The Family Took Shape

by Shashi Bhat

  The shop said Patricia’s Cakes in a white scripty font on the window. In the window display were hundreds of cupcakes, arranged in a daunting mountain of tiers. These were the only real cake inside the store. The door opened to a small white room with display cases around the walls, filled not with cakes but with their pictures, next to colour swatches and photos of varieties of fondant bows. A thin, efficient-looking woman stood behind one of the cases, her blue-jeaned legs magnified disproportionately through the glass.

  “You could have called it Patty’s Cakes,” said Mira.

  “Well, I could have,” said the woman, and handed Ravi a menu. “These are the flavours we have available. Obviously for the inside we have chocolate and white cake and we could marble those, but then we’ve also got lemon and red velvet and coconut and the others you see listed there, and we could always add some kind of flavouring — amaretto or orange or whatever you like — to the frosting or to the batter, and frosting-wise there’s buttercream or you could do a rolled fondant, depending on the design. Shoot — I didn’t even ask you about the event. Is it a wedding, birthday …?”

  “Wedding,” said Ravi.

  “Oh, right, you told me that over the phone.”

  “Actually,” said Mira, “I’ve sort of drawn out the design I was hoping for.” Suddenly her piece of notepaper seemed ridiculous, dog-eared as she pulled it out of her purse.

  The woman looked at the paper for a moment. “Hmm, well, this cake would collapse under its own weight. It’s struc-turally impossible. It wouldn’t stand,” the woman said. She asked about the other details of the wedding.

  “Well, it’s a bird theme. Wild birds. Rare birds,” Mira told her without conviction, and then described the dress and favours and invitations and the other odds and ends she’d collected.

  “It’s like you can’t decide if you want the wedding to be elegant or garish,” the woman stared at her and then came out from behind the counter. “But that’s a wedding, you know, it’s a business. I hate to sound skeptical. Anyway, we can work with this theme of yours.” She pulled out a notebook and outlined the simple shape of a three-tiered cake. “A white fondant cake, and I’ll airbrush a peacock feather over each layer. So your guests won’t have to floss out the fake feathers. Okay?”

  “Okay,” said Mira, glad Ravi was with her instead of H, who would never have stopped making fun of how rudely the woman had dismissed her sketch. Ravi wandered to a picture of a cake shaped like a race car. His fingertips left oval prints over the glass counter.

  “Did you want to sample the flavours now?” the woman asked, and, without waiting for an answer, she directed them to a high round table in the corner with two tall wooden stools. She retreated into the kitchen, behind a nearly invisible door.

  Seeing a groom cake topper with a striking resemblance to H reminded Mira that she should probably phone him for his opinion. Mira checked her handbag and realized that she’d left her phone in the car. “Rav, I’ll be two seconds. I’m running to the car,” Mira said.

  “She’ll bring out the cakes for me?” Ravi asked and Mira nodded, darting out the door.

  Out by the car, on the phone with H, she saw Ravi through the window, eating methodically through small cubes of cake. He wore long denim shorts, eyes wide and head bent over a dessert plate. When he was little and had birthday parties, there had been other people — boys from school that their mother invited — but after a while the guest list dwindled to just the three of them. They would eat pizza, then the cake (too sweet, bought from Loblaws) and give him his gifts (shirts, sets of coloured pencils). They took pictures if they had remem-bered to charge the camera batteries. Each year’s photo was identical to the last — Ravi hunched over the round blue cake, knife posed over a frosting rose, Mira or her mother (whoever wasn’t taking the picture) standing with hands on the back of his chair. Ravi was thirty now; the legs that came out of his shorts were covered in dark hair. Probably he would cele-brate his seventieth birthday the same way, minus their mother. Even now, Mira and H occasionally cooked dinner and invited him, and he acted as though he were their child. “More milk,” he would say, holding up his glass. He would be the same in forty years, but grey-haired and smaller, changes impercep-tible over the leisurely movement of time. Now he dipped each cube of Patricia’s cakes in one of the mini ceramic bowls that held frosting, lifted them to his mouth with a level expression of joy.

