by Shashi Bhat
Lala Aunty took the credit for this new, lighter, popular Ravi, and seemed to think she could affect similar change in Mira’s life by taking her shopping. Mira preferred to do her shopping alone, so she could scour for secret, beautiful, often second-hand finds, but Lala Aunty went on about how before Mira went off to university she needed to start wearing the right brands in the right sizes — “None of your clothes fit you properly,” she said, and hinted that if Mira herself took up a sport, maybe she would lose some weight and it wouldn’t be so hard to find a husband. “You’re young still of course, but every year girls will be snatching them up and then when you are twenty-six-twenty-seven you’ll see only the baldies and fatties are left.”
So they shopped together at Hillcrest Mall one Saturday after dropping Ravi at bowling and her mother at the dentist. Mira wondered if Lala Aunty planned to pay for everything or if she was meant to pay herself. She stopped in the food court for a cup of coffee and Lala Aunty expressed surprise that at seventeen Mira was already drinking coffee — “A bit early for coffee, isn’t it? Must mean you don’t have enough of your own natural energy.” She expounded on caffeine and how she couldn’t possibly sleep at night if she had coffee in the after-noon. Mira interrupted her — “Chai, then? They have chai everywhere now” — but Lala Aunty complained about sugar and about how Westerners were exploiting Indian culture to an inexcusable degree.
“Just look at our influences on fashion,” Lala Aunty said. She directed her remark at the mall’s biggest department store, indignantly, as though the mannequins were her oppressed ancestors. “You know Indians invented sequins?”
“This might look okay, right?” Mira asked, holding up a black Indian-inspired tunic.
“You could get that for a hundred rupees in India,” said Lala. “The price of a cup of coffee here.”
“But I would have to buy a plane ticket to India first,” replied Mira, draping the shirt over her arm in subtle rebellion.
“And when is the last time you went to India? It has been a long time, isn’t it? A million years roughly. Since before your father passed?” Lala Aunty asked.
“We haven’t gone since then,” Mira said.
“Go then! Why not? You kids don’t even know how big the family is.”
“It’s my family,” said Mira, checking the sleeves of the shirt for stray threads.
“Yes, of course, I know that. Actually, you can buy even more clothes there. You wear only black T-shirts or what? Ravi can stay with me and Uncle. You and Mom go and when you come back he will be fluent in Hindi.” Lala Aunty took the shirt from Mira’s hand and kept it firmly back on the rack.
“I guess we can go now, since I’ll be buying all those cheaper clothes in India,” Mira said, asserting to herself that Indians certainly had not invented the sequin.
THEY PICKED UP Mira’s mother at the dentist — “Which kind of floss did they give you? The cheap kind, oh this is the good kind. Good,” said Lala Aunty, checking the toothbrush, too, to make sure it was soft-bristled. Then they drove to the bowling alley to pick up Ravi, and when they got there all shifted seats so that he could drive.
“Well, then, how was it?” Lala Aunty asked. “You struck ’em dead, I think, right? Striked ’em dead.”
“Put your seatbelt on,” said Ravi. “It’s the law.”
Aunty fastened her seatbelt. “Hit lots of those pins, eh?”
“I did pretty good,” said Ravi, beaming out the windshield.
“Can we stop at my radio station for just one moment?” Aunty asked. “I have forgotten to bring home my recipes for Monday, and I must test them out once more before delivering them to the public.”
Ravi hummed and frowned. He took the extended route and they parked in the near-empty lot next to the building where Aunty worked.
“Come in with me, I absolutely must show you my office,” she said.
The four of them ascended a narrow set of stairs to the offices of Indo-Toronto Radio. Her cooking show was the most pop- ular on the station, and had been running for an abnormally long time. When she’d started, it had been merely a Sunday morning show, but now they put her on right before dinner time every weekday. Toronto Indian women listened to her from their kitchens, followed her advice over even the smallest measurements of garam masala, which was odd given that Aunty herself was unable to stick to a recipe as written (the reason her cooking was often subpar).
