by Shashi Bhat
Mira imagined the man’s wife seeing Ravi’s eyes — dark-circled because he almost never slept — peering at her through the half-open window curtain. Sometimes when Mira lay in bed at night, she would look through her cracked open door and see him pacing aimlessly in the hallway, talking quietly to himself in stilted phrases, his eyes unnaturally large, his body a hulking rectangle, and under the trick of darkness, even she had sometimes felt a little afraid.
“It was all an accident. I’m so sorry. He’ll stay inside now,” Mira’s mother said.
“I’m heading down to tell the management,” the man insisted.
“They’re closed,” Mira’s mother said, and the man glared at her.
“In the morning,” he said.
“Please, don’t.”
“Just keep him inside.” He glanced at Mira as he went back to his room.
“WHY DOES HE do that,” Mira said quietly, retreating into the bathroom with the chemistry workbook she’d brought. She solved one stoichiometry problem as she sat on the closed toilet lid, feet cold on the subway tile, erasing and pencilling numbers into an elegant, distracting solution. She was too old to be sharing a room with her family. In books, the parents always got the kids an adjoining room in a fancy suite with lots of brocade fabrics, but in real life you stayed in motels where the bathrooms had no towels and were painted yellow with yellow lighting and yellow tile, the wrong colour for a bathroom, urine-coloured — you might as well paint them brown — and you shared a bed with your mother, hoping no authorities would notice you had three people in the room instead of two.
She could hear them talking from the bathroom. Ravi had gone for a walk and forgotten their room number. He wan- dered past the adjacent doors, reviewing the numbers, probably reading them softly aloud. She didn’t know the shape of her brother’s thoughts, but sometimes she imagined they might resemble ticker tape, a two-dimensional sheet, a single line of words. He would have bent his shoulders to look in the woman’s window, ducked his head to see through the glare, and covered the glass with his large, sweaty hand, thinking which is the room is this the room? In his frustration, he started knocking on the window, his fist determined and steady against the glass, the woman cowering inside. Had she answered, Ravi’s words would have emerged identical to his thoughts, a panicked, “Which is the room? Is this the room?”
It might be laughed off if he were a four-year-old. But he was sixteen, and it was five in the morning, and the man had probably called the front desk to leave a complaint.
She heard her mother say, “Just stay in the room and don’t go anywhere from now on.”
“I didn’t mean to,” Ravi said, and Mira imagined his eyes closed again and his hands swooping up and then down.
Her mother’s voice pleaded, “Didn’t you realize it’s very early in the morning? People are sleeping. Why did you wake them up? Why didn’t you remember the room number, Ravi? You’re good at remembering numbers.”
“I’m SORRY,” Ravi screamed. He began breathing a series of heavy sighs and hums. After a while, they faded, and the room became silent.
What were you trying to seeee? Mira kept hearing, as though the walls of the building had captured the phrase. Please God, she prayed, don’t let us run into that man on the way out.
IF MIRA HAD been a loud girl, a confident girl, a girl over whom embarrassment rolled like water on a waterproof jacket, she would have defended her brother. She would have gone right out of the room and joked through it, diffusing the situation with a Rainman reference. Buddying up to the angry man, she’d say, “Sorry man, my brother’s a little slow. I mean, he’s no Rainman or anything, but you know. He didn’t mean it.” The man would smile, disarmed, a hand in his hair, and say that no harm had been done. Probably he’d introduce her to his son. They would date and eventually marry. Other people would stay in motel rooms to attend their wedding. Back in the room, she’d hug Ravi, her arms reaching only halfway around him. She’d say things like, “Don’t worry about it,” and then she’d joke-punch Ravi lightly on his flabby chest — because touching him would no longer embarrass her — and Ravi would giggle and curl his body inwards.
