by Shashi Bhat
At first, Ravi tried to help, holding up shirts and saying “What about this one?” in his slow voice. He seemed to be just choosing the clothing at random. He picked up shirts with embarrassing slogans or cartoon characters, shirts that would fit people half his size. She couldn’t understand how he had no concept of how much space his body occupied, that he could hold up a tiny piece of fabric and believe it would cover him. He gave up after the fourth or fifth shirt, instead spending the time humming and clapping along to the song playing from the store’s speakers. Mira handed him the clothes and waited outside the dressing room, watching his feet under the door. He took off his shoes and revealed ankles that could almost be called slender. She didn’t understand how they with- stood the burden of his body. She watched his hands lift over the top of the dressing room door to pull on a shirt, his arms and hands forming a horseshoe shape in the air. He opened the door and his body bulged in between his slim limbs.
“How do I look?” he asked, beaming.
Why was he so happy? Didn’t he realize that the pants had bunched at the crotch so their hems didn’t even reach the floor and the shirt stretched over his belly where it should have been loose and flat? Where was his dressing room shame? “Those don’t fit properly,” she said, and handed him the same clothes in a larger size. She didn’t smile. She wanted him to stop smiling. Nobody would ever have sex with him, she realized. His body would always be entirely his own.
Her mother phoned her as they stood in line at the register, to ask if she had found him clothes.
“Yeah, we’re getting some T-shirts and a couple of pairs of pants.”
“T-shirts? He can’t wear T-shirts to a job interview. Find him some office shirts, and pants that need ironing.”
“But Ravi doesn’t wear shirts with collars.”
“Mira, it’s a job interview.”
“The interview’s at a grocery store.”
“Oh god, Mira, I can’t let him go in there and embarrass himself.”
“You think his clothes are going to embarrass him?” Mira said, relishing and regretting the following silence. “Never mind, I’ll buy something. Don’t worry.” She hung up. She left the line and picked up the first passable clothes she found in Ravi’s size, and didn’t bother having him try them on.
“Are those for me?” Ravi asked.
“Yes, and you’re going to wear them.”
“I don’t like those kinds of shirts.” He said it dismissively, as though he were refusing some vegetable curry at dinner. But he never refused food.
“It’ll help you get a job,” Mira said, though she felt she was lying.
“I WILL NOT PUT THAT SHIRT ON!” He stamped his foot. His shoe, not on quite properly, flopped at the heel. Other customers turned to look at them.
“Shut. Up,” she whispered, conjuring up her mother’s tone of voice, then ignored him and went to pay.
THAT NIGHT ON the phone with Nathaniel, she confided in him that she planned to never have children. Because she might give birth to somebody who wasn’t quite right, and she might not be able to love him as much as she should. She had never said this out loud before.
“But didn’t you say it isn’t genetic, what your brother has? The odds are, like, zero.”
“But there’s the fear of it,” she said. “Don’t you get it? And even if my baby doesn’t have what he has, it could have some-thing else — Down’s syndrome or something. I just can’t do another eighteen years of this. What am I talking about, eigh-teen — if you have a kid like that, he stays with you forever. That’s another lifetime of this, of fighting with him and fighting for him and fighting embarrassment. Forget it. At least now I can leave, I can do anything as soon as I leave this house.” As she spoke, she knew she wasn’t getting it right, she was painting it all too negatively, even though she meant everything she said.
“Well, my mom had seven kids and they’re all normal,” said Nathaniel. Questionable, thought Mira, who had seen his brother once lick the carpet.
“Lucky her,” she said. “Your family is so blessed.”
“You’re going to jinx us,” he said. She could tell he was angry and she didn’t care. He hadn’t lived through anything, he’d never suffered.
“Your life is all roses,” she said.
“Stop it.”
“Okay.”
“So what will you do instead of children?” he asked her, peacekeeper Nathaniel, moving things along.
“Instead of having children, I will live as one of those rare childless women with long resumés and unspent fortunes. So remember, when we have sex, you and I have to use multiple, layered forms of protection.”
“Ah,” he said.