  “YOU KNOW WHAT we should do, is we should save money by getting companies to sponsor our wedding,” said H to Mira as he rolled uneven chappatis.

  “I don’t want Google stamped across the back of my sari,” Mira said. She was trying to produce a chickpea curry from Aunty’s telephoned recipe. She distracted him by kissing his shirt-covered back and took the rolling pin from him.

  “Hey,” he tried to get the rolling pin back, then gave up and sat down at the table, where all their freshly printed wedding invitations were laid out to be addressed.

  “No, see, I saw it on TV where they were able to get tons of stuff they wouldn’t have been able to afford. Like the cake — we could get like a crazy flamingo cake. It’d go perfectly with your theme, Mirabello-mushroom.”

  “I wish I had cake now,” she said, giving up on the chappatis and sitting down with him. The invitations smelled pleasantly of chemicals. The neat squares were night blue on the outside, embossed with a stylized silver Ganesha. She opened it to see the blue letters on the white background, with a tiny rsvp card tucked inside. H had had them made by a friend of his who did desktop publishing, so Mira hadn’t yet seen them. The letters inside cordially invited guests to the wedding of Miss Mira Acharya and Mr. Harshvardhan Narayan. Below that were the date and time information for the ceremony and reception, and the words “No boxed gifts.”

  “No boxed gifts,” Mira said.

  “Oh yeah, my mom told me to have that put there. Apparently it’s a polite way of telling people to just give cash.”

  “It’s a rude way to tell people to just give cash. It’s rude to mention gifts, period!”

  Mira and her mother had discussed this issue over the years. There were four possibilities with wedding gifts: creating a registry (classic), not mentioning them at all (the most elegant option), “No gifts please” (the subtle bragging of the rich), and “No boxed gifts,” which they’d decided was the most hideous option, an option for people with no shame.

  “But we’d rather have cash than receive eighteen rice cookers,” H said, smiling and moving his chair close to hers, as if he couldn’t handle being so far across the table from her.

  “God, I just feel like I’m compromising on everything! You shouldn’t have to compromise for your wedding. I mean, I changed the cake design and we have that godawful mantappa and have you looked at the centrepieces? They look like beaver dams. And now I have to settle for these tacky wedding invita-tions so all my friends and relatives think I’m asking them for money.”

  H got up abruptly, silently pulling back his chair. “I’m sorry you feel like you’re settling,” he said, before he headed up the stairs. Mira sat for a moment and then retreated to the living room, leaving the trapezoidal chappatis uncooked on the counter.

  HER BRIDAL SHOWER was a crass affair. Cynthia hosted at her apartment and seemed to confuse it with a bachelorette party. Fifteen girls attended, most of whom Mira barely knew (“You remember Sophie? From my office?”). They sipped pink rum punch poured into paper cups from a large plastic pitcher and ate wheat thins with dyed-orange cheddar until the pizza arrived. Cynthia had baked cookies in inappropriate shapes. By the end of the night, the girls were weaving drunkenly over the carpet. Somebody suggested they go to a corner bar (“Popcorn! Doesn’t that bar have free popcorn?”), so they did. A tiara appeared on Mira’s head and she wore it sadly through the evening and until the next morning, when she woke up early, having crashed at Cynthia’s. She climbed, hungover, over the oth
er sleeping girls splayed across sofas, to her gifts, and opened them. Tissue paper, wrinkled and scotch-taped, went into an empty gift bag. The night before the bridal shower, the night she and H had argued, she had gone to bed and found him already asleep. In the morning, she frothed the coffee and he distributed the cereal, but they spoke only in nouns. “Milk?” she grunted, “Sugar,” he replied. Mira opened her gifts quietly, as not to wake the other girls. Instead of bevelled glass jewellery boxes, she found she’d received erotic card games and poppy red underwear.