Mira’s mother had never even seen Rainman. She didn’t allow those kinds of movies in the house. For Ravi’s last birthday, Mira had bought him Forrest Gump, intended not as a deep comment on his situation, but because she knew Tom Hanks was one of only two actors Ravi would recognize, the other being Jennifer Aniston. Ravi would love the scenes of Forrest running. “Run, Forrest,” he might say. They might say it together. After Ravi had opened the wrapping paper, crum-pling it and saying an absent Thank You, their mother saw the video box and grabbed it roughly from his hands.
“Ravi, go get the cake from the basement fridge,” she told him.
“Is it an ice cream cake?” he asked, as his mother grabbed the sides of Mira’s arms and shook her, pushing her back-wards and pulling her forwards as she spoke, so Mira’s whole body undulated involuntarily, practically lifted off the ground because of her mother’s strength, and it felt like Mira’s only anchors were the fingernails cutting lightly into the flesh of her upper arms.
“Hey Mom,” said Ravi. “What are you doing?”
“What do you want him to think?” Her mother whispered, scariest at her quietest. “You want him to think he’s like this foolish man, on this videotape?” She dropped Mira’s arms and picked up the box, striking at it. Mira said she was sorry and later exchanged the video for Shrek, though it occurred to her that her mother was defending Ravi from the wrong people, that the effects of Hollywood were the least of Ravi’s concerns.
There had been a time when her mother had been a cham-pion. It was two years since she’d fought with the school board to get him out of special ed, eight since she’d given the bully a little scare by chasing him down the street with her car, seven years since she’d gotten Ravi’s third-grade teacher suspended after finding out that for weeks the teacher had forced him to wait in the school hallway while she taught her class — palms braced against the gritty linoleum floor because she wouldn’t give him a chair — letting day after day pass with nobody even noticing him there, stepping over him like a used juice box, because it was easier to leave him in the hallway than to teach him a single damned thing.
“IT’S TIME TO leave,” Mira’s mother called from outside the bathroom door. They packed silently into the car, with Ravi in the front passenger seat and Mira in the back. They left the radio off and Mira dozed against the window, her head peri-odically hitting the glass. Ravi began to whimper.
“I didn’t mean to,” he said.
“Don’t worry about it, Rav,” said their mother.
“It’s okay, right?” Ravi asked, and nobody answered. “I just forgot,” he said.
“Mom, I DIDN’T MEAN TO,” he shouted. “I didn’t mean to,” he whined.
In this way, they passed the hour to the Pittsburgh temple.
“DO YOU EVEN know the bride or groom at all?” Mira asked her mother as they drove up the hill to the temple and tried to find parking in the crowded, sloping lot.
“When will I be getting married?” Ravi interrupted. Mira’s mother turned the car engine off. She and Mira exchanged glances in the car mirror.
“Well, you have time,” his mother said lightly, and lifted her right hand from the steering wheel to touch the picture of Lord Ganesha they kept taped to the middle of the dashboard.
“Ganeshana madhuve” was Mira’s mother’s favourite expression to use when she caught Mira opting for elaborate methods of procrastination — rearranging the family room furniture into a new, better-functioning order, building a waste-paper basket out of cut-up, coiled magazine pages — rather than working on a tedious school assignment. “Do those teachers never give you any work?” she would ask, and eye-rolling, teenage-behaviour-embracing Mira would say, “I’m going to do it tomorrow.” Their mo
ther-daughter exchange was classic, with a Hindu touch, “Ganeshana madhuve,” being an allusion to Ganesha, the only unmarried Hindu god.
When Ganesha’s mother, Parvathi, asked him when he was getting married, he always said, “Tomorrow, my wedding is tomorrow,” to remain a bachelor over a literal eternity.
But after Mira’s mother had explained the expression, she had become confused and backtracked. Perhaps, she said, she had it reversed, since in those days, Ganesha wouldn’t have searched for his own wife. His family would have found the girl and arranged the marriage. Maybe Ganesha had pleaded, “When is my wedding? When will you find me a bride?” and Parvathi, that clever buyer of time, had responded, “Tomorrow, your wedding is tomorrow.” But, Mira had asked, why couldn’t Lord Ganesha (whose title, after all, was Remover of Obstacles) find somebody to marry him? And her mother had answered, wryly, “Would you marry a boy with an elephant head?”