When Mira encountered these childless women, mostly her mother’s friends, she always wished she knew their reasons. Her own mother, and the other women with children, appeared simultaneously pitying and envying. She had heard them gossiping about why Lala Aunty didn’t have children. “Okay, maybe they couldn’t have kids, sad and all. But there are billions of orphans lying around in India. We have a duty to them,” her mother’s friend Anusha declared accusingly, as though she had personally brought home several orphans. “These abandoned children are like our own children. All Indians are related. You know, we took a taxi in Mumbai and chatted with the driver and found out he was my brother-in-law’s brother-in-law.”
“Oh, they don’t even want children,” a woman named Kalpana answered. “This way they can still afford that other house in Tobermory. They don’t have to buy all this Nintendo-Bintendo nonsense. What kind of an Indian buys a cottage in Tobermory? Hiking and camping and all, as if the outside is new to them. As if they weren’t raised in houses made of mud! It’s simply ridiculous.” Mira tried to read her mother’s expres-sion to see if she too would have preferred a second house in Tobermory.
Mira had told Nathaniel about the summer she worked at a summer daycare camp. Mostly she told him this story so he wouldn’t think she hated children. For three months, she had taught four year olds a song that went: “Peel, peel, peelpeel bananas! Chop, chop, chopchop bananas! Eat, eat, eateat bananas! Go, go, gogo bananas!” At that last line the children and counsellors would scream and throw their arms in the air and jump madly across the rubber floor. One of the children in her group, Edison, had a fear of this song which was both cute and strong. The first time they sang it, when they reached the screaming at the end, he had mashed his face into Mira’s leg and cried. After that, every time they sang the song Mira would take Edison on a walk to the water fountain, the one on the far side of the building. It was a relief to her, too, because she hated screaming and jumping and acting crazy. What did it mean exactly, to go mad, go insane, go crazy, go bananas, lose your marbles, lose your mind? They were such lonely phrases — always going or losing, and worse, losing control, but were used so casually that she always speculated about who had coined them and in what frame of mind. She pictured going bananas as exactly that, body heat melting brain to overripe banana mush, seeping sticky thick white and sweet-smelling, filling and spilling from her ear canals.
WHEN MIRA BEGAN to get fatter, it felt inevitable. She was only a little bit fatter; she noticed it the mirror, an extra lump of hip, a crease across her belly that wasn’t there before. But she should have expected it, since, while dating Nathaniel, she had let her after-school activities dwindle, instead loitering with him in the Tim Hortons parking lot, having Timbits and iced capps. She ate and went to school and ate and saw Nathaniel. Her face was round now, and Mira began surreptitiously elongating her neck to minimize the flesh under her chin. In the shower, she found stretch marks clutching her thighs and stomach like pale fingers. “Gona!” she spat at herself when confronted with her fatness. Gona meant “buffalo” in Havyaka, and she had heard her mother call her brother that on occa-sion. Insults sounded more vulgar in Havyaka. In English, a buffaloe was a sweet, if so
mewhat foolish, buffoonish creature. In English, who could call anybody a buffalo and mean it as anything but a joke? But Havyaka exposed the buffalo’s true identity as a disproportionate and hideous animal with fur the colour of filth. Forget that her Brahmin ancestors adored buffaloes and their cow brothers. She would think of this in passing, only years later, when she would take her honeymoon in India. An uncle would take her to watch a buffalo race — “Kambala,” it was called, a traditional coastal Karnataka sport watched by thousands of people. She would want des- perately to take one home, imagining herself concealing it ineffectively in her carry-on luggage, a splendid bovine that lumbered and hobbled against its friends, splashing through the muddy paddy field water at illogical speeds.
“Your sari blouse needs to be let out,” her mother told her. They were trying on outfits to make sure they had clothes for a wedding that winter. Mira had tried closing the buttons on the blouse and it had flattened her chest grotesquely.
The Indian grocery store had a tailor in the back room. All three family members went, because Mira’s mother needed a new blouse too, and Ravi needed a kurtha. While Ravi and their mother went next door to buy material, the tailor took Mira’s measurements. She posed underneath a large poster of Bollywood’s Salman Khan, his muscles swollen and hair depleted from steroid use. Blouses in twenty colours and an equal number of designs covered a row of styrofoam manne-quins with bodies that ended at the waist. On one of them, some joker had drawn red cheeks and pasted an unusually large bindi. The tailor licked over his cavity fillings. He used a brown paper measuring tape to circle Mira’s stomach and then the flesh of her upper arms. In a pale blue notebook, he recorded the centimetres. His long-nailed fingers scratched across the buttons at the front of her blouse.
