The Family Took Shape

by Shashi Bhat

  There and Back Again

  THERE WAS A difference between actively observing and just passively looking, or that least that’s what Mira’s drawing teacher had told her before she had dropped the lessons. The teacher had shown her a picture of a pigeon’s foot and said that Picasso’s father, an artist himself, had forced the boy to observe and sketch pigeon feet over and over until he could draw with photo precision every knot in their arthritic grasp. As a result, Picasso’s skills of observation became so developed he could look at anything and, instantly perceiving details and nuances, produce his own exact copy. Mira imagined him looking at her and drawing a picture so identical to her that it was indistin-guishable from the original.

  She remembered this when she saw Ravi looking at his own hand. He had this habit of, when sitting in front of the tv, holding his hand out in front of him and staring at the palm, his eyes getting bigger and bigger, or whiter and whiter it seemed, then flipping the hand over to look at the back in this same way. He kept his fingers splayed so they much resembled the shape of a pigeon’s foot. What could he be looking for that he hadn’t already seen, there on the front and back of his own hand? Didn’t he know it well enough by now? He concentrated on it the way Mira herself had started concentrating on her own face in mirrors, stretching her skin out with her fingers to examine any anomalies.

  HE WAS DOING just this, staring at his hand, right before he first asked his question. He quickly put the hand away, down on the arm of the sofa, where his fingers moved like kicking legs. A piano prodigy in another life, thought Mira. It was a Friday after school, their mother had just arrived home, and all three sat watching sitcom reruns and eating unshelled peanuts.

  “Check for worms before you eat them,” said Mira’s mother. They all checked for worms.

  “Mom, why can’t I be in the normal class?” His fingers kept dancing, tapping against the sofa’s corduroy fabric.

  For a second, Mira thought he meant the normal class of society. At school she was learning about feudalism. She and Cynthia had constructed a miniature hut with a straw roof to illustrate where the serfs would have lived. “Good work but historically inaccurate,” the teacher wrote on their com- ment sheet. But no, he meant the normal class as in any class other than the one in room 314, where they housed all the special ed kids, or, as Mira’s mother put it, the kids who didn’t know up from down (which led to many instances of Mira lying on her back around the house, imagining the ceiling was the floor).

  “Different people go in different classes, that’s all,” said Mira’s mother.

  Another pair in Mira’s class had built a castle out of papier-mâché. lord’s castle, it said on the base; they’d written the letters in white glue and shaken glitter over them. “When they take it home, their My Little Ponies can live in it,” said Mira, and Cynthia cackled hahaha.

  “Like Mira is in her class and I am in my class,” said Ravi, with a tone of finality.

  BUT THAT TURNED out not to be the end of it. Ravi began ask- ing, with abnormal frequency, variations on the same theme: “Mom, Why am I not in the normal class?” “When will I be in the normal class?” “Can I change into the normal class?” Normal-class-normal-class took on the qualities of a fugue, the phrase repeated and re-emerged with musical regularity. It took on the rhythms the Sanskrit mantras they chanted nightly. She heard her brother say it in his own primitive prayers, said quietly to himself as he lay supine in bed, “God please help me get into the normal class like Mira.” He brought up the subject when Lala Aunty was over — “Next year I might be in the nor- mal class.” Lala Aunty said, “Is that right?” and patted his hand and gave him an extra handful of char-mur snacks to crunch on.

  Once he called it out to Mira in the school hallway, as he walked with his abnormal-class peers and teacher. They all held hands, a wobbly string of kids of varied heights, reminding her of her plastic bracelet with the multicoloured snap-together pieces. Some grinned and others stared flat-expressioned at lockers or at Mira. The kids in wheelchairs trailed in back — like Santa Claus at the parade, thought Mira, watching the grotesque procession. The teacher was curly haired, matronly, patient. Probably she had an autistic brother.