Parvathi had created baby Ganesha out of clay to keep her company while her husband, Lord Shiva, journeyed away from home for countless years. (In Hindu mythology, years passed like the sights out a car window; in real life you would have forgotten your husband by then.) With her powers, Parvathi granted the baby life, and he grew into a boy. When Shiva arrived home from his travels and found the child standing in front of his house, he questioned him. The boy pulled out his sword to defend his mother from the stranger, and Shiva, epic in his rage, pulled out his own sword and sliced off the boy’s head. Parvathi ran out from the house screaming, and cradled the boy’s headless body in her arms, crying, “What have you done to our son? What have you done to our son?” How bewildered Shiva must have been, but he wasn’t the type to show it. He promised to go into the forest and bring back the head of the first animal he came across. “Why didn’t they just re-attach the original head?” Mira asked. Her mother said it must have been too damaged. A mile from his home, Shiva crossed the path of an elephant, as grey as the monsoon sky, and he decapitated it effortlessly, carrying back the precious skull. Parvathi placed the elephant head above the lifeless neck of her son and pressed magic into the body — the most ancient sort of transplant. When the elephant head blinked and spoke, its surrogate parents showed no surprise.
Ravi, Mira thought, was like the crude baby-shaped clay that Parvathi had dug from the gardens behind the house, before she had given it whatever it was that made it breathe and grow and cry, or maybe he was the bleeding headless boy that Shiva left behind him when he ran into the forest, before his father had brought back a replacement for that irretriev- able part. Except that there wasn’t any magic to press into Ravi, and to think like that was awful, shameful, and he was still her brother, whom she was supposed to love — she did love him, in a yearning, horrible way that she couldn’t stand.
Mira’s belief in Hinduism was paradoxically both whole-hearted and fragmented. She prayed compulsively, but tried hard not to think about the logistics of her prayers workings; to test it too thoroughly would be for it all to fall apart. She made bargains with God. She told him — Ganesha or which-ever one was listening — she would stop wasting her money on movie rentals if only he would put Cynthia in a different French class than her this fall, so she could stop coming up with new reasons not to let her copy her homework. She would stop making craft wastepaper baskets out of magazines if her mother would let her discontinue the piano lessons. She didn’t pray for important things, for long shots, such as finding out that her father hadn’t actually died in any car accident, but had been found in some hospital with amnesia, and would regain his memory prompted by some small clue — finding a reminder in the way a curtain moved, or the way Jell-O tasted — and come home, weeping at the twelve lost years, the weeping evidence that he was alive. She fantasized about things like that, but didn’t pray for them, because though she watched the occasional soap opera, she had a firm grasp on realism.
And she didn’t pray that Ravi would wake up from the blur of his mind, snapping awake as though it were a nap he had been taking. But she did imagine it, her brother suddenly speaking in swiftly modulating tones instead of his blank monotone. She spent so many car rides and so many hours before falling asleep and so many commercial breaks thinking of her brother as he could have been, a Ravi who was two years older than she was instead of eight years younger. She liked to picture the two of them renting a movie and bantering hilariously through it, or shopping with him for their mother’s birthday present, arguing over whether she’d prefer the sweater or the food processor. They would both have part-time jobs that involved deep thinking and would afford food processors easily. But she prayed for little things, thinking maybe they’d accumulate. Her brother had been the exact same boy for ten years, and in her experience, that was too established a pattern to expect an aberration.
Quotes from another religion told Mira there was nothing new under the sun, that nothing would ever be new again. How many more emotions were left for her to experience — true love, the dazzling emotions of childbirth. What else? In a recent French class, she’d been slapped with déjà vu as they discussed Georges Simenon’s novel, Le Chien Jaune. It had a glossy paperback cover with the picture of a hotel café on the front, indicating an elegant murder mystery. One of the prime suspects was a large simple-minded man. They referred to him as le colosse. Criminals tricked him into transporting a large shipment of cocaine, and later turned him in for a reward. Cynthia raised her hand in class because she had trouble under-standing the character. “I don’t get it … sorry, je ne comprends pas,” she said.