“Tell your mother you pay extra for large-size fabric lining,” he said, tilting his head slyly. “The measurements have changed since last time, hanh?” Mira nodded but didn’t look at him. She watched him pull pins from a tomato-shaped pincushion.
Afterwards, she explored the grocery shelves while Ravi and her mother had their fittings. A tower of mango boxes blocked half the entryway, open-topped to reveal the ripe- rotting fruit. Inside a bin of lychees, a brown roach scrambled drunkenly. The ready-made samosas wilted at room temperature. Boxes of dhokla mix and bhel mix gathered dust. Behind glass, sweets dyed into unnatural pinks and greens had been stacked into pyramids. From the back room, Mira heard her mother talking about patterns and about not wanting to be cheated. Mira picked up a bottle of coconut extract and recoiled at seeing a large mosquito preserved inside.
When she came back into the shop, Mira’s mother selected a box of bright orange round laddoos to take home.
“Leave it, don’t buy that!” Mira said. In Hindi movies, they nicknamed the fat kids “Laddoo.”
“What do you mean, you guys love laddoos,” her mother said, surprised at the urgency. She bought it anyway.
ON A WEEKEND over winter break, Nathaniel’s family travelled to Florida on a rare vacation. Because he was the oldest, they let him stay home by himself. So Mira invited herself over and lied to her mother, saying she would be sleeping at Cynthia’s. Mira stood on Nathaniel’s porch and wondered if, by the next time she stood on the porch, she would have slept with him already. His house smelled like marinara sauce; he’d made pasta. She wondered if he’d chosen the bowtie-shaped pasta because he thought it was more elegant and would set the mood.
“This is one of two shapes of pasta that Ravi won’t eat,” Mira told Nathaniel.
“He’s not here,” Nathaniel said.
“I mean at home,” Mira said, pointlessly. She’d been hoping he’d ask what the other shape was.
They watched something on Showcase until Mira started to doze. Nathaniel collected the unbreakable plastic plates and put them away. Mira got up off the slipcovered sofa. They stepped over the needy, lumpy dog who slept on the bottom step. She wanted very badly to say that the dog’s body reminded her of a scoop of mashed potatoes, but thought it wasn’t the best time.
They took off most of their clothes. She slowly unbuttoned her flimsy floral blouse, which she’d worn specifically because it had buttons and it seemed more lovely to her to open a shirt rather than pull it over her head. She pictured how, around the corner, inside the now defunct Fantasia, women had dropped their clothes for decades with practised ease.
Then they lay under a single sheet on his twin-sized bed, so small that Mira had to lie sideways, but she found it romantic to settle her undressed body into the gaps of his. They kissed for what Mira estimated was five minutes.
Will we make love now? she asked herself, and then imag-ined herself asking it aloud. Will we ml now? she could say, and wait while he tried to guess what it meant.
But Nathaniel only said goodnight and removed his hands from her body then stayed entirely still. To propose an activity as dynamic as sex now would be like going from sitting to running without the intermediate step of having to stand.
TOO EARLY, SHE woke up to the square of white light from outside. Nathaniel breathed evenly with his mouth open. His arm formed for her a neck-rest, a little too warm. Today he smelled like fabric softener. Perhaps it was the room’s sand-coloured paint that made her imagine the pale blue sheets covering their feet as rolling waves, and made the air conditioner roaring in the yard sound like the ocean. She didn’t know if he had noticed that she was becoming larger. She wondered if she would soon be larger than he was. She tested the circumference of her arm against his arm, curling her fingers loosely around each as far as they would go. She shifted and put her ear over his stomach, hoping to hear the growls of morning. When she didn’t hear any sounds, she pushed her ear down harder like a suction cup on a car window. He woke up sleepy-eyed.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Oh, nothing,” she said quietly, as though she had a marvel-lous secret. And then she said, “I want you to be the first person I sleep with.” She had thought a little about how she would present this question, and was happy she’d managed to avoid the phrase “first time.” Then, looking at his vacant face, she wasn’t clear whether he understood she meant now, she wanted to sleep with him now.
