by Shashi Bhat
Her mother had taught Mira about reincarnation, and had once confessed to worrying about what she would become in those future lives, emerging from that chrysalis of death. Mira couldn’t expand her thoughts to what God considered pardonable. It was enough for her now that H could overlook her former cruelty, and to convince herself that a hypothetical healed Ravi might let go of every single incident in which she had caused him pain. But in her mind, forgiveness seemed just an emotion that came and went like a hummingbird, a drag-onfly, an imp, an enchantment — a flimsy, mercurial thing.
Rare Birds
MIRA WANTED FEATHERS on her wedding cake, rising outward from the middle tier.
“Every slice like the rear end of a pigeon,” said H, when she showed him pictures on the internet.
She pointed out that the feathers would be violet rather than pigeon-coloured. They had chosen a theme for her wedding — wild, rare birds, an idea that had come to her as she wandered around H’s neighbourhood one afternoon. Walking in front of her was a man carrying a plastic bag in each hand. His slow-moving breadth blocked her path. Mira adjusted her pace because she had nowhere to go; she was killing time while H cooked dinner. He had shooed her away because she had a habit of washing the dishes as he dirtied them. (“Mira, I still need that spoon.”) She had the gardens and garage doors memorized, their colours and bare patches. She knew which yards had solar-powered lights tucked into their soil, disguised behind rocks, brightening as the night darkened, illuminating the undersides of shrubs.
Her eyes went to the man’s bags. Each looked heavy, and she tried to figure out what they contained. Milk in the left, probably — she recognized the plump bulge of the milk bag — and seasonal fruit she guessed, pears, just what H was adding to their salad with crumbled gorgonzola. She was hungry as she observed the second grocery bag, and found that by squinting she could read through the plastic the words, “Wild Bird Feed.” She looked at the man with new interest and pictured wild birds hovering inside his home, sitting on dowel perches, tweeting bossily as they ate their striped sunflower seeds from his rough palm, but then she realized the feed would most likely go into a feeder on his front porch.
“Wild, rare birds!” she shouted at H as she burst into his apartment.
“Nope, just chicken,” he said, patting her back with his oven-mitted hand.
Mira began setting out plates and forks and explaining.
“See, I wanted a theme for the whole wedding, to sort-of unify everything. Is that not the perfect theme? And it gives us a colour scheme — peacock feathers! — we could take all the colours from peacock feathers … am I only allowed to wear a red sari? What are the rules?”
“So a peacock blue sari?” H eyed her. “Yeah, that could look okay.”
“And lots of gold jewellery — from my mom, don’t worry. Should I wear a fake nose ring or is that tacky?”
“No, I adore nose rings. Get a real one. Feathers in your hair?” H asked.
Mira thought about it. They took their places at the tiny round table. H hopped back up for the water pitcher and returned.
“And sewn on the back of the sari,” H continued. “That could be your train. And we could train little birds to carry it for you. I’ll be in charge of that part. Trainer for the train-carrying trainees. Except I don’t know how they’d feel about carrying feathers from one of their shorn brethren.”
“Haaaa,” Mira fake-laughed, selected a crouton from the salad bowl and threw it at him.
THE NEXT DAY, she woke up before dawn while H still slept, and found that her head had dislodged itself from its usual position over the hollow of his neck, under his pushed-around hair. She had a pharmacotherapy class to get to, one of the last classes in her second year of the PharmD program, but she liked to set her alarm ten minutes early and lie awake, looking up at his ceiling, perpetually surprised that its slope had become so familiar. H was the only other person whose apartment she had stayed at regularly, which she thought was lucky. It would have been difficult to get to know many ceilings; she consid-ered the possibilities, flat or popcorned or dotted in spackle, and was glad she hadn’t wasted time on them. She moved her head around H’s neck and shoulder, fretting that she wouldn’t be able to find the right spot again, that he would wake up and she would tell him, “My head doesn’t fit,” and they would try together, hopelessly, for hours, until morning, until the next night, to piece together their skulls and limbs. The light would change in the room and then change again and then she would be forced to leave.
