The Family Took Shape

by Shashi Bhat

  “I didn’t know what to do with the bag,” Mira said, jumping into their conversation.

  Baskar turned to look at her. “Well, you should just have put it down somewhere. On a chair, or on the floor. What does it matter?”

  “That’s what I did, I put it on the floor near my feet. But then I kept accidentally stepping on it and it would make that rustling plastic bag noise, so I moved it to the floor a little farther away. Then that funeral home girl came in again and she kind of looked at it, like I had littered. I was planning to pick it up when we left.”

  “Eh, she didn’t know which one of you it was. Probably thought it was Anusha. She looks more like a litterer.” Baskar got up to bring a bowl of banana chips from the kitchen. He opened the cupboard like it was his house.

  “Can I have some?” asked Ravi. Baskar dropped a fistful into one of the Tupperware lids.

  “Anusha Aunty kept saying how nice Lala’s face looked,” said Mira’s mother. “I didn’t really think it looked that nice. They powdered her face with talc so she barely even looked Indian anymore.”

  What Mira wanted to talk about was not a plastic bag or Lala Aunty’s new, dead, white face, but about what she had seen when they took off the sheet that covered the body. “When we took off the sheet …” she began.

  “Don’t tell me you saw her nude,” said Baskar.

  “No, she was wearing a very modest undergarment,” said Mira.

  “Athe, is what the ladies in India have nicknamed that kind of bra. You know athe actually means ‘aunty’ in Havyaka,” said Mira’s mother.

  “How appropriate,” said Mira, “naming a supportive gar- ment after a supportive family member.”

  “It reminds me of my favourite aunty growing up,” said Mira’s mother. “She wore one just like that.”

  They had tried to put the sari blouse on Aunty, but could only get it to fit over one arm. The arms had swollen near the armpits. They had become so enlarged that Mira had a sudden worry that Aunty would expand to completely fill the wooden box. The funeral home girl would open the coffin to inspect the body before setting it aflame, and she would see a rectangular block of flesh in the exact dimensions of the box, bloated like a bowl of pho left too long in water, with eyelids and nostrils and birthmarks embossing it like the sides of dice. One time, on Aunty’s instructions, Mira had left dosa batter to ferment in the oven, but used too small a container, and the batter had bulged out and on to the oven floor. When she looked inside the oven, batter was still rising and breaking the surface tension, pouring active and bubbling, pale and alive down the sides of the bowl. Now she wasn’t sure she would ever be able to look into such spaces — this included stifling open ovens, refrigerators before the light clicked on, gas fire-places, home air vents that seemed to exhale at her, toaster ovens with their hot red elements, the wooden chest she kept in the upstairs hallway with tennis balls and bicycle helmets and badminton racquets — without imagining Aunty’s flesh, solid and liquid at the same time, taking up its hollow space.

  Her mother and Anusha lifted the body and Kalpana put the left sleeve over the hand. Then they switched sides and Kalpana attempted to manoeuvre the right hand into the right sleeve, but said it was unnatural. Mira tried, but almost fainted at having to bend the heavy and inflexible limb into arrange-ments she’d never seen Aunty maintain while alive. So in the end, they just tucked the blouse over top of the arm and hid that side with the sari pleats. Aunty went into the afterlife with one naked shoulder.

  MIRA HAD THE guilty feeling that none of them were being respect- ful enough, mournful enough. When her father had died, though she had only been five, there had been whole rooms in their old house she had avoided, not in fear, but in a suffo-cating instinct towards reverence. She had not even wanted to look in those rooms. She did not feel this way now when she visited Uncle’s house, now inhabited solely by him. But she did feel — looking upon the kitchen stool Lala Aunty had pulled up to the stove and rested her ample rear on, as she held the end of a long spoon in a saucepan of milk sweets that needed endless stirring, her wrist moving as gracefully as Martha Graham choreography — that all Aunty’s furniture had upon her death turned immediately antique. Belongings she had used last week now felt like ancient relics.