  She drove right to H’s apartment and entered to find him standing on the kitchen table, replacing a lightbulb. He held his frown and she held one of the presents up to him. It was a novelty bride voodoo doll. Hanging from her bouquet was a pouch of pins for the groom to use nefariously on what was basically a bride-shaped pillow. H examined it thoroughly and, not looking at Mira, he removed the pins and set them down on the table. Then he took the doll and kissed it squarely (for a surprisingly long time) and started laughing as Mira wrapped her arms around his knees and kissed his brown calves. “You bird,” he said, bending to hold up two fistfuls of her hair, like wings, “my rare bird.” Mira thought of the first time she had visited his family, taking her passport because it was across the border in Upstate New York. She had always evaluated other people’s houses, how the floors creaked in tune with her movements, how the stairways angled into land-ings, how the sofas had acquired new contours in age. At H’s family’s house, in contrast, she had complimented his mother’s cooking (exactly like her own mother’s), talked pharmaceuti-cals with his father (a doctor), watched two romantic comedies with his sister (H searched for a better entertainment), and was back across the border before she remembered to notice how the pet hair swept through the air like ghosts.

  ON THE MORNING of the wedding, Lala Aunty pinned Mira’s sari and bent in front of her — softly groaning, joints cracking — to adjust the crisp folds. Mira’s mother took the mango-shaped earrings purchased long ago by Mira’s father, and, so that they would fit through the small holes in Mira’s ears, she dipped the ends in Vaseline. Outside the reception hall dressing room’s double doors, Mira heard Ravi pacing — “They deliv-ered the cake!” he called out, muffled through the door. She heard him clap his hands.

  She followed Ravi to the kitchen, dressed but for her hair and makeup (the stylist had yet to arrive), and found the cake placed alone in a huge chrome refrigerator. The fondant was smooth and white, the cake woman had painted peacock feathers climbing up the cake, their shapes pendulous as tear-drops; their centres had an iridescence Mira hadn’t realized could be achieved with frosting. At the top of the cake she had perched a peacock figurine made entirely of sugar, turning his long neck to glance behind in a way that made you wonder what magical thing he had seen.

  A caterer came around to check for fridge space. “It’s a mag- nificent cake,” she said, leaning in to move it slightly, to make room, but the cake board stuck stubbornly to the metal bars of the fridge shelf. It looked like she was being quite careful, but — and Mira knew it would happen before it happened — the cake wobbled and fell forward, its painted feathers, glimmering layers collapsing, toppling like a child in a dress.

  “Oh no,” Ravi said. He stepped back with his hands up, as though worried someone might blame him for this disaster.

  “I’m sorry, oh my god, I’m sorry,” the caterer said.

  “What are we going to do? We have to go to the temple!” said Mira’s mother.

  “I’ll pay for it,” said the caterer. “I’ll find you another cake, I’ll go right now.”

  “What will we do?” Mira asked. “We didn’t even order a second dessert.”

  “I’ll find you another cake,” the caterer said again, and bolted away.

  “We’ll probably never see that foolish character again,” Mira’s mother said.

  “Everyone will be waiting for cake and we’ll have to say there isn’t any,” said Mira. “It’s like the wedding won’t even be finished! How can we dance without cutting the cake?”

  “Who am I going to marry?” Ravi asked. “Is she here yet?” Mira and her mother looked at each other and at the ruined cake, which looked even more exquisite after it had sunken into itself on the floor.

  “What do you mean, Rav?” their mother asked.

  “I can’t marry her if she’s not here.”

  “You know this is Mira’s wedding today, right?” their mother said finally.

  He paused. “Oh … but I thought … because …”

  “Because?” Mira asked, wondering if it were actually pos- sible that in the preceding months, during every discussion of flowers and cake, Ravi had been making plans of his own, thinking it was all for him, anticipating a joint life without knowing how unlikely it was that he would ever have it.

  “Well, because I got to pick the cake and all that,” he said. “And because you said I should wear the jubba because it was a special day.”

  “I’m sorry, Ravi,” their mother said, and paused.

  It was evident he was struggling to hide a number of emo- tions, or perhaps struggling to finally take grasp of this inkling he had, that only the smallest, vaguest differences separated the quality of his life from anyone else’s. “That’s all right,” he said.

  “But when I get married, who am I going to get married to?” he asked.