They had chosen a July wedding date, even though Mira had originally wanted it in winter. Her hair frizzed under any sign of humidity, strands rising like dry question marks. She had wanted to have her hair straightened and shiny and curled out and in at the ends in the same hourglass shape as her body in a sari that an aunty would gather and tighten neatly around her. In winter, her jewel-toned sari wouldn’t appear excessive, even in the brightness of daytime, and she wouldn’t have to wear patches to keep the sweat stains from her silk armpits. For the reception, she had a vision of a hall filled with white trees. She wasn’t sure exactly how they would stand, since potted soil would look ridiculous and be a tripping hazard and uncles would probably discard napkins in them. But she’d have lights threaded through the branches (H said this would resemble his sister’s first dorm room), glowing in the dark hall. Between the trees, a V-shaped path would lead to the mantappa where the wedding ceremony would take place. Mira wanted the mantappa’s pillars painted gold — fake gold didn’t seem as vulgar in winter — and the platform covered in a blanket like a snow drift. Two Hindu priests lived in the area, and she would hire the one that didn’t mumble. He was youngish, and they’d hear his tenor voice in the very back row of seats (they expected a guest list of three hundred since H’s family brimmed with popularity and Lala Aunty would probably have a list of her own); his voice would resonate through the trees. For the reception, she could wear a shawl over her shoulders and then when she stood up to dance she would casually drape it over the back of her chair, like an evil queen in a Disney movie, and all the aunties would marvel at how fair her shoulders were, especially for a South Indian. The menu would include every imaginable curry — “Both veg and nonveg? Are you sure?” her mother had asked — and the spiciness of the food would warm them appropriately in the cold weather. Somebody would call up the tables by number and guests would return for seconds as the caterers refilled each stainless steel buffet tray, kept hot over a blue flame.
But a summer wedding made more sense, she realized, dis- cussing it with her future family members and tallying up the reasons — no snow to keep long distance guests from attending, no bulky winter jackets and dripping footwear, her degree would be finished so she would have ample time for planning, H’s mother had the summers off and could help with arrange-ments, they could take outdoor pictures, and then she came up with the bird theme — so she marked the Canada Day long weekend on her wedding planning calendar, decorating the square with a glossy sticker of a bouquet.
EIGHT MONTHS BEFORE the wedding, she journeyed to Gerrard Street to buy saris, and took her mother and Lala Aunty with her.
“You know we could find all of this stuff much cheaper in India,” Aunty said, referring not only to clothing but to favours, centrepieces, and printing invitations. Mira reminded her that she was already taking her honeymoon in India. They had scheduled their trip for the monsoon season, and she anticipated spending all her time wrestling broken umbrellas and taking long naps in humid rooms.
Her mother parked the car in a lot near an elementary school and they hurried through flurries to the first in a row of clothing shops. The store window had hanging strings of coloured glass beads that clicked together as the wind came through the door. Three mannequins stood behind the strings — one headless, one bald and painted a copper colour, one wearing a synthetic light brown wig. They had been dressed in Indian dresses of varying styles, dupattas t
ied haphazardly from shoulder to waist. Two were red, in cheap chiffon, one- size lehengas that fell loosely and revealed half a foot of plastic midriff. Boneless arms posed out from ill-fitting cap sleeves. But the third was a blue so pale it was almost silver, embroidered in silver, with patterns of stemless flowers mingling at the corners of their petals. She could wear it with a peacock-blue blouse to match her theme. It hadn’t been made into a dress yet, was just a piece of fabric pinned so it skimmed the mannequin’s frame.
It hid the body’s hollow beige like the dresses Mira had searched for in her fattest stage of youth. And it reminded her of an incident before that, when she’d been a little girl in a different Gerrard Street shop. Her mother looked for a jubba that Ravi wouldn’t refuse to wear (one with no buttons, no high neck). Mira had fallen asleep for an hour under a rack full of blue dresses, woke up to a ceiling of different-length blue hems, like a low, textured sky. She sat up and they brushed her face, smelling like the incense that burned in a dish on the store’s counter.
