by Shashi Bhat
AS A RESULT of having six brothers and sisters, Nathaniel always spoke as though yelling over a crowd. In his house, they hollered. Mira didn’t think she had ever heard anybody holler in real life, besides the Richmond Hill town crier.
In contrast, Mira’s family could pass entire evenings word-lessly, with an occasional hmmmm from Ravi, which they ignored like noise from the refrigerator. Mira had vague recol-lections of a time when her mother had been called chatty. Now the carpet absorbed even their footsteps. If the phone rang, everybody jumped.
The differences in their homes delighted her. The differ-ences in anybody’s homes delighted her. Lucy Chin’s house had made her claustrophobic. Cynthia’s house was open-concept, expansive and expensive. It had barely any belongings in it, as though she and her family might at any moment pack up and move. At Nathaniel’s house, the sofas had slipcovers. His parents avoided decorating, with the exception of potted plants, whose soil spilled and made the beige carpet brown. Their cupboards held unbreakable plastic dishes in primary colours. A dog ran wildly up the stairs.
Mira’s mother had recently developed a penchant for fragile furniture. The legs of chairs curled like italicized script. The arms cradled cushions with embroidered portraits of elephants. On the walls, every room had a painting shipped from India, back from when Mira’s father was alive and they could afford it. The paintings all had the same character, an hourglass woman with dark eyebrows and gold nose-rings appearing in every frame; it was as though she had wandered from room to room, stopping and posing, then moving on. The only pet they had ever owned was a Siamese fighting fish with a purple-red tail, who had no companions and so swam in an endless ellipse until he died. She had been in the room when Ravi knocked the bowl over with a misplaced elbow. “Sorry sorry sorry!” he had exclaimed, throwing up his hands as the bowl crashed against the porcelain tile; as she scooped the naked fish into her hands, it stared at her with a wobbling eye.
Mira’s mother painstakingly examined the Queen Street antique shops for marked-down items, considering the house an ongoing project. At a Winners store, while buying Ravi clothes, Mira had seen her mother exhibit a rare joy at spot- ting a pewter carving of the Goddess Durga, whose numerous lean arms opened as gracefully as the petals of a magnolia. The goddess was even more beautiful and more terrible than the tiger whose back she used as a throne. Each arm held a different weapon, a black shield, a bolt of thunder, a blade shaped like a slender moon. Years ago, when their mother had ventured to redesign the basement prayer room in their old house, she had told her children the story of the Goddess Durga, whose name in Sanskrit meant “invincible,” a word that shook the little Mira, once its meaning had been explained to her. “Indestructible,” her mother had said, wielding an angled brush to paint an enormous gold Om symbol on the blue prayer room wall. “Impossible, inhuman strength.” The other great Hindu gods had combined their forces to create Durga, each forming a different part of her body. Mira’s mother held Mira’s chin, “the face from Shiva,” pointed to her eyes, “made by Agni, the god of fire,” patted her on the rear, “created by the Earth,” and so on. They created her to defeat the evil Mahishasur, a demon who had received a boon that protected him from being killed by any man or god. (“A badguy?” Ravi had asked from his seat on the basement stairs.) Durga, a woman, killed the demon Mahishasur on the tenth day of the waxing moon, brandishing a trident borrowed from Rudra, the god of storms and winds and death. At this point of the story, their mother whipped her paintbrush around in an imag-inary duel and the children pretended to be vanquished, falling and rolling all over the carpet, kicking their feet in the air.
Mira had been so infatuated with the story that she had insisted on dressing as Durga for Halloween. It was only a few years before she went as Gollum. Out of an old blue sari and stick-on velcro, she and her mother fashioned a gown. They stuffed Mira’s mother’s old beige pantyhose with crumpled tissue paper to make the six additional arms, which held cardboard and construction paper weapons. Mira wore a foil-covered Burger King crown and instead of “trick or treat” would say, more boldly than she ever said anything, “I am Durga, defeater of Mahishasur!” her extra limbs bobbing up and down. “She’s a Hindu goddess,” her mother explained to their bewildered Korean neighbours.