For Lala Aunty’s radio career, Mira held a private respect. She liked to imagine those women, under the influence of Aunty’s voice, running for the appropriate cupboard as soon as she named an ingredient. When the show ended, her instruc-tions continued to guide them, as they fermented their white idli batter in their turned-off ovens, admired the air bubbles that formed overnight, inhaled the light sour smell, and consulted the notes they’d taken from Lala’s show. Lala Aunty’s instruc-tions filled recipe books across the city, were pencilled into margins of newspapers, copied on Post-it notes. New Indian wives, who had never before so much as purchased rice flour, would present their husbands with dishes of curried goat and diamond-shaped almond sweets. The husbands — setting their expectations low — would open the foil in their lunches and find thick onion uthapams, dark orange mango pickles, and crisp happalas the colour of tropical sand. Their colleagues would ask them what they were eating, and the husbands wouldn’t know the names of the foods at all. “But this isn’t just a show for us ladies,” Lala Aunty announced now and again on the radio, firm in her feminism, and each time, another husband would learn to make a rich tomato saru.
In fact, there was a framed poster on the hallway wall of a shining pot of tomato saru with Aunty stirring it and smiling. Chopped coriander lay scattered over the surface, and Mira thought, that coriander is no longer fresh. The poster was over a decade old, though with all of Aunty’s primping and dyeing, her hair was roughly the same genre of black. The age change showed only in the absence of lines around the photograph eyes and in the flamingo lipstick she had long since stopped wearing. The name of the show, Eating with Aunty, was printed across the bottom in chubby letters, somewhat surreally, since Mira had heard Aunty say those words so many times.
The picture portrayed Aunty as Mira’s family had first met her. For months after Mira’s father died, Lala Aunty had arrived at their door with pots not dissimilar to the one in the picture. Mira’s mother, stoic in mourning, had listened to Lala’s descriptions of whatever food she had brought with her, and Mira had wondered if the descriptions could penetrate her mother’s deadened thoughts. The descriptions of food would turn to details of what she had cooked for other families, families in worse situations than theirs. “So we’re not the most pathetic, then?” Mira had heard her mother ask once, and Lala Aunty had responded, “Oh no no no no,” repeating the word “no” another dozen times in a soothing rhythm that Mira had repeated to herself later when she tried to sleep. Back then, she would awake in the mornings and hear her mother on the phone with Lala Aunty. She phoned her at dawn, knowing she would be awake. It became a goal for Mira to wake up before her mother made the phone calls, so that she could pick up the extension in her room and listen. They were her phone calls, too, she needed soothing, too. “Aunty?” her mother would say into the phone and Lala Aunty would say, “Good morning, Shilpa! I am cooking porridge for Uncle. He is still dozing as usual …,” slipping into a narrative without waiting for a question or reason for the phone call. It had been such a relief, Mira recalled, to hear another voice that early in the morning. Their house was always so silent, not even cars made sounds out the window, since they didn’t live on a main road. “Why not come over?” Lala Aunty would ask — exactly the right question. Mira’s mother would gather up the children and say, “We’re going to Lala Aunty’s!” and Mira would pretend she didn’t know this already and would sing, “Lalalala! Lalalala!” in lovely ascen-sion, like a vocal exercise. Lala Aunty had been just what t
hey needed. But that was over a decade ago, and now her role had changed, the way words can change, when formed in different mouths.
NEXT TO THE stirring, smiling photo of Lala Aunty was her office door, which they entered. She went to her desk and rifled through file folders, pulling out recipes.