  The news was still on and Baskar kept eating the banana chips and wiping his hand on the sofa. It was possible he had picked that habit up from Ravi, who wiped his own hand on his pant leg a moment later.

  The phone rang and Mira answered it and heard Uncle on the other end.

  “I can’t find the aluminum foil,” he said, pronouncing “alumi- num” as “al-you-min-ee-um.”

  “Lala Aunty kept it in that drawer next to the silverware,” she told him.

  “Oh okay,” he said, worriedly. “Will call you back if I can’t find it, then?”

  “No problem, Uncle.”

  “Is that Uncle? You say hello for me!” Baskar called out.

  “Baskar is there?” Uncle asked. Her mother and Baskar had first met at one of Lala Aunty’s dinner parties, and it had taken her twenty years to agree to date him.

  “Yes, we’re just watching the news,” said Mira.

  “Good good news, no, not good news, but you know. Will let you go,” Uncle finished and hung up.

  Mira put the phone back in its receiver on the counter. “I am worried,” she said, watching her mother take Baskar’s oily hand, “that Uncle just spends all day going around the house and turning the lights on and off.”

  While travelling from her downtown apartment to her mother’s house, she had seen a man on the subway, sitting just in front of her. She faced forward and he faced sideways, according to the perpendicular arrangement of seats. Upon hearing a noise of moving paper, she looked up from her novel to see the man holding a newspaper up so it covered his face. He seemed to be reading it, until she saw him turn the page so violently its pages flapped and snapped in defiance of their natural creases. The side of his face was visible, and it squeezed together as though around a pivot, all features converging at his harsh purple mouth. It was obvious that in holding the newspaper he was both trying very hard to control his twitching, and also to conceal himself. His face loosened again and he muttered, and then repeated all three actions — flap-ping, squeezing, muttering — and continued repeating them until he finally exited at Bloor. This is what it was to try and hold yourself together, Mira thought. This is what grief would look like embodied — repetitive and beyond restraint.

  BASKAR PUT HIS wet mouth over the spot where her mother’s shirt left her shoulder, an unrefined kiss, and Mira thought of how his breath smelled like dog food, literally, like the smell that inhabits a house with a dog, and which the owner no longer notices.

  The television showed images of filled hospital beds and packed ERS.

  “Oh, there’s York Central — no, it’s some other place, never mind,” said Mira’s mother. She shooed Baskar away, and Mira wondered if she noted the smell of his saliva on her skin. York Central was the hospital where her mother worked, in the health records department.

  “Crowded, eh?” said Baskar, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “Uncle said when Lala went by ambulance, they got priority to go in but still had to wait to see a doctor. I’m not saying it would have saved her necessarily, but who knows?”

  “Time is of the essence when you’re dealing with heart trouble,” said Baskar.

  On the tv, they announced the changes to the Ontario Health Insurance Plan.

  “OHIP doesn’t even give us eye exam coverage anymore,” said Mira. She’d been seeing floaters in her eyes lately, and read that it was a sign of old age. She was twenty-eight.

  “Not a problem for me — 20/20!” said Baskar.

  “Hmm,” said Mira’s mother. “You and Rav should see a movie together,” she said suddenly to Baskar.

  “
Which movie will we watch?” said Ravi, who joined them now in the living room. He chose the dark green loveseat and leaned diagonally into it.

  “We will one of these days, but got a lot of stuff to take care of at work. Toner doesn’t make itself.”

  “All right, Baskar-the-Grouch,” she said. Baskar crunched messily through his banana chips, and Mira reminded herself that he was nobody important to her.

  Now somebody interviewed a doctor over the backdrop of a busy waiting room. Mira surveyed the people, mostly elderly couples. In each pair, Mira tried to guess who had the ailment. While the doctor waxed on about health care privatization, a couple stood up together as they were called inside. They held hands and shared a side-to-side gait, stocky figures and lumpy faces. She imagined Baskar and her mother like this in thirty years, shuffling together with twin hunched backs. She added Ravi alongside them in the image, a third bump in the row.