But in that ordinary department store, Durga, the Hindu symbol of strength, waited amongst ordinary objects, as though she were of the same ilk as clay garden gnomes or ceramic toads. Mira’s mother saved her from the shelves and gave her a prominent position on the mantelpiece, adorning her with a fresh flower when the garden provided one.
“I like the simplicity of your house,” Mira told Nathaniel.
“You can come over whenever,” he said. He seemed to view this as a magnanimous offer. It was true, Mira thought, that Nathaniel’s house had a comforting quality. But secretly, she preferred her own home, with its dark beauty. Even the rugs depicted ancient battles, and as a child she had imagined sinking into them and travelling backwards in history. It took effort not to pity Nathaniel for living in a place where it didn’t even matter whether or not you took off your shoes.
BACK WHEN MIRA still dressed up for Halloween, she had accompanied her mother and brother on countless shopping trips. Ravi would stick his head halfway out the window and point out impressive-looking cars, of which Mira and her mother knew nothing. At the shopping centre, her mother had made a game out of having the children search through the clearance bins for Ravi’s size. But then Ravi’s size began to increase, not in the expected increments, but almost exponen-tially, his torso expanding like bread dough rising. The numbers on the clothing tag went up and up commensurately until Mira and her mother had to struggle to find his size in their usual stores. They switched from jeans to elastic-waists. They became regular customers at the city’s Big & Tall Men shops, where sleek-haired gentlemen would ignore their protests and try to sell them two designer Italian suits for the price of one.
And there were further complications. Ravi wouldn’t wear shirts with buttons. He wouldn’t wear shirts with collars. He wouldn’t wear shirts that didn’t feel like cotton, or pants that couldn’t be rolled up into shorts. He wouldn’t wear socks of colours other than white. Clothing lay in his dresser unfolded and unsorted — because his folding abilities were such that even pillowcases came out diaper-shaped — so undershirts shared space with hats, brims mingling with sleeves, and Mira wondered whether her brother might someday emerge from his bedroom with his leg in the neck of a sweater, a human clothing rack.
Shortly before Ravi’s eighteenth birthday, Mira entered her mother’s bedroom and saw her leaning forward at her desk, squinting at the computer screen, clicking through websites for discount large clothing, scanning through page after page. “I can’t handle it anymore,” she said, and continued clicking.
“Let me take care of it, Mom,” said Mira, inspired and sad, as she watched the hand twitch over the computer mouse, tendons pronounced, veins startlingly blue. Her mother pulled a credit card out from her purse and handed it over wordlessly.
“SO NOW I’M in charge of buying his clothes,” she complained to Nathaniel the next time he came over. As soon as she had walked away with the credit card, she wished she hadn’t volunteered. She knew it would be a chore.
“You need to regress,” he said, tracing his finger across her eyebrow as though he were locating a foreign country on a globe. She didn’t know what he meant exactly, and how regressing would be any different from what they usually did — renting movies (he talked through them; she didn’t), playing cards (he always wanted to play poker; she argued for Spit), or going on walks (he preferred walking near shops; she liked parks). Everything but the walks they did while sitting on her bed. This had embarrassed her initially. When he first came into her room, he hopped on to it even though there was an office chair right there, which she’d wheeled out invitingly before he’d arrived. So she sat on the chair herself, until he p
atted the spot next to him, and then she hated the way the mattress sunk under them, and the sound of bending hinges. But it had been five months now and now she was the one to jump first on the bed and whatever activity they started with always dissolved into them kissing each other and they’d miss half the movie or lose half the deck of cards and half their clothing. They hadn’t talked about sex yet, but she thought about it with a shy disbelief that it was now a possibility.
For now they used juvenile expressions to dart around topics of physical contact. “Fooling around” was ruled out because Mira had once heard a biology teacher say it. Nathaniel sug- gested “sucking face” and Mira countered with “necking.” They decided on “making out,” which Nathaniel shortened to mo. He liked secret codes; he read books about spies. During the walks, they’d stop if they saw a park, sit romantically on a park bench, mo when there weren’t people to see them, and discuss all the possible places they could kiss each other (“Chem lab,” he said; “Your ear,” she said).