  It had been a long while since he had asked about a poten-tial marriage. Once, Mira had heard her mother brush off the question and then later that day had seen her crying quietly in front of a picture of Lord Ganesha, whose wedding had also been delayed in perpetuity. Another time, during the mali-cious flash of Mira’s teenage years, Ravi had approached the door of her room and asked how old she thought he should be when he got married. She had said to him only, “Who would marry you?” before getting up from her desk and closing the door. And minutes later, even after her conscience kicked in, she had thought of the horrifying trap of marrying somebody like Ravi, imagined arranging his marriage on false pretences, maybe to a destitute Indian village girl, and realized the idea’s cruel impossibility.

  “Well, what kind of girl do you want to marry, Rav?” Mira asked, in spite of her instincts, adjusting the collar on the jubba he’d worn for his wedding day.

  “A pretty girl,” he said, and smiled broadly.

  “No ugly girl is marrying my son,” said their mother. “She’ll certainly be beautiful.”

  “Indian, do you think?” Mira asked him.

  “Maybe,” he said, considering.

  “A girl from India would be just great really,” said their mother. “We India-grown girls have some sense.”

  “I say marry an American and get citizenship,” said Mira.

  “She should be smart, too,” said Ravi.

  “Very important. She better have a good job. I wouldn’t mind a doctor in the family,” their mother added.

  “Or some unique profession, like an art dealer …”

  “What is this nonsense, art dealer! Doctor or engineer or maybe business-type. And she must be responsible. Preferably knows how to cook some proper chappatis, unlike this one.” Mira’s mother pointed her eyebrows at her.

  Ravi’s bride would perform complex surgeries and make round chappatis and quote Baudelaire, thought Mira. Or she would do none of those things, she would instead twitch her fingers and pace the halls at night, chew the beautiful tangled ends of her hair, and the pair would live in convenient, mir- rored ignorance that anything was wrong with the other or with themselves.

  Mira took a clean plate from a stack on the counter and slid it into the cake, pulling it up with a heavily iced chunk from the side. She put it within their reach on the counter and dipped her henna-covered fingers into it. They shared the cake in the spacious chrome kitchen, spoke through the blue frosting to imagine Ravi’s bride. It was seven in the morning still, and they ha
d yet to adorn Mira’s hair with its plait of white jasmine flowers whose petals would drift to her shoulders as she prepared to adjourn to her guilty, happy life, where her only problems would be all-consuming in their triviality. You should cry before your wedding, thought Mira; sentimentality and tradition should gather themselves up, folding and unfold- ing like the pleats in a sari. You should be teetering, reeling; you should be on the very edge of elation. What she felt instead was a clean absence, a suspension, a sensation she only ever remembered feeling once, on an airplane, where she had bitten into a soft roll the way she bit now into her wedding cake, and because the altitude and roaring engine had overwhelmed her sense of taste, she could perceive only the food’s fragile crumb yielding under her teeth.

  Ordinary Fears

  THEY HAD DRESSED Lala Aunty in a silk sari, which, like Mira’s wedding sari, had been purchased on Gerrard Street.

  “They were really nice to us at that store,” said Mira’s mother, “gave us this and that discount — and then we ate at Udupi in Lala’s honour —”

  “Did you order bad-tasting food in her honour?” Baskar asked, scruffing up the back of her hair with his hand in a claw-shape.

  It was too soon for that kind of comment, Mira thought, given that they had just prepared her mother’s closest friend for cremation. Now her mother was telling Baskar about it as they sat on the couch and watched The National on cbc. She talked right over Peter Mansbridge.

  Mira was in the kitchen, watching them over the half-wall between the two rooms. She was sorting Tupperware, matching each container with its dishwasher-warped lid and piling them into the tall cupboard. Ravi sat at the kitchen table, helping. He unhurriedly lifted each item and evaluated it. Mira had gone with her mother and two of Aunty’s other friends to dress the body. The girl who worked at the funeral home led them to a room with a plush cherry carpet and two Victorian parlour chairs and a coffin on a stand. She opened up the coffin for them, nodded nervously and respectfully. She was about Mira’s age, and later, at home, Mira looked up what series of educational choices someone required to work there. The girl gave them instruc-tions and left them alone. Mira’s mother described how Mira had taken out the sari and its blouse from a white plastic bag.