felt an instant of glad-ness that her mother’s leg wouldn’t be sitting next to Baskar’s anymore. She located a spot on the carpet to sit, since the cush-ions were all taken, and moved her fork to sort the foods into discrete
mounds. The food gave her something to do, and since she didn’t feel particularly drawn to eating it, she would eat it slowly; it would use up a fair amount of time.
Her mother seemed to be having more difficulty. She balanced her plate in one hand and picked up a glass of water from the clear row of glasses at the end of the table. Turning around to go back to the sofa, Mira could tell she was being careful not to tilt her plate and drop food on the heads of people who sat around her legs. Mira noticed before her mother did that the late-arriving woman had usurped her seat on the sofa. The chairs and floor cushions were all taken. People shared cushions, their backs meeting. Some squashed together on armchairs, and others suspended themselves, feet waving, on the soft red arms of the sofa. She didn’t know anybody well enough to share seating, and she could have just sat on the carpet like Mira, but then, only children sat on the bare carpet, and probably Lala Aunty would make a cute worried fuss about there not being enough places, which would draw attention to her. Mira was pretty sure that’s what she was thinking.