The thing she disliked about kissing was the smell of breath, both familiar and unfamiliar, and how she was never sure if it was hers or his. Alone, she would cup her hand to her mouth and breathe and smell and think — was it him or was it me? She started gargling regularly with baking soda. His body was scented most often of soap, but sometimes, if he had biked over, there was a spiced human odour that filled the room like humidity, stayed when he left. She didn’t like how it seemed to overpower the room’s natural smell, which smelled like nothing but which must be her own smell after all.
Another thing she didn’t like was when he waxed political. One minute they would be kissing and then he would be dis- cussing the House of Commons. He was the only person she knew who watched cpac, but she was pretty sure he had no idea what he was talking about.
She and Nathaniel and Cynthia had milkshakes together, because Mira had wanted Cynthia’s opinion, but then spent the whole time wondering if he wasn’t looking a little too long at Cynthia’s face, or if it was more than politeness when he offered her the extras from his milkshake. She was not imag-ining it, when he watched Cynthia’s neck as she tilted the tall stainless steel cup to pour the icy dregs into her red mouth and then slammed it down on the table. Cynthia used Nathaniel’s napkin to wipe the condensation from her hand. The conversation was mild. Mira and Cynthia compared their school to Nathaniel’s, discussed the pros and cons of wearing uniforms, the unfairness of how exams came right after winter break.
“So what did you think of him?” Mira asked quietly as she and Cynthia walked home together, Nathaniel having biked in the opposite direction.
“He’s attractive,” said Cynthia, “but I don’t think he has a very rich inner life.”
APPARENTLY REGRESSING MEANT building a fort by placing a bed sheet over her desk chair and the end of her bed. Mira viewed this behaviour as a symptom of his having so many younger siblings, but she played along. A flashlight, balanced on the chair, provided the ambiance as they told ghost stories, lowering their voices, butchering the endings. From one of the secret hiding places, she brought a bag of banana chips and a box of Parle G glucose biscuits. Ravi eyed her as she passed through the hallway carrying them.
“We should draw pictures.” she said to Nathaniel.
In her desk drawer, she could only find blue pens and lined paper.
“Don’t you have drawing paper? And markers? Or crayons?” he asked.
“Ravi probably does. He used to draw,” she said.
They went to his room, where Ravi lay on the floor, pretend- ing to read a magazine. Nathaniel politely stepped around him. She had noticed that Nathaniel never said anything to her brother unless her brother said something first. Say something, she wanted to tell him. You are usually always talking.
“Rav, you have crayons we could borrow?” Mira asked.
Ravi considered this. “Will you give them back after?”
“Obviously. That’s what borrow means.”
He pointed to the closet. Then he abruptly stood up and left the room, hands placed at the sides of his head like fake ears.
They checked the various boxes but didn’t find any crayons. Instead, they found several of Ravi’s drawings.
“He doesn’t do these anymore?” asked Nathaniel, flipping through a notepad filled with round-eyed square-headed birds.
Mira kept looking in the closet, coughing as she disturbed dust on the shelf up above her head. “He did them for a long time, took classes all the way up through high school. And then, he stopped. I don’t really know why. We tried to get him to start again. Suggested all kinds of pictures he could draw. My mom would physically put the paper in front of him and the marker in his hand,” she said, turning to look at him. Nathaniel kept looking down at the birds. Mira tested some markers and discovered they had all run out. One by one they left faded lines on the paper, and this seemed to her the most pathetic thing of all. Her hands found a box of art supplies on the high closet shelf, and accidentally knocked it over. They covered their heads as Ravi’s collection of short coloured pencils fell over them as sharp as ice rain.