  After her mother had first started dating Baskar, Mira had asked her, over the phone one night when H had to work late, what had made her contact a man who had initially so repelled her. Because it was she who had contacted him and not the other way around. “Oh, Lala kept mentioning him, kept push- ing him on me,” her mother said, which wasn’t the most glowing reason, and wasn’t enough for Mira, and so her mother asked her if she remembered the time they had all gone to the mall together to buy Uncle a birthday present. Mira did remember the story her mother told her, of how she had forgotten her purse inside somewhere and only realized it after they’d gone out the building doors, so she told Ravi to wait there on the street while she and Mira ran to find it. When they returned — the purse safely under her mother’s arm — Ravi was standing next to a man. They were roughly equal in bulk, with iden-tical dark hair colours and wearing similarly puffy jackets. The two of them looked the same; the man could have been Ravi in fifteen years, but the man had dirt all over his face and big, flaking hands that held a piece of cardboard with green marker words saying, “Need money for food.” Instead of the word “four” he’d written the number “4,” slashing it across the cardboard. “Ravi, come back here, what are you doing?” her mother said, and from her tone he must have known he had done something wrong, so he made that expression of his where the whites of his eyes stretched high up, like Dracula’s, and he’d said, “Making friends, Mom.”

  “This is what someone does when he has no proper role models,” Mira’s mother said to her. She told her that when they went home after that, she had prepared dinner for the two of them — Mira had gone home to her own apartment — and tried to watch some sitcom on television, but she grew tired of explaining the jokes.

  So, love having come and gone in the first third of her life, Mira’s mother replaced it by phoning Lala Aunty and asking for Baskar’s number.

  “ATHE, FUNNY HOW you’ve reminded me of her,” Mira’s mother said. “She wore those funny old bras, big enough to be shirts of their own. So big it showed under the sari blouse. You know what we called that, when the bra showed? We said Sunday was longer than Monday.” She rarely spoke about her child-hood, and did it now with a voice of confession. “My favourite aunty, she was. Four decades ago. God, I am old now.”

  “Old is gold,” said Baskar.

  “I used to sit in her clothing cupboard, which smelled like roses.” She told them how she had watched her aunty spit out the window (she had acquired from her husband a love of paan-chewing) and pull up the hem of her faded cotton slip to kick away ants.

  That other aunty had washed her bras in a reservoir with hard navy soap, then left it to dry in that mirage-inducing weather, up there on the clothing line like fat white gulls.

  “We used that clothesline as a badminton net,” Mira’s mother said. In her childhood, she had lived in a valley outside the city of Kasargod.

  Every other week, Mira and her mother played badminton against H and Baskar in the community centre’s open badmin- ton hours. The first time they’d gone, her mother had scoffed at the yellow plastic birdies they provided, which she said had no weight to them. The birdies flew flimsily across the gym, embedded themselves in the wire mesh around the light fix- tures, went too easily over the back boundary line. “Out!” Baskar kept saying. “Out, again!” After that she had gone to Canadian Tire and bought two tubes of Yonex white goose-feather birdies with heads made of Portuguese cork, and she and Mira hammered them relentlessly at Baskar while H laughed good-naturedly and Baskar pretended to cower under his racquet.

  Those feather birdies were the kind her badminton-obsessed relatives used to buy — of course, they’d called them shuttle-cocks then but Mira’s mother had dropped that term because Baskar kept saying it suggestively.

  “At home,” she said now, “I spent so many afternoons watching my uncles play badminton.” Mira had seen these uncles play, on a long ago visit to India. They played shirtless and with their lungis tied up to expose their active knees. After that, the aunties would play, using slightly older racquets and the birdies that were missing a feather or two. They wore their floral, cotton nightdresses, which swirled and collected the red dust around their anklet-wearing ankles. The uncles played with wordless intensity, hitting net kills and only speaking to call out the score, but the aunties used underhanded swings and took breaks, approaching the clothesline to gossip through the gaps between fragrant, billowing saris.

