The Family Took Shape

by Shashi Bhat

  So it seemed her mother would have to stand. Mira was curious — how would she eat? Both of her hands were full, making the manoeuvre impossible unless she put something down. The only possible table on which to leave her water was the coffee table near the sofa, inconveniently low, and she couldn’t stand there because there wasn’t any room in between the mismatched wood dining-set chairs and the metal folding chairs and she would have to either keep silently to herself or lean over to make awkward conversation with the sitting people. They’d look up at her and ask her to repeat herself. If somebody told a joke, her laughter would float over their heads.

  She couldn’t keep her water on the floor next to her, due to the carpet, and even without carpeting, it was likely the glass would be knocked over by one of the small frog-jumping chil-dren, who had taken their food first and had finished eating already, some having only eaten a bit of yogurt and rice. The plates were heavy — Lala had run out of the Corelle and broken out the china. Mira lifted her own a little to feel its push of gravity, and thought that even if her mother could find a place to keep her water, she wasn’t sure she could hold the plate in one hand the whole time while eating. Her wrist bones jutted like binder clips. Didn’t her mother used to be fatter? She had a fork and a spoon balanced on the plate along with a napkin tucked in her palm.

  What were other people doing? Mira looked at the standers. They formed a tight corner circle, and she knew her mother didn’t know any of them. Mira had never before caught her mother in such an awkward moment. Was her mother as worried as Mira was, thinking about this, in this unusual rush of empathy? If she was, she didn’t show it. She had a mild smile on, but wasn’t smiling at anybody in particular. To join the group of standers, she would need to tap somebody on the shoulder (“Excuse me,” Mira imagined her mother saying, the way she herself got the attention of a recess monitor), or stand sideways until somebody noticed her, and there wasn’t even room there to stand. Even to get over there she would have to walk around several cushion-seated people, and a couple of babies lying around on blankets — she would probably crush one of the babies under her feet.

  If her father were here, such a dilemma would not have existed, because first of all, he would have saved her a seat or she would have saved him a seat, or he would have told her to leave her selwar shawl where they were sitting, or to keep her purse on the chair.

  Or they might have stood and shared plate and glass, minimizing the amount of food they would have to eat and coordinating into a lovely and precise rhythm, a kind of counter- point. Mira remembered a time when they had done this before. Mira, having finished eating, had been drawing dots. Her father held the plate in two hands while her mother clutched the glass in one hand and used her other hand to eat.

  “Don’t touch the mysore pak, that’s my favourite,” he had said, and Mira thought maybe he was joking but maybe not.

  “Crumbs, I will leave you crumbs,” her mother responded — in a way Mira recognized as flirtatious — holding the sweet up to her mouth and threatening to eat it whole. Then she took a tiny corner bite, barely touching it with her teeth. She saved it for him on the very edge of the dish, and Mira felt satisfied that it wouldn’t be tainted with the residue of other foods.

  “Oh, I was joking, you can eat it,” he said. When her mother picked it up again and, wide-mouthed, went to repeat her pan- tomime, he suddenly dipped his head forward, nearly dropping the plate, and bit the piece of mysore pak out of her hand, as though it were an offered grape.

  Her father had often compared one food to another. “This is the biggest chappati I’ve ever seen!” he would say, and she’d also heard him exclaim, “This chappati is impossibly soft!” and, “This chappati is even more delicious than my mother’s!” (He was overwhelmingly positive in his opinions, at least while expressing them at dinner parties, to aunties who simpered under his handsomeness.) They attended dinner parties so frequently because they had had an incredibly large social circle. On the drive home, Mira sat in the back with Ravi and leaned against her seatbelt to watch her parents through the gap in their seats. They always critiqued the meal together: “Did that one curry taste exactly like that other curry?” her father asked.

  “All curries taste the same,” said her mother.

  “It’s the mtr package mix, probably.”

  Then all four of them gazed out the dark car windows on to the highway that led them home from Mississauga to Richmond Hill. When they passed the Vishnu temple near their exit, the whole family touched their foreheads in prayer.

  Often, one of her parents would bring up the time they had eaten at MTR — the Mavalli Tiffin Room — in Bangalore, only a few days after they had first met. This was their favourite story. They’d gone to Lal Bagh Road and stepped into the crowded restaurant, where patrons tucked into meals brim-ming out of stainless steel sectioned plates. The place wasn’t beautiful, but it was the most famous restaurant in India.

