The Family Took Shape

by Shashi Bhat

  “Mira Athige, I hear you are a scientist?” Gautham asked shyly, lingering as the other children dispersed.

  “You could say that,” Mira smiled at him, thinking about how much younger children seemed in India than North America.

  “I, too, am a scientist.” Gautham looked up at Mira to judge her reaction.

  “Is that right?” asked Mira. “A biologist? Chemist? Physicist?”

  “All of them, Mira Athige. I am all three. And which are you?”

  “A pharmacist, actually. Lots of chemistry involved, and biology, too.”

  “Then tomorrow you must show me an experiment!” Gautham said.

  He left Mira to freshen up, giving her a thin cotton towel and a perfumed bar of Mysore sandalwood soap wrapped in lavender paper. The scent of sandalwood soap was what made it real: she was in India, the country where her parents had spent their youths, the country that had become almost entirely irrelevant once they had left for Canada. After the birth of her children, Mira’s mother had called home maybe twice a year, even when the internet made the phone calls cheaper. Next to the water-damaged bathroom mirror, a fist-sized pregnant spider crawled thin-leggedly down the wall, and Mira let out a soft cackle, drying her face and heading downstairs.

  The aunties invited her to sit on the marble floor, handing her a plate neatly arranged with crisp plantain chips and bright carrot halwa. Her great aunt added a dry holige to her plate, the regional specialty, a paper thin roti made from lentils and jaggery. She dabbed it liberally with ghee, and Mira put one hand to her stomach and the other hand up to fake protest, as was the usual routine, pantomiming her need to slim down. Another elderly aunty served her coffee, caapi, in a stainless steel cup. She brought it out with another cup and poured the milky liquid back and forth between the two to let it cool. Mira pushed the milk skin aside and sipped the coffee, tasted cardamom and cloves.

  Two young girls had claimed the baby, undressing him down to his diaper and letting him crawl freely around the marble floor. One tried to feed him rice pudding.

  Mira ate slowly, trying to identify the people in the room who chattered to and around her. She would never learn all their names; when she guessed she was often wrong. Her mother had four sisters and four brothers, but one sister lived in Mumbai and would be arriving the following week; one brother had recently moved to Dubai, and another lived in Australia. She recognized her eldest aunt, Laxmi, a silent, serious woman who wore a wrinkled sari tied in a no-nonsense knot at the back. Despite having two children, she was wiry and with muscular arms that made Mira embarrassed of her own body’s descent into softness. Jayashree and another sister looked exactly the same, so when she wasn’t sure she called them both Dodamma, the word for aunts older than your mother. She called Ram, who had met her at the airport, by the title Dodappa. Laxmi and her husband Krishna had two children, Gautham and a girl who looked like pictures she had seen of her mother as a child. This girl came to Mira and told her that people often asked her if she were Shilpa’s daughter, and so she and Mira were somewhat like sisters. But we have never met before, Mira thought, but would not, of course, say to the child who smiled widely and wore a tiny gold nose ring. Jayashree also had two children, a stylish teenage girl who wore jeans with her short selwar top, and a younger boy who carried his cricket bat wherever he went. The other sister had only one boy, who spoke so quickly that Mira couldn’t recognize a single word. The youngest brother’s children were loud and numerous; there were at least four, with alliterative names that Mira could not distinguish from one another. Ram had only recently married, so he had no children. Mira could not remember which wife matched which husband, and she did not even begin to figure out her mother’s cousins, eight of them, who lived in a house on the other side of the valley.

  She tried to hold conversations with people. She thought of her father in this exact situation more than thirty years earlier, when he had come to meet his bride’s family. The volume and rapidity of her father’s words had often escalated as he spoke. Lala Aunty had once described her father’s voice as thunderous, but that did not capture the way Mira remembered it, because thunder was only a consequence of lightning, but her father’s voice had been a force, a prime mover; when people spoke to him they waited for the pauses of his breaths. Growing up in Mumbai he had learned to shout over street noise, to haggle violently with salespeople, to give roaring speeches as Head Boy of his school. He had spoken Hindi as a child, so here even he must have felt stifled, as Mira was, by the unfa-miliar language. Even for those who spoke English, she had to slow her words and repeat them.