  “My aunty had a quick, low serve that fell just over the service line every time. All the opponent aunties would say, ‘Waah!’” (“Waah” did not mean anything, but was one of the preferred exclamations of aunties.) She told them her aunty had stopped playing when she became sick and began to spend her time lying on the cot in her bedroom, complaining of throat ulcers and holding scraps of old fabric up to her face to blot her nosebleeds.

  When the other uncles and aunties had gone inside for tea, Mira’s mother and her small cousins would race to the court — which wasn’t really a court but a space of hard dirt used for drying areca nuts in hotter months — and select the oldest racquets and barest birdies from the bucket where they were kept. They’d choose their partners and organize mini-tour-naments. The racquets were so old their splintery wooden handles had to be smoothed down occasionally with a bit of sandpaper reserved for that purpose, and if an ambitious player tried to smash the birdie too viciously, it would catch in the racquet’s grid, spreading the strings until they no longer held their perfect squares.

  “I was playing badminton when she died,” she said. “I was winning my game, partnered with one of my girl cousins, against two of my brothers.” One of her brothers had just accidentally hit a birdie up on the roof, when another girl cousin proclaimed the death of the aunty. The girl stood on the marble front step of one wing of the house and all the children dashed towards her just as they’d run to the badminton court before.

  Mira’s mother did not run with them. She went up the side stairs to the terrace and then up another level to the highest point in the house. “I was sure it was there somewhere, that birdie.” She climbed out the window, on to the roof extension, and stood up, bare feet gripping the crimson slate tiles. On the roof, she saw not only that one birdy, but dozens of lost birdies laid out over the slate like fallen snow, except at that point she’d never seen snow, so couldn’t make that comparison and thought only of feathers, of birds retiring their tired wings and resting their tired limbs on the rooftop, unreachable by even the tallest cousin.

  She looked down to the gull-like undergarments hanging between saris on the makeshift badminton net, and yelled, “Athe!” “I didn’t know if I was yelling about underwear or my aunty!” she laughed. Nobody had heard her anyway.

  Maybe I could gather those birdies, she thought after a minute, and stepped forward. Her foot slipped right over the wet moss that coated the roof, and she landed hard on her side. She seized the edge of a beam to keep from falling. If she had fallen then, she would probably have died, knocking her head on
roof tiles, cement corners, and then the hard ground.

  Eventually, she managed to slither back to the window. She never went back up to collect her bounty of birdies, though she knew she could have bartered them for any number of store-bought apples and clementines. “That’s how I got my fear of heights,” she said. High places terrified her after that: roofs, ladders, tops of coconut trees, and all the famous suspension bridges she would have opportunity to visit later in life. Mira had assumed her mother had simply always been afraid of heights. “My relatives always wondered what had triggered that phobia of mine, when I had always been an adventurer.” They missed learning of the reason, because they were inside her aunty’s bedroom. They opened the dark, sweet-smelling cupboard to find a sheet to cover her, and said, “Throat ulcer, must be,” and repeated those words for the weeks that followed. It was only now because of her job at the hospital that Mira’s mother realized her aunty must have died of undiagnosed throat cancer from eating all that paan, which was stuffed with sugar-preserved rose petals and carcinogens.

  The most startling to Mira was the very last part of the story — which her mother told as an offhanded coda — how, after the aunty’s death, they moved her husband into a different room, already inhabited by three single uncles and an older cousin. A newly married uncle moved into aunty’s old room with his wife, who acquired the old cupboard like a hermit crab.

  BASKAR GROANED WHEN the phone rang the second time. Mira answered it, and it was Uncle again.

  “Hope I am not disturbing you,” Uncle said.

  “No, Uncle, not at all. Did you find the foil?”

  “Yes, I had found it in that drawer you mentioned, but see, I have used it all up. But you know, it is night and I am quite concerned at driving nowadays during nighttime, now that I’m an oldie. Otherwise, I might go to the store …”