  “Once, the Chief Minister of Karnataka himself stood in line here to have a masala dosa,” her father had told her mother outside the restaurant, at a time Mira could barely imagine, when her parents had barely known each other.

  “I know that, everybody in the whole state of Karnataka knows that,” her mother said, a bit meanly, Mira thought.

  “You are charming,” he said, very seriously, and her mother laughed aloud because — she told Mira as an aside — she had only ever heard the word “charming” in the novels of Jane Austen.

  They ordered crisp paper dosas, which came to them folded into half-moons, stuffed with cumin-scented yellow potatoes cooked until they’d lost their shape. The surface of the dosa glistened with oil that highlighted the crepe’s gradual gradient from white to brown, darker where it had touched the centre of the pan. The young version of her mother raised her eyebrows over the dosas and the steel plates and their messy, potato-covered hands, at the young version of her father, at the boyish, asymmetrical face Mira had seen in the wedding album. “I thought the faux-marble table was real marble,” Mira’s mother told her. And she said that in the middle of some forgettable sentence, his name, Ashwin, had sounded like a combination of a sneeze and a sigh.

  On the way out of mtr, Ashwin had put his hand for one second on the small of Mira’s mother’s back and she had tensed. “She thought I was being too forward,” Mira’s father told her, “so I apologized.” They grinned about that moment when they told it, after they’d crossed the Atlantic. In their suburban Canadian house, Mira knew her parents had no such barriers; they watched television in their bedroom, stayed up late watch- ing the Fox Network (her father’s head on her mother’s stomach, folded over each other in their bed like resting cows).

  They would fall asleep with the television still on, and it flashed over their sleeping bodies until morning, when Mira and Ravi would crawl in there with them. Her father would wake up and stretch and say, “Strrrrrretch!” his mouth open and his eyes closed and his arms reaching up and over her mother, purposely waking her so he could cuddle her with more results. She would blink into his cheek and ask, “Why can’t you stretch without saying the word ‘stretch’?” And then father and mother and Mira and Ravi would all together say, “Streeeetch!” and get the day’s stretching out of the way.

  Her father would eventually get up to shower, turning the tv off as he passed it, and after five to ten minutes (the three of them pretending to catch some extra zees or watching cartoons with the volume down), they would all listen to hear him get out of the shower and say aloud to himself, “Cleaaann as a whistle!” Mira and her mother and sometimes Ravi, too, in imitation, would smother their laughing reaction in the Ashwin- flattened pillow, or they’d roll around the middle of the bed, where the sheets were warm as a fresh roti; they would wait there in the space he had left.

  NOW THEY WERE back in the cycle of more dinner parties, where the food wasn’t very good, and her mother seemed still in the limbo of h
olding her plate and glass. They hadn’t seemed to have problems like these before. Mira’s father had always had a plan. They had glided through without Mira’s mother ever needing to worry about where to sit, where to set down her glass, where to find parking (“Does this look like a spot?” she asked Mira every time), where to find a reliable moving company (“Yellow Pages,” Mira said helpfully and her mother rolled her eyes), where to mail the completed tax forms, where to enroll Ravi in school, where to hold a funeral, where to keep the Great Dad mug (in the cupboard, and all take turns drinking from it, or in some kind of father shrine). In the end she had packed his things — the mug, an envelope fat with small notebooks where it turned out he’d recorded stoichio-metric calculations side by side with funny things Ravi had said, shiny pens that didn’t write anymore, the graph paper shirt with the fuzzy blue coloured-in square that would remain like a notch on a timeline — all in a storage container in their new basement. It was the only one of many containers they might really never unpack, or maybe they would in ten years; they’d open it like a gift — here, here is your father in this box.

  MIRA’S MOTHER RETREATED to the kitchen. The water in her glass rippled as she set it down on the countertop. Lala Aunty was in there, washing silverware, her body split in half by the pillar in the way of Mira’s view.

  “You still haven’t eaten, what is this?” Aunty asked, point- ing at Mira’s mother’s plate with a handful of forks.