“This one’s nice,” she said now to her mother, and to the shop woman who approached.
“You can’t buy the first one you see,” Lala Aunty interjected, and then looked closely at the fabric and said, “That’s too simple for a wedding sari.”
“No, not right for a wedding sari at all!” the woman agreed, leading them to a carpeted staircase. Up the stairs were the expensive proper wedding clothes which Mira scanned through quickly.
“Aishwarya wore this kind of sari only,” the woman said, pulling a square cellophane package from the shelves, “How nice you would look! With a flower garland in your hair and one gold pendant like this,” she gestured at the part in her own hair.
Mira humoured her. The woman showed them a series of saris, explaining which part of India each one was from and in what style they should be tied. Then Mira retreated into a makeshift dressing room while her mother and the store woman passed possible reception outfits to her over the card-board door. Lala Aunty lowered herself into a nearby folding chair and gave her opinions, having Mira pose in every dress.
She really only wanted the blue sari she had seen first, and so after commenting diplomatically on every outfit in the upstairs of the shop, she told them firmly, “I’ll get the blue one I pointed out for the reception and then we’ll think about the other one.”
But when they had finished returning all the tested fabric to the shelves, and once they’d finished chattering about bangles and bindis and Aunty had bought three pairs of gaudy earrings for Mira that spanned the length of her neck, they descended back to the front window and found that somebody had already purchased the blue fabric displayed so prominently in the window. An assistant was in the process of dressing the copper-skinned mannequin in some subpar material, attaching it over the hinges of elbows.
They left the shop after a fruitless search for a similar sari. At a shop two doors down, they bought a traditional red sari for the wedding and a dark green one for the evening function. “Christmas colours,” exclaimed the store’s owner, as though that were worth celebrating.
IT ALL FELT like a compromise. Mira had attended nine weddings in her life. Most were weddings of family friends; Indian weddings that followed the same stale but colourful structure, with an occasional tweak of having the bridegroom arrive on the back of a flamboyantly dressed horse. A few had been the weddings of high school and university friends. One was Cynthia’s three years earlier — surprising, since Mira had always imagined Cynthia holding out until her thirties rather than getting married at twenty-two, right out of university. She’d held it in an old, familiar church on the side of Yonge Street in historic Richmond Hill. Two of their former high school teachers had made cameos, nodding from their seats in pews, nearly unrecognizable when not standing at the chalk-board front of a room. Each of those weddings had possessed its own charm, but Mira wanted hers to stun, to be recalled among the best of weddings, not to blend in with the others and be discussed and forgotten over the car ride home.
But she compromised on the photographer — she’d wanted artful black and white shots of the side of her face as she got her makeup done, of her petticoat on its hanger, of Ravi’s hands blurring as he danced, of H laughing into a spotlit microphone — but they couldn’t insult H’s cousin who always took the photographs, and she had a feeling all the pictures would be posed rows of aunties holding plates of half-eaten idlis. She despised idlis, but had included them on the menu because, her mother reasoned, many of the uncles had health problems and expected idlis, which were easy on the stomach. For her rare bird theme, and to make up for the cancelled white trees, she’d thought up centrepieces of twisted, nest-like branches, with wood carved bird eggs sprayed gold and turquoise.
“Eggs?” asked H. Mira told him this idea in March as they flipped through bridal magazines on the sofa. “And how do you want these eggs, Bridezilla, scrambled or fried?” he asked, “Or devilled? In an omelette?”
She looked at him mournfully.
“Or wait, wild birds, right?” he continued. “How about ostrich eggs?”
She kissed his ear.
“We’ll put them on the menu.” He gathered her up, crushing the page of a magazine. “Except half our guests are vegans …”
“Okay, you’re right, no eggs, but what about the branches?”