MIRA AND RAVI took a trip to Hillcrest Mall. Ravi drove. They squeezed through traffic in the narrow part of Yonge Street. People never believed it when they heard that Ravi could drive, but really his road skills were impeccable, surpassing those of any driver Mira had ever seen. It was shocking, given that, as a pedestrian, he hesitated before crossing even the emptiest of streets. He got his licence right away at sixteen, passing the test on the first try, and now he knew the roads so well he didn’t even glance at the street signs. He had no temper, no rage, and so Ravi moved through the busy streets gracefully, making smooth turns with a flick of the signal, merging with a quick check over his mountainous shoulder, smoothly stepping his large foot on the accelerator as though it were a pedal on a glorious grand piano. He followed exactly every driving rule his mother had told him, never picking up bad habits. When it came to safety, he had an obsession with following instruc-tions. This slowed him down with the speed limit — and for a while, other cars had lined up to pass him, but then his mother advised him to travel at ten percent above the speed limit (if the sign said sixty, he went at sixty-six, and so on) and in this way he blended in better and avoided being pulled over. Once he learned how to drive, his mother began sending him alone to the stores with a list of groceries. It took him a while to find everything, but he became practised at scanning the aisles for unfamiliar items.
On one occasion, Mira’s mother had forgotten to write down the quantities of items he should buy, and he had returned home from the Indian store with a bag of besan flour so large they didn’t have a cupboard tall enough to keep it. After that, whenever she sent him on errands, she called him “Hanuman,” after the Hindu Monkey-God. Scooping the soft chickpea flour with a steel scoop, she told Mira and Ravi of the bloody war against Ravana’s army, where Lord Rama’s brother Lakshman received near-fatal injuries, pierced by a charmed arrow. With the flour she mixed a generous splash of water and measured with her fingertips the amounts of cumin and chili powder to create a rich batter, the same colour as a lion’s skin. Rama sent Hanuman, his faithful helper, to find and bring a rare healing herb growing somewhere on the Dronagiri mountain. Mira’s mother described the precious herb, and Mira speculated her description was a complete invention based on the pointed curry leaves she chopped on her wooden cutting board. She held up the tiny pieces for effect, and sprinkled them atop her roughly diced vegetables, the purplest of eggplants and plumpest of bell peppers. Hanuman had to find the plant before dawn, to cure Lakshman, who lay near dying in his brother’s arms. Their enemies tried to lure Hanuman away, but he resisted the distractions. The vegetables went into the batter. Exploring the mountain between ground and sky, Hanuman still could not locate the plant. Knowing he had only the barest amount of time, he lifted the entire mountain in one strong arm, as easily as a bag of flour, and fle
w back to Rama, where the herb was found and Lakshman saved. Here, Mira’s mother dropped her vegetables individually into a black pot of boiling oil, and as the batter coating quickly browned, a cluster of miniscule bubbles formed and flickered to the surface.
“He lifted the whole mountain?” Ravi asked, his face lovely with surprise.
“The whole mountain,” she said. But later, she told Mira the rest of Hanuman’s story. Yes, Hanuman had superhuman strength and undeniable loyalty. But in his youth, the gods had placed a curse on him that made him forget, for the rest of his life, his own powers. Unless reminded, Hanuman could not even remember his impossible skills, that he could lift moun-tains, and stretch his monkey tail to unbelievable lengths, that he could fly as readily as the tiny weaver birds and large grey herons that frequented the Indian skies, that he could grow larger than an elephant, larger than the State of Kerala. In the incident of the mountain, a crocodile had reminded him of his strength. But once the cure had been found and Lakshman had been rescued, Hanuman promptly forgot all again. Only those who had been there could remember that once, as a boy, Hanuman had flown into the sky, and mistaking the yellow sphere for a mango, had tried to eat the sun.
FOR THE FIRST time since he had started pushing grocery carts, Ravi had a job interview. It was a cash register position at the same store. “He just has to push some keys,” said their mother, but even she didn’t seem to have much hope that he would get it. Mira imagined the checkout line growing longer and longer as Ravi tried to remember the code for, say, navel oranges, then typed it in laboriously. “We can dress him up decently at least,” her mother said, “Or they’ll never hire him.”