  “Next year I won’t be in this class!” Ravi exclaimed from his place in the line, waving at Mira as he did whenever he passed her in the halls. The whole motley crew turned to him for this bit of fanfare. He might start a revolution.

  “Indoor voice, Mr. Acharya,” said the teacher, as though calling him mister would give him the dignity he wanted.

  It wasn’t the frequency of the question that bothered them all — Mira, her mother, Lala Aunty and even the imperturbable Uncle — as it wasn’t as though Ravi hadn’t ever been a broken record before. After any small reprimand, Ravi would bring up the criticism again and again. For example, when Uncle and Aunty were over for dinner, the phone rang and Ravi answered it and said “She’s busy. Okay bye,” and hung up in response to someone’s asking to speak with his mother, and Lala Aunty suggested next time he answered he should demonstrate the same friendliness he displayed in person. “Say hello and how are you and oh sorry Mom can’t come to the phone right now. Don’t just say ‘she’s busy.’” For the rest of the evening, he asked again and again, “So I should say how-are-you next time?” and for the rest of the week, after every phone message he took, he’d ask whoever was around — “Did I do good? I did it right, right?”

  “He has an obsessive personality,” Mira told Uncle. They were buddies now. He loaned her books that were just beyond her. Her mother brought her along when she went to visit Lala Aunty, and Uncle would emerge from his library with a book in his hand. They would chat at the dining table while her mother and Aunty made tea and fried snacks. His current book selection was The Wonder that Was India, which he gave to her with a printout of a book review from when it had first come out. She could barely understand even the review, except the part that said, “His understanding of philosophy, religion, language and culture (art and prose) is just a pleasure. I am amazed to see this breadth in one person.” That line made her want to know everything about the world. She carried the book around with her and beamed when people asked her why she was carrying such a big book. “Well, this is only volume 1,” she would say, and point to the lines she’d underlined in pencil (Uncle had encouraged her to take notes). When he’d given her the book, Uncle had said, “It is incredible how he has captured the whole of our country, in only words!” Mira’s mother had been there too, and had nodded, though Mira had a feeling she hadn’t read it.

  When she told Uncle that Ravi had an obsessive personality, she felt sure he would agree, and she continued, “It’s like, why does he need to be in the normal class? He won’t be able to keep up. He can’t even understand when we watch a tv show. So I don’t know how we can convince him to just stop asking.” She waited for Uncle to give some suggestion, some formula-tion of words to end Ravi’s incessant questions. Uncle twisted his hands around his mug of tea, looked straight at her, and said, mildly, “But don’t you think he would like to read a book like you, Mira?”

  At home that afternoon she got out The Wonder that Was India and vowed that she would understand every word. There would be no gaps in her understanding. She flipped to her favourite page, where she had underlined, “thirst for knowl-edge,” “ancient wisdom,” “cosmic mystery.” She put the book away again and went to watch television. Jeopardy was on, and she got none of the questions right, though she kept on guessing. “Malaria,” she said, but the answer was “leprosy.” “Salmon,” she said, but the answer was “herring.” Ravi flopped into an armchair and said, “Wheel of Fortune is better because it’s much easier for us to get the answers.”

  She turned to him and said, “No, you never get the answers. You’ve never gotten a single one. You just say what Pat Sajak says after he says it.”

  “No,” he said, and smiled, then frowned when he saw th
at she was frowning. “But I’ll be in the normal class soon, right.” He said it as a statement, and he looked away and something in Mira’s stomach emptied and then rushed back again, because it wasn’t the frequency of his query that both-ered her, but its plaintiveness, its abject tone, its lack of hope despite its persistence.

  THEIR MOTHER CALLED his teacher first, and then the gui- dance counsellor, and then the principal. “I’m in your corner,” the principal told her, “but it’s not my decision.”

  “He’s in my corner,” she said to Lala Aunty. “As though a child’s education should be a boxing match.”