  “He’s not exactly my type,” said Mira’s mother.

  Aunty pulled off her yellow gloves. “He’s not a bad type, though, you know.”

  Mira remembered how her father had added yogurt to everything he ate.

  And then Lala Aunty was patting Mira’s mother’s back with her palm. “Don’t worry, beta,” she said, her North Indianness emerging through the endearment, and Mira’s mother was crying while Aunty held her whole body tightly in the bend of her elbow.

  Mira saw Uncle enter the kitchen. His white hair frizzed from the humidity of the cooking and all the bodies. She saw him pause, look to the wall at his left, and quietly turn off the first switch in the row of three kitchen lights.

  MIRA, BORED, HAVING waited until her mother and Aunty left the kitchen then scraped her food into the trash, observed the woman who had taken the seat on the sofa, beautiful, dark- eyebrowed, sinking into the old leather. Seemingly unconcerned with the social situation going on around her, she ate silently, listening only superficially to Baskar rattle on, probably about manufacturing toner. Instead she, like half the people at the party, was more intent on the task of balancing her plate on her lap, making sure the liquids didn’t drip off the side. She was about forty — though Mira had trouble estimating the ages of anyone older than herself — very carefully put together. Her sari kept immaculate pleats, fanned outward at the bottom over bronze painted toenails and three silver toe rings. Her face had a perfect shape, more like a sketch of a face than an actual face, or more like the oval you drew before drawing in the details and contours.

  She was eating rice, plain white rice. Once, right after her father had died, Mira had tried to eat a plate of rice with saru and then, unable to reach the bathroom, vomited it on the tile floor of their old house. They ate rice every day, so she’d begun to eat without thinking until, with only a quarter of the meal left, she’d removed spoon from mouth and seen one white grain sticking to the steel — the last thing she had seen her father eat was at his funeral, except that he wasn’t really eating. The Hindu priest had given her mother a dish of uncooked, translucent grains, and she had taken a few and placed them into his parted, dead mouth.

  “Food for the journey,” the priest had whispered, for the benefit of the children. Then he had given her mother a silver dropper of water, scented with holy tulsi leaves, and she had carefully let three drops fall over his lips. “To ensure the soul goes straight to God,” the priest said, before closing the coffin lid, before men carried the coffin away to the ovens, where the grains of rice burned with him.

  The reason Hindus weren’t buried, the priest told them after- ward, was that they believed cremation destroyed the material link of the body to the soul.

  The woman took a bite of wheat noodles, her wrist giving a double-jointed bend. She bit into a piece of the heavy, dry, cake of lentils, and pieces crumbled down the sides of her face.

  At a wedding, the priest wouldn’t say anything about death parting a pair — not in the strings of monotonous Sanskrit prayer — but Mira knew, from her mother telling her, that the Hindu marriage ceremony joined one soul to another. It all sounded like such crap to her sometimes. But her parents’ wedding program sheet, now preserved under cellophane in the red-and-cream photo album, explained the steps of the ceremony in neat serif type. Her mother and her sisters had hand-folded and placed those program sheets parallel on a hundred white-and-gold chairs. The notes said the bride’s fore-head would be marked with the red circular sign of luck, a sign that her husband would always be with her, only instead of the word “husband” they had typed the word “soul,” italicized, one letter leaning into the next like a shoulder to a shoulder.

  Lala Aunty was saying something. “He died last week.” No, that wasn’t right, thought Mira; he died five years ago. But she listened again, and found that Lala Aunty wasn’t talking about her father, but about the round-faced woman’s husband.

  “Baskar is recently divorced, and is living out of a suitcase at the Days Inn,” said Aunty. To whom was she speaking? Not to her mother — to an unidentified woman, who had asked about the other guests. “The man wearing the blazer just moved here but his wife was refused a visa and is stuck in India.” She went down the guest list like a roll call. “Shilpa’s husband died some time back. Also, that woman’s son went missing two years ago,” said Aunty, gesturing at the thin elbowy woman. “He was abducted at the Square One Mall.”

  So that was why they were here, Mira supposed. She’d bitten her cheek as she tried a square orange sweet, startled at this revelation, that her family was only one of this strange group of fractured families to which Lala Aunty had somehow become the nucleus. She spit the sweet, which was grainy and cardamom-scented, back into her napkin.