  Krishna, Gautham’s father, came to sit next to Mira and asked, “Magana kannige enthathu?” Mira smiled hopelessly at him, shrugging her shoulders and looking at Gautham. Gautham translated, “His eyes, what is wrong?” pointing at the baby.

  “Oh, nothing’s wrong with his eyes,” Mira said.

  “Mathe, awana bayi?”

  “His mouth is fine, too,” answered Mira, understanding that one. She thought of how she had whispered the story of Little Red Riding Hood to her baby on the plane and suppressed an uneasy urge to laugh.

  Krishna stood abruptly and went to speak with Ram.

  THAT NIGHT MIRA went to sleep under a mosquito net, on blankets that smelled like incense, spread over the cool marble floor, with the baby lying quietly beside her. Frogs warbled whimsically outside the house, and she could hear singing voices from the nearby mosque. When her eyes adjusted to the darkness she saw geckos creep out from behind light fixtures, trapping insects with their tongues.

  “Geckos stick to the walls by intermolecular forces between their footpads and the surfaces. London dispersion forces,” she said to the baby before going to sleep. She wished H were there, so she could talk to him, so they could share the foreign feeling of being in India, or imagine what lives they would have had if their parents had never left, or make gentle fun of the relatives, smothering their laughs in the fragrant blankets.

  She awoke to the clang of pots being washed at the side of the house and a bucket clattering and splashing down into the well. The sun had just risen, lighting the room in stripes of orange. She added the ten-hour time difference to the time on her watch, estimating it to be around six. She took the baby and checked the bathroom, but it was occupied, so she gathered her clothes and towel and went to use the old bathhouse in the garden.

  It was more a jungle than a garden. The family grew mango and coconut and areca-nut and banana trees, spreading them across the acres and acres of their land. One of the children had told her yesterday that a monkey lived in the mango grove, as well as a family of peacocks that they often saw drinking water from the reservoir. Mira stepped barefoot across a path of stones to reach the bathhouse. She found Ram headed in the opposite direction, his hair freshly wet.

  “Good morning!” said Mira.

  “Ahh, meevale hovuthe? You are taking bath?”

  “Appu, appu.” Mira nodded vigorously and then felt silly.

  Ram’s face became serious, and he clutched Mira’s arm. “Your boy, something is wrong.”

  “No, he’s fine. He slept nearly straight through the night.”

  “Something is wrong. Krishna has informed me. I will do healing for him, don’t worry,” Ram assured her, and continued back to the house.

  Mira wished again that H were there. The family was bois- terous, and caring despite having only seen her twice in her life. Her mother had told her that her brother and brother- in-law practised homeopathic healing. Ram had treated her menstrual cramps before she had left for Canada; Krishna had lessened the frequency of his daughter’s epileptic seizures; together they had eased the suffering from Mira’s grandmoth- er’s arthritic wrists. They were healers, even more powerful than doctors, but she wanted to tell them that nothing was wrong with her baby. No, she did not quite know this baby yet, and had no control over what had developed inside he
r, how the cells had divided, over what shaped the convolutions of his delicate brain, and this was her worst worry — that she might raise a baby like her brother, a changeling whose true identity might always be the most painful kind of enigma.

  RETURNING AFTER HER bath, she found Gautham in the God room. Mira carefully stepped into the doorway and folded her legs to join her nephew cross-legged on the floor. They chanted mantras together in Sanskrit. The boy sipped droplets of water from a small brass spoon. Gautham asked for the karpura, camphor, and Mira broke a crumbling piece from a large block, placing it on a gold-plated dish with a handle and using a long match to light it on fire. Mira lifted her fingers to his nose and inhaled the sharp remnant smell of the camphor. Her mother kept containers of it in her basement prayer room at home, light- ing it each evening as she and Ravi said their prayers. Gautham moved the plate in circles in the air, speaking in a monotone chant under his breath, and Mira could tell that the boy didn’t even need to think about his actions, perfectly internalized.

  Mira picked up Gautham’s wilted paper copy of the mantra, which the boy kept in front of him even though he didn’t need it, and read the words she hadn’t ever seen in print, “Om Bhur Buvaha Suvaha …” The left side of the page had the translation: Om — The original sound, from which all sound originates; Bhur — The physical world; Bhuvah — The mental world; Suvah — The spiritual world. Om Thath Savithur Varenyam, Bhargo Devasya Dheemahi, Dhiyo Yonaha Prachodayath … You, Lord, the Sun, the Creator, the Sustainer, you are power, love, illumination, and divine grace of universal intelligence. We pray for the divine light to illumine our minds.