  Next she called the school board to see if she could get him transferred to a different school where they would allow him in the regular class, but was informed he had to attend the school he’d already been assigned. She looked into private schools, calling two or three and jotting down numbers on the pad of paper by the phone — phone numbers and tuition fees. “Even the uniform would be a stretch of our finances,” she said, which Mira assumed was an exaggeration, but when her mother wasn’t nearby, she studied the numbers her mother had written down and tried to guess what figures they represented.

  Her mother spent her afternoons pacing the foyer with the cordless phone — “He doesn’t test well,” she said, “But that doesn’t mean anything, you know him, you know he tries so hard,” she said, “I’ll show you these drawings he did,” she said. Her mother’s voice had a certain controlled anger that grew with each conversation. Her syntax, usually a bit creative, settled into polite regular patterns, as though she’d rehearsed. Even holding back frustration, her voice fluctuated elegantly with expression, persuading and asking, “Can’t you do some-thing? … How do you expect him to learn anything? What is he supposed to do when he finishes school? He’s better off than those other kids in that class. They don’t even look you in the face. They don’t even walk … no I’m sorry I said that …,” she held the phone away from her for a moment, breathed, put it back to her ear and began again.

  She took an evening off from work to attend a meeting she’d managed to arrange with the principal, the guidance coun-sellor, and Ravi’s teacher. Mira didn’t know what happened in that meeting, but when her mother came home, she brought a pizza with her, and Mira and Ravi sat together at the table, in front of the covered pizza, not eating it yet, breathing sauce, waiting to hear what she would say.

  “You’re in,” she said. “We got it.”

  “The normal class?” asked Ravi.

  “We got it we got it,” their mother kept saying, crying and opening the pizza box.

  IT WAS THE autumn of Ravi’s eighth-grade year when he trans-ferred from 314 to 112, rumoured to be the easiest of the normal classes, a room that housed a group of just-turned-teenagers whose mothers didn’t drop them off at the bus stop, who dated each other and smoked their cigarettes next to the No Smoking sign on school property, who applied to high school and straightened their hair and wore expensive sneakers and kissed and smoked and chewed gum and cracked wise, whom Mira avoided if she could, being only a sixth grader and inclined to carrying large books around with her. At home, not much changed. Her mother still put chicken nuggets in flasks for each of their lunches, accompanied by a pear, which she would slice and then put back together, wrapped in a napkin, zipped and locked in a Ziploc bag. The eighth graders did not carry such lunches, but it didn’t matter because Ravi ate his alone on the edge of the playground, sitting on a wooden balance beam, kicking his feet in red, fallen leaves.

  The only thing that changed was that now when Ravi came home each day he put his worksheets and textbooks on the dining table next to Mira’s. Their mother eyed the papers with bare desperation. The deal with the school board was only a trial, and to avoid being placed back in the special education class, he had to stay above passing in all subjects. When he brought home his own book, The Hobbit, carried under his arm though there was room in his backpack, she counted the pages.

  “There’s a test when we’re done reading it,” Ravi said.

  “The Hobbit,” she said, pronouncing it “hoe-bit.” “We’ll read it out loud,” she said. “It’s not impossible.” She had a half-finished English degree from a school in Karnataka. She’d read Othello once.

  That night Mira lay in her bed listening to her mother and brother across the hall, opening the pages for the first time.

  “An Unexpected Party,” her mother began in her sing-song accent. “Well I’m glad it starts with a party,” she reflected to Ravi. “You know how we go to parties, well, now we can imagine these hoe-bits having similar parties. And so many of our parties too are unexpected, like when Shailaja Aunty came the other day without even phoning.”

  “How is Shailaja Aunty doing?” Ravi asked.

  “Oh, you know, you know,” and she went on reading. “If I say he is a Burglar, a Burglar he is … There is a lot more in him than you guess, and a deal more than he has any idea of himself … You know what a burglar is, Ravi?”

  “Like the Hamburglar.”

  “Correct!”

  And a few nights later, “Roast mutton? Why are these Hobbitton guys so fond of mutton?”