“I’m doing an eggplant curry on Monday’s show. One of Uncle’s favourite recipes. You know he can’t cook at all,” she chattered as the other three looked around. The recording equipment was in an attached room; the place seemed to be set up as many rooms attached to each other in a long row. This was the space where she prepared and answered her fan letters. The room was clean, with corkboards all around where Aunty pinned pictures of foods she’d made and pictures of herself with special guests who had visited and cooked with her — Bollywood actors, local members of parliament, Indo-Canadian authors — and a calendar with all her appointments colour-coded in pen. She’d brought in a small refrigerator and kept it unobtrusively under the desk. Next to an aging, beige computer she kept a kettle, an assortment of teas, and a bear-shaped jar of honey.
“Come, I’ll show you around,” Aunty started to say, but then they heard some shuffling and footsteps in the next room. “Oh, somebody is here, who could it be?”
A man in a blue golf shirt emerged and said, “Oh, hello.” Aunty introduced him as a producer for a Tamil music show. He shook hands with Mira’s mother and then with Ravi — clearly he’d mistaken Ravi for an adult. Mira stood awkwardly behind her mother and brother because the room was cramped. “Now, how do you folks all know Lala?” the man asked, and then inquired as to whether they were from the Toronto area and whether they listened to his show. He smiled at Mira’s mother and smiled even bigger when she said she loved the intros in his music show. Imagine he asked her out right now, on a date. He seemed the type to be smooth enough to hit on a woman even when her children were standing right there. He didn’t look at Mira at all — but, of course, she was standing behind everyone else. And then the man turned to Ravi, still smiling, looking intelligent, Mira thought; the man’s eyes had intelligence, which you heard people say a lot about eyes, and people took it for granted, but Mira never did, because she had looked so often into her brother’s eyes, and had found only the undeveloped expression you might see in the eyes of a squirrel, a bird, a creature who didn’t know you from anybody. Ravi looked like everybody else, until you looked into his eyes. Mira saw the man look into Ravi’s eyes and ask him a question. She didn’t hear the question, but she heard Ravi’s response, “I’m not sure,” a standard confused answer of his. He said it in his slow tenor and it came out like he was humming a tune. Mira watched the man’s face change as he realized the sort of person he was speaking to.
“Well, then,” the man said.
“Ravi suffers from some retardation,” Lala Aunty said, put- ting an arm over Ravi’s shoulders.
No he doesn’t, Mira thought. She balked at the lack of specificity. The word retardation sounded so much worse than what he was. In the half-second pause, Mira wondered how her father, in the same situation as this man, would have reacted. Kindness, she thought, infinite compassion, and then was unsure of how much she’d glorified him, and if instead he’d say, as this man did, “Ah, okay, I see,” satisfied at having the problem addressed so squarely.
DESPITE THAT SNAFU, it seemed Ravi’s luck had continued. Lala Aunty called them up the next week and said she had mentioned to the man at the radio station that Ravi had been looking for work for some time now and she showed the man his resumé, and the man had found him a job. “Nothing to do with radio, but his brother-in-law is looking for a driver. He does deliveries — food manufacturing or somesuch,” she said. “It’s a good start, you know. Why didn’t we think of these driving jobs, he is such a good driver. Then maybe he can go on to ttc driving, post office work, airport limousines …”
For Ravi, the best part was wearing a uniform, a royal blue T-shirt with the company’s logo. He came home with smudges of grease on his pants from warehouse work. He lived in high anticipation of his paycheque, which would come in a lump sum after his two-month trial period, and though his arms ached from all the heavy lifting, he said, “My arms are hurting,” with enormous pride. Because it was summer, and on the hot and dry side for Toronto, his left arm, propped against the window frame in the sun, turned a deep mahogany colour, much darker than the rest of him. At night his mother applied Myoflex ointment to his arms, and in the morning she layered on the sunscreen.
“We should fashion you a sleeve,” said Mira, “just to cover that one arm.”
“You must be joking!” said Ravi. He had learned a new expression.
RAVI’S LIFE HAD a rhythm now, regular as a sine wave, as full as anyone else’s, with work and his new extracurricular. Midway through the bowling season, Ravi came home with a trophy — it had a figurine of a man bowling, in plastic the colour of brass, seam lines running down the sides of the man’s body.