After several attempts in French, their teacher, finally relent- ing and using her less than polished English, had explained, “He is, you know, un peu retarded.”
“Ohhhhhhh,” the rest of the class said in unison, in under- standing. No, you don’t understand, is what Mira wanted to say, but — and she hated this about herself — she was a girl who thought things and didn’t say them, and the class discussion continued around her. She wanted to say, you don’t understand until you’ve lived with it. And even then you don’t understand.
THERE WEREN’T MANY guests at the wedding — fewer than a hundred, which, for an Indian wedding, was the same as inviting twelve. These eighty-five or so gathered in a down-stairs room of a temple. The women tucked their saris under them, cross-legged on the low-pile red carpet, pulling chil-dren into their laps. Mira played with the tasselled edge of her selwar kameez shawl until it began to fray. A Hindu priest performed the ceremony with his eyes literally closed — it seemed almost dubbed, Mira thought, the strings of Sanskrit words. Afterwards, everyone stood in an S-shaped line and waited to congratulate the couple. When they got close, Mira saw that the bride had too much foundation on her dry skin — it flaked under the temple lights. Her mother slipped an envelope of money into the bride’s hand and the bride said, “Thank you so much for coming, Aunty,” smiling as though she recognized them. Being strangers hadn’t mattered at all.
Five hundred people attended the reception at a local banquet hall. In the lobby, Mira spotted a table with rows of crisp white place cards, and found her name written in curli-cued uppercase on one side, a table number on the back. Her mother and brother had been placed at table four, but she was at table sixteen.
“We’ll ask someone to switch with you,” her mother said. In the hall, white tableclothed tables formed two concentric circles around a parquet dance floor. The centrepieces — low cubic glass bowls packed tightly with yellow roses — pulled and refracted all possible glow from the dim lighting. Mira scanned the tables for number sixteen and realized that some brilliant aunty had seated her at the table with all the other teenagers. Ravi and her mother were at a table more than halfway across the room.
“It’s fine, Mom, I’m fine,” she said.
AT TABLE SIXTEEN, she touched the eyebrow of the boy sitting next to her. He had a scar there and she had decided already that she would be fearless; these were people she would never see again.
“What is that from?” Mira asked. She heard herself speaking and liked how her voice sounded — as though it belonged to somebody bold.
“I gave it to him,” said the girl on the other side of him, who turned out to be his sister. Mira tried not to stare at the girl’s undeniable physical perfection. The boy was beautiful, too, even though in rooms of formal Indians, under the splen- dour of females, males tended to form the background canvas, content in shirts and ties. The girl looked about Mira’s age, but she wore a sari, two-toned teal and royal blue, embellished at the borders with silver embroidery to mimic the looping feather patterns of peacocks. From her tight, sleeveless blouse emerged arms that were sculpted and brown, darker than Mira’s. Her eyeliner looked liquid, dark and wet inside the rim of her eye. She had a deep-pitched laugh that she covered with her palm.
Brother and sister snickered through the speeches and presentations. They mocked everything. Why did the dj wear a baseball cap? Couldn’t the groom have memorized his three- line speech and delivered it with some sincerity rather than printing it out on a now thrice-folded sheet of printer paper? The girl declared there would be no speeches at her wedding, only acrobatic performances. She catcalled as the dj intro-duced the couple’s parents, who danced up from the entryway to the head table and thanked nearly all five hundred guests by name. Thankfully, by that time the appetizers had appeared on tables in an inconvenient corner of the room. Guests raced to the snacks, tripping over microphone cords. There were breaded pakoras with tamarind and mint chutneys, pieces of spicy grilled chicken that had to be clearly labelled “chicken” so the vegetarian aunties wouldn’t accidentally pop them into their lipsticked mouths. Girl and boy nearly spilled their food laughing at how each of the uncles would accept a few lonely leaves from the salad tray and then grunt as they placed their oily samosas over them.