  Mira chanted the words as though it were the first time, and thought that she might teach her own baby this someday, the words of the Gayathri Mantra, the rhythmic pace of a prayer chant, how to rest on the consonants and aspirate the Bs.

  Gautham used a rag to wipe dark spilled dots of lamp oil from the Lord’s altar. Mira opened the dish of camphor again and broke off another piece.

  “Take this,” she said, placing it in Gautham’s bony hand. “Keep it there on the windowsill. And check on it, maybe once a day. An experiment.” He nodded solemnly and did as Mira had instructed.

  “SHALL WE GO to town?” Ram asked one day as they stood for breakfast. “You must be wanting to shop.” Mira agreed and Ram drove her to the Kasargod city centre in his white Maruti car. Mira had initially planned to buy H a pair of Bata shoes — “Bata, the world at your feet,” he would quote, while proclaiming them the softest and most durable of the footwear market — and she had made a note of his shoe size before leaving home. But when they arrived in the city, she couldn’t help but be drawn to Malabar Gold, the tallest building in Kasargod. Her father had once bought her mother a set of diamonds here. She decided she would purchase for H a piece of jewellery, something modest (lest he make one of his Liberace jokes), perhaps a wedding ring, since they had never bothered with bands, or a watch (he had wanted a Rolex, not realizing how much they cost until he looked it up online and said he would buy a counterfeit in India instead). Mira and Ram entered the store, feeling a cool air conditioned breeze. Deeply tanned employees moved over the burgundy carpets, carrying black trays with lemonade in paper cups, which they offered to Mira but she declined because the water hadn’t been boiled. The employees wore crisp, white uniforms, a colour of white that barely existed in the India her parents had known, where teeth turned yellow-red from chewing betel nut, writing paper had a bluish newsprint tint. Mira sat on a plush red stool and pointed at items in locked glass cases. Men with oiled, parted hair brought her purple velvet boxes, and she shook her head at dozens of selections, pausing to weigh them in her hands, holding one up against another, impressing the men with her perfect English but letting Ram bargain in Havyaka as they quoted prices, to avoid being charged extra. She chose a watch with a sleek mesh strap, not too bulky, and — though she knew gold shouldn’t be an impulse buy — she impulsively purchased a thin bangle for the baby’s pudgy wrist. It was worth making the comparison: when you purchased a gift for a grown person or slightly older child, you considered the recipient’s person-ality and preferences, whereas with a baby you considered only your own adult opinion, and functionality, how it would fit and for how long.

  AFTER DINNER ON the night before H’s arrival, Krishna and Ram approached Mira.

  “There’s nothing wrong with the baby,” Mira said, trying not to sound defensive. She held the baby in her arms for the first time in days. The aunties and girls had grown fond of carrying him around with them or letting him play in the kitchen as they cooked and gossiped. Her great aunt liked to keep the baby with her while she slept. “We just had a checkup before we came here, his eyes and ears, everything; he’s fine.”

  She could tell the men didn’t catch all of her words, but Ram, the one with the better English, said quietly, “It is not his eyes. It is his mind.”

  It is his mind — she thought how terrible it is that there exist phrases, unremarkable and unbeautiful, that upon hearing you immediately memorize.

  “What do you think is wrong with him?” she asked.

  “It is not for-sure. He might be just-fine.” He compounded his words and Mira would have found this endearing in another conversation. “But is there not something amiss in his reaction?” Ram said. He tried to get the baby’s attention. He motioned for Mira to try, and Mira noticed for the first time that the baby wouldn’t meet her eyes. Did babies know to look you in the eye?

  “He quiets when I talk to him,” Mira said. Ram just nodded.

  Mira felt tears come to her eyes, though she knew this was an error, that her uncles were merely making guesses based on what they knew of her brother. It wasn’t hereditary, what Ravi had. It was possible that her baby just didn’t like her well enough to pay much attention to her.

  “Koogadda.” Krishna spoke for the first time, don’t cry, touching Mira’s arm.