  “Because it’s delicious!” Mira yelled from her room.

  “No, it’s because they are not Hindus,” said her mother and began to giggle. Mira couldn’t remember if she’d ever heard her mother giggle. Mira got up from her bed and went over to Ravi’s room. Ravi was sitting on his bed and grinning, his subject notebook sitting next to him on the bedspread, his hands together as though he had just finishing clapping. Her mother had fitted herself roundly into Ravi’s desk chair. She held the book open with one hand, her chin tilted upward like a dramatic performer of Shakespeare. “Sorry Mira, no pic- tures,” she said, and giggled again. Mira rolled her eyes, lay flat on the floor, looked at the ceiling, thought about dwarves, tried to tell up from down.

  J.R.R. Tolkien became another member of the family. They left the book open at the fourth and empty dinner table place, occasionally spilled curry on it by accident. All the new family jokes involved elves and dwarves and wizards and the occa-sional dragon.

  “Smog warning — that’s what Bilbo needed, a Smaug warn- ing!” her mother said, reading the newspaper one day.

  They started referring to their array of houseplants as Mirk- wood Forest. The cupboard where they kept Ziploc bags was called Bag End. When Mira slouched, her mother said she looked like Gollum.

  “So I’d be Gollum due to my poor posture,” said Mira, “Then which are you guys?”

  “I want to be Gandalf,” said her mother, “that expert in wizardry. No no, I change my mind, I’ll be Thorin, no I don’t like him so much, I think Gandalf. Ravi?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, and thought importantly.

  “Bilbo? How come nobody picked Bilbo?” asked Mira.

  “It’s the name, it’s a detestable name,” said her mother. “His name should have been Shobit, Shobit the hoe-bit.”

  “Classic Indian name,” agreed Mira.

  “How is Shobit doing?” Ravi asked. Shobit was actually the name of one of their cousins in India. Mira and her mother collapsed into cackling laughter.

  Chapter 6 was “Out of the Frying Pan into the Fire.”

  “I am getting out of the frying pan and into the shower,” said Mira’s mother as she walked out of the kitchen and headed upstairs.

  “My precioussss, give me my precioussss,” they would say to each other when they wanted anything at all handed to them: car keys, chappatis, encyclopedias.

  For a school assignment, Mira invented a fake world inspired by The Hobbit. She called it Hichmond Rill and wrote an elaborate twenty page story about it. Her mother helped her build a giant 3d papier-mâché map. They painted it with acrylics (which her mother pronounced “a-kir-a-lix”) and took Plasticine and formed little homes, pasted a legend at the bottom. In her room, sh
e practised reading her story aloud, stealing her mother’s tricks, pausing on the semi-colons and letting her voice jump suddenly into volume, wondering if she should add impromptu casual commentary in between the written words, which, when her mother did it, made the story so much easier to follow.

  Mira went as Gollum for Halloween. It wasn’t the first costume she’d had to explain.

  Watching a recorded episode of All My Children, Mira’s mother remarked, “This is exactly like when the army of Wargs tried to steal the treasure and it resulted in the Battle of the Five Armies.”

  They finished the book in late November.

  “Great fellow, J.R.R.,” said Mira’s mother.

  “I wish he was my dad,” said Mira, and her mother actually laughed. She seemed to have mellowed, hadn’t yelled in weeks, hadn’t chased anybody down with her car in while.

  THEY’D PRACTICALLY FORGOTTEN that Ravi had to pass a test on The Hobbit, his first real comprehension test. He had just barely managed fifties and sixties on the math and science tests, skipping the tougher word problems like his mother had advised him and spending all the allotted time on the basic calculations, his numbers round and plodding. They celebrated with dinner at East Side Mario’s, where he ordered ravioli and a Diet Coke and ate most of the table’s garlic bread. “Napkin on your lap,” his mother reminded him. “The next one will be tougher,” she said. “You can’t skip any. Just do all of them. Think about the story and answer.”