Because she didn’t know what to say next, Mira told him of the ideas that had occurred to her in dreams. Later she’d find it childish that she had once associated dreams with intimacy. But now she told him that in the middle world between sleep- ing and waking, she had been frozen. Her eyes must have been open, because everything had looked the same in his room as it always did, the open closet door casting a tall black shadow on colourful spilled clothing, the Toronto Maple Leafs poster wilting and faded from too much direct light, his back- pack slouched against the leg of the cluttered desk. But she had felt sure it must be a dream, because she couldn’t move. Every attempt to turn or rise had been hopeless. And when she com- pared then to now, she realized she had been unable to sense the textures under her, the cool blankets or his skin, the weight of her head on the pillow, and now they felt incredibly rich, too much almost, how butter might taste after weeks of fasting.
“Sleep paralysis,” he interrupted her. “That’s what that’s called. When you can’t move.”
While frozen, she continued, a figure had materialized in the doorway. In the past, when she’d had similar dreams, there had been other figures, hooded demons or bizarre creatures that stood above her until she managed to scrunch her eyes and squeeze her hands and will herself to move. Once, her ceiling fan had begun speaking to her, its blades whirling with each word. This time, it was her brother, standing at a distance, over on the other side of the room. He appeared paler than usual, and had a moustache and beard, a poor disguise. His mouth moved into the same shapes over and over, and finally she understood rather than heard what he was saying. Ravi said exactly the same words she heard him say to himself, when he thought he was alone, “I love my mom and dad and sister,” simply
, memorized, like lines from a play.
Nathaniel pulled away the sheet covering them so the bed was completely bare and she shuddered — in the daylight she was too aware of her body, of his body.
“So should we do it now,” he said, cold and urgent, “or do you want to keep talking about your brother?” His hands went to the sides of her panties and tugged them down as she tried to suck in her hips but they swelled unbidden. He removed his own boxers, and though they had seen each other naked before, she felt that with their clothing had gone everything that had once been sensual and beautiful. His lips were dry and white at the edges and he kissed her close-mouthed and hard.
“Wait,” she said. “I’ve changed my mind.”
He sighed in an unbearably familiar way, and she collected that sigh in her memory to pull up later, along with the outlines of his ears and the first thoughts she’d had of him.
“Sleep paralysis,” she said, slowly, as she stood up, moving even as she said the unmoving phrase, covering herself with the wrinkled, water-blue sheet. Paralysis. Later, she idly looked up the etymology and learned that para meant beside, lysis meant loosen, release. She took her time, she lingered, because though she knew it was over, she wanted to be sure.
BUT SHE WASN’T sure, and after she spent the day at the library, slowly making her way through a book she wouldn’t remember later, so her mother wouldn’t inquire about why she had left Cynthia’s so early, she went home in the dark and her mother wasn’t even there. Mira entered the house and lay down in her own bed. It had been too easy, she thought, to tell him every-thing. She had overshared, unloaded too much of her baggage. She was like an old woman with hundreds of failed relation-ships — she hadn’t had any failed relationships, until now. The word made her think of bags under eyes, of loose skin and sagging breasts, of her clothes piled up on his floor like every single thing she’d ever told him. She felt like an approximation of herself, like the Picasso series Cynthia had on a poster on her wall, depicting drawings of bulls each more abstract than the one before, so that while the first bull possessed a full, fleshed body, the last was only a few suggestive lines. Never again would she allow herself to be so open. Who would she talk to anyway? She began to cry, noisily, hiccupping wetly into the pillowcase. Who would she tell now, about her father’s picture’s recent disappearance from the mantelpiece, next to the Durga carving, and her mother bringing home some man and serving him tea like an arranged bride? And about what she remembered, the information she had been waiting to bestow on Nathaniel, about how her mother had chased Ravi’s bully down in her rust-spotted Ford Taurus, but when Mira had been bullied, mercilessly, torturously, her mother hadn’t helped, because she hadn’t even known, because Mira never complained to her, just waited every day of first grade at the school bus stop praying that Lucy Chin’s face wouldn’t be there, flattened against the second seat bus window, her hair shiny as gunmetal, swinging over her neck as she turned and watched Mira walk the bus aisle. The girl was always there, waiting to whisper at Mira, don’t tell a soul, as though souls were something you could tell things to.