“Look at this trophy!” Ravi said and held it high up over his head. “They said I might get a big trophy,” he continued, after all the congratulations, and gave his mother a sheet of paper from his coach. It announced that their team had quali-fied for the regional semi-finals, taking place over three days the following week.
“It’s a good thing they sent this paper, or we wouldn’t know what was happening, Rav,” his mother said.
“Good thing!” he said.
“Should I put the trophy on your shelf?” Mira asked him, and he nodded and gave it to her and went to the living room to watch Wheel of Fortune. As she travelled up the stairs and into his bedroom, she heard him repeat the letters after the contestants. Earlier that year, Uncle had installed a glass shelf that cut across one wall of his room. It was held up by smooth metal brackets painted dark blue. Glass might not have been the best choice, because the grey dust covered the surface and made it noticeably opaque. She dusted off a corner and placed the trophy there, noting the other items displayed: his grade eleven photo in a cardboard frame, a sandalwood statue of Lord Ganesha, a model car with lacquered, lifted, butterfly doors.
While she was there, she made his bed, picking up the sheet and tossing it upwards to shake off the short sharpened pencils that often collected in parts of Ravi’s room. There lay maybe twelve pencils on the floor, so she gathered them and opened a desk drawer to put them inside. They fit in the space between the curled drawings and unused watercolour sets and red-penned assignments from the normal classes. She found a familiar copy of The Hobbit, pages smashed and bent up against one side of the drawer. She remembered when they’d read the book aloud and seen all sorts of hidden significances — There is a lot more in him than you guess, and a deal more than he has any idea of himself. It seemed so cheesy now, like a quote they’d put on a Special Olympics pamphlet; every quote everywhere seemed to be a melodramatic metaphor for Ravi’s hidden abilities. But as it turned out, he did have hidden abili-ties, and Mira wanted, if she could, to not become what she might be becoming: the sort of hardened person who dismissed things just because they felt sentimental or impossible.
Later, in the evening, when she came downstairs from her shower and found Lala Aunty in the kitchen with Ravi, when she hadn’t even heard her knocking or opening the front door, and didn’t even know where her mother had gone, she let it go. She herself was not the person who rightfully should be sitting there with her brother — next to the kitchen walls painted in two clashing colours with white wainscoting in the middle like some kind of mediator — going over bowling rules, under the half-circle window that framed the half-circle moon.
LALA AUNTY WOULDN’T let them buy fries at the bowling alley, even though all the other tables of spectators had them.
“Vegan brownies,” she said and pulled out Tupperware from her purse. The brownies tasted like bowling shoe insoles, but Mira figured they hadn’t come here to eat anyway. She and Aunty and Uncle and her mother
were all present, and Mira had brought her friend Cynthia. Ravi, in a new violet bowling shirt, stood with his teammates. He stood on his toes to wave at his family.
“Focus on the game!” yelled Mira. She was making an effort because Cynthia was there.
“What a great shirt,” said Cynthia, untying and retying her hair. “We should get bowling shirts but wear them, like, as dresses.”
“Over tights?” Mira suggested.
“Or without them!” Cynthia winked.
“Hey, don’t make these implications when I am here,” said Uncle, looking up from the book he was reading on the history of bowling.
They’d been there forever, watching other teams bowl, and now Ravi’s team was finally up and halfway through a game.
“They’re winning, right? Are they winning?” asked Lala Aunty.
“They seem to be winning,” Uncle said, and everybody agreed.
It was hard to tell from the team’s demeanour. There were five people on Ravi’s team. Three of them (including Ravi) waited quite emotionlessly, another seemed excited about the fries he was eating, and another maintained a miserable pose with his chin in his hands.
Ravi went up. Unusually, there was no build-up to his turn.
He flattened his lip and his face squeezed as though con- verging at a central point. All of this was only visible to the rest of them in profile, as he did a surprising sprint, swung his arm, and let the ball go.