He agreed to it, and they ordered branches to be set in small brass pots. When the branches arrived in the mail, they stored them in her mother’s basement with the other wedding supplies. The more Mira looked at them, the more they seemed to have nothing at all to do with her theme — they were bunches of twigs she could have found in the yard.
“Let’s just hold the wedding outdoors,” Mira said to H when the hall they wanted turned out to be booked on their desired date. She fantasized about having the ceremony at Mill Pond, until she remembered about the swans that had lived in the pond, and how a decade ago somebody had snapped their necks. She didn’t think she could hold her wedding, given its theme, among the ghosts of all those murdered birds.
They scheduled the religious part of the wedding to take place in a temple basement, though the floor needed refinishing and the ceiling beams were dark and low.
When she went to see the temple’s set-up, she found that the mantappa, the pillared platform on which the wedding ceremony would be held, was bright orange, though the priest on the phone had told her gold.
“It is gold-colour,” the priest kept saying.
“No, it’s orange!” Mira almost shouted, but did not because she was in a temple. H suggested they cover it in flowers, but the flowers Mira longed for were overly pricey dahlias and orchids. Given their graduate student salaries, they ended up ordering white carnations that would bulge cheaply down each pillar.
She didn’t think the things she wanted — her wedding plans, other things — were unreasonable. In fact, they were often ordinary; once she’d read the real estate section of the paper and said to H, “Imagine we moved to a house outside the gta,” and another time they’d been in a café, and observing a woman’s tall, wine-coloured shoes, she’d said, “Imagine I owned a pair of those,” and H always said, “I can’t imagine it!” as though it were wholly unimaginable, until, over the tele-phone, midway through one of his jokes, she’d said, “Imagine we got married,” and half-waited for the usual answer while at the same time imagining him saying, softly, in a romance movie voice, “I can imagine it.” He wasn’t sappy enough for that; he just laughed at her, and she worried about him breaking up with her. But after he had hung up the phone he drove immediately to see her, still wearing his pyjamas, and proposed properly, or improperly, because he removed his pyjamas and hers shortly afterwards, flinging them in his ironic, dramatic way. Even as her clothes were being flung, Mira fantasized about him ending the relationship, an even more painful end now that they were engaged. It hurt her chest to think of never washing dishes in his apa
rtment again, of having nobody to phone — who would answer her terribly timed phone calls? She called him when he was already sleeping, when he was in important meetings, during funerals, during the basketball finals, and he answered, would probably answer if, by crazy accident, he were at the circus hanging from some acrobat’s legs, swinging, letting go, mid-air, he would answer and say one of his absurdities, a pun on hanging and hanging up. She thought of him breaking up with her, saying, “I don’t know, Mir-kat,” speaking in endearments right up until the end.
She took a strange pleasure in these break-up fantasies. But it made her think, guiltily, that maybe H was only the person she was meant to date before meeting the person whom she was actually supposed to marry. And now she would go to her honeymoon — in India of all places, staying with his grand-parents in Karnataka and then hers in Kerala, under torrential rains — and return to move her belongings from her Toronto walk-up into his. She’d never live again in a space that was only hers; she had spent innumerable hours in his apartment but still hadn’t grown accustomed to the way mugs were kept upside-down in the cupboard, or the way he ate cereal instead of bagels for breakfast. Soon she’d be changing the name on her driver’s licence and other identification. It felt as though she were severing the link to those other Acharyas, the ones that had been with her from birth. H’s family was so flaw-less; it was like being adopted, plucked from her home, or like singeing off fingerprints whose touch she had pressed to countless surfaces.
MIRA TOOK RAVI with her to sample wedding cakes, partly because H had only a mild sweet tooth, partly because she was exhausted of his bird-related humour. And because she didn’t know anybody who enjoyed cake as much as Ravi did. He ate the Sara Lee unthawed from the freezer.
One of her classmates, who had just gotten married herself, referred her to a bakery. Mira had sketched her own design. She wanted it to be avant-garde, with mad hatter layers and faux (non-toxic) feathers.