  She wondered whom Lala Aunty had lost, and why she was listing all these details, and why she had invited all these people here at once. Perhaps she intended to diminish their pain, but Mira felt instead that its importance had been dimin-ished, in a too-truthful, everybody-has-their-problems way, and Mira did not want her grief divided and shared. All she craved then was to be pitied as though hers were the only suffering in the room. She imagined the room crowded with the souls of everyone’s missing family members. They paused next to loved ones, held invisible conversations, ate the ined-ible chutney, and wandered, taking up the few remaining spots of empty carpet space.

  “OH HOY,” SAID Uncle to Mira, when he noticed her on the carpet. “I would have vacuumed you by mistake,” he said. He lifted his eyebrows twice — liftlift! Balanced atop his palms, which he held flat and raised above his head like a bhangra dancer, was a stainless steel plate. The plate’s diameter was wider than the diameter of Uncle’s body, and he spun it a little from palm to palm as he paused to talk to Mira. She watched it — a spinning disc, a wheel. Did the turning of the wheel match the patterns of his thoughts? “Will you come and help me then?” asked Uncle. “I have too many paan to fold, maybe a hundred or more or so, you know how these people eat them one and then another and another, and my hands are old guy hands so it will go very slowly otherwise unless with your help.” So on top of the plate must be materials for making paan; even as he said the bit about his hands being old, his hands tiptoed in the air, across the bottom of the plate, with magic agility. His words tumbled over and over as Mira nodded and stood and saw the ingredients poised above the plate — betel leaves and crushed betel nuts, a heavy can of sugar-preserved rose petals, a jam jar filled with candied fennel seed, a tiny g
reen container of white lime.

  They spread the materials out over newspaper on the kitchen table, out of the way of the guests. “If they see this then immediately they will come and eat them faster than we can fold,” said Uncle.

  He folded two as examples and Mira caught on, though her paan were clumsy and fat at first — “Not to worry, those will be for the clumsy and fat guests only,” said Uncle. She washed the waxy heart-shaped surface of each leaf, then dried it on a paper towel and flipped it upside-down, then rubbed a thumbful of the chalky lime over it and topped it with a hunk of sweet gulkund. Then Uncle added the fennel seed and betel nut and a bit of coconut dyed pink and yellow. The leaves were laid out on the wide plate until nine or ten had accumulated, and then Mira and Uncle tackled the folding together.

  “Folding paan is similar to origami,” said Uncle. “You know, they use this kind of folding for all different things — car airbags, folded, then upon crashing they boom open in your face. Telescope lenses, too, surprisingly. They fold it up so it fits on the spaceship. Also, too, you know I had a heart attack a few years ago and they put a stent in my artery — you know stent? It’s like a mesh to keep your artery open. No clogs-bogs. They showed me before surgery and I asked them, how do you plan to fit such a thing in my small small artery? We will fold it, the doctor said. Origami inside my own body!” he said.

  “If you eat paan, you won’t get worms,” said Uncle. “I mean inside your body. But on the other hand, you chew too much, you get mouth cancer.”

  Mira nodded. She imagined what mouth cancer might be like — sores that looked like tiny pizzas. She imagined a lens unfolding in space.

  She wondered if Uncle had had anything to do with the selection of guests. No, she thought, watching Uncle gesturing in the air, his hands moving like spokes; no wonder it took him so long to fold the paan on his own. She smiled and he beamed. Ravi came up to Mira, held his still-filled plate right up to her neck. “Everyone finished a while ago, Ravi,” she said. She took the plate from him and put it next to her on the table. Ravi went and sat on a cushion in her sight, wiped his hands on the carpet. Filthy, she thought, remembering all of Ravi’s dirty handprints in their old house, on the wall next to the stairs. She creased the two sides of a leaf, then brought in the bottom and top. The paan’s final shape was a plump pentagon. They did look like origami, thought Mira, like green origami frogs. Still, she was tempted to bite into one, but she’d had them before, knew she didn’t like the taste, too sweet, and with a cold rush like peppermint. Maybe, she thought, it is possible to be reincarnated as something inanimate, and I will come back renewed, as a coat rack or a folded leaf, a hand-print, a grain of rice.