  “After Namkaran ceremony, we can perform a ritual,” said Ram. “We will try to heal him.”

  H’S FLIGHT WAS to arrive after dark. Ram went alone to pick him up as Mira worked on preparations for the naming ceremony. Mira bent her legs under her on the marble porch ledge, washing mango leaves clean with water from a copper urn. She heard a sound, “Cooo … Cooo,” in the distance, more human than bird-like.

  “Could it be peacocks?” she asked Gautham, who sat with her on the other side of the ledge.

  Gautham laughed. “It must be Ram Maawa and Harsha Maawa,” he replied (this was what he called her husband), suddenly standing and hollering for the rest of the relatives. “During dark, the Jeep drivers refuse to come down the valley. It is too dangerous. So the person at the top of hill, they call, ‘Cooo,’ like birds.”

  Krishna brought a flashlight and began the trek up the hill. After twenty minutes had passed, Mira saw Krishna and Ram return, the beam of the flashlight shakily illuminating the path. H walked next to them.

  Mira stood and watched her husband. He stepped forward into the fluorescent light from the house, his face spotlit, dark-eyebrowed and rectangular. He had worn a Nehru-collared shirt (embracing his culture), wrinkled from travel, with a pair of long khaki shorts, and brown sneakers with no socks. His hair was damp from sweat and his arm angled out behind him to pull a small wheeled suitcase, rolling foreignly across the red dust. Mira waited as the family embraced him.

  Seeing his sweat made her feel the humidity renewed, and she reached her hands up over her shoulders and braided her hair, swiftly wrapping pieces into their neat pattern, securing the end with an elastic from her wrist. She never braided her hair at home, instead wearing it loose and straightened — H told her later that he had lost his breath as he watched his Canadian wife transform so seamlessly into a simple Kerala girl, into the person she might have been — and then he heard her call out, “H!” in the voice she might have had, had she grown up in this village, a voice developed by sing
ing prayer songs over a tinny harmonium, by a childhood spent calling cows and chasing cousins and cooing down a steep, darkened path. The backdrop of mango trees and relatives turned her back into a child. Their parents, by career decisions, had taken them away from this.

  Mira looked at H and told herself that despite the skepti-cism she held, she would protect him from whatever might be wrong with their baby. And after he had hugged her and she asked about his flight and released him to eat the many-course meal the aunties had prepared, she went to speak with Ram. She found her uncle washing his feet at the tap at the side of the house. Ram rubbed his feet against the stone ground, aged aquamarine from the copper tap’s oxidation.

  Mira said to him, “We’re not going to tell him.”

  Ram looked up, using the towel on his shoulder to wipe his feet and slip them into his sandals. “Tell what?”

  “We’ll do the ritual, the healing for the baby. I don’t want to tell H — Harshvardhan.”

  Ram paused and then nodded.

  After dinner, Mira brought H over to her suitcase and pulled out the velvet case with the watch she had bought. “You know how I feel about men’s jewellery,” he said, and then opened it. “Oh, thank God,” he said, and put it on immediately. “It goes with everything,” he said.

  HE WORE THE watch as the family gathered in the marble foyer, spreading and sitting in all corners, against all the walls, checking first for geckos. On some nights, they arranged them- selves in the foyer and somebody would begin to sing. Mira’s great aunt brought out three pomegranates and began to open them, spilling the pockets of seeds, and the family passed them around to each other, crimson fingers to crimson fingers. A girl began a pure-pitched Bollywood melody, and then an aunty belted a clear, solid prayer song. Smaller children grabbed tiny brass finger cymbals from the prayer room, and an uncle found a mrindangam to beat out the rhythms. Their voices carried easily into the mango grove, to the ears of the garden monkeys, gently disturbing the slumbering peacocks. A fat frog bounced heartily up the front steps and into the hall with them. A nearby uncle unceremoniously lifted the frog with both hands and dumped it back on its outside way. Mira recalled how, before their wedding, she and H had looked at brochures for possible honeymoons, advertising “exotic locales.” This was one, technically, except that it had been her mother’s norm. If her brother had lived here, he might have gone with the other men to work in the rice fields, and come home exhausted each night to sing along in his atonal voice, never marrying, staying here in perpetuity, unless — possible in this alternate world — he had been healed, he had become a normal boy.