The Family Took Shape Read online

  The

  Family

  Took

  Shape

  The

  Family

  Took

  Shape

  a novel

  Shashi Bhat

  Cormorant Books

  Copyright © 2013 Shashi Bhat

  This edition copyright © 2013 Cormorant Books Inc.

  This is a first edition.

  Chapters in this book were previously published: “Drawing Lessons” in Bayou Magazine; “Sublimation” in The Missouri Review; “Another Dinner Party” in Nimrod International Journal.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free 1.800.893.5777.

  The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for its publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (cbf) for our publishing activities, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation, an agency of the Ontario Ministry of Culture, and the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit Program.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Bhat, Shashi, 1983–

  The family took shape / Shashi Bhat.

  Print ISBN 978-1-77086-091-9

  ePub ISBN 978-1-77086-104-6

  Kindle ISBN 978-1-77086-091-9

  i. Title.

  ps8603.h38f35 2012 c813’.6 c2013-900263-1

  Cover illustration and design: Angel Guerra/Archetype

  Interior text design: Tannice Goddard, Soul Oasis Networking

  eBook development: WildElement.ca

  CORMORANT BOOKS INC.

  390 Steelcase Road East, Markham, Ontario, I3R 1G2

  www.cormorantbooks.com

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Drawing Lessons

  Bullies, Bees, and Spiders

  Breaking

  Another Dinner Party

  There and Back Again

  Le colosse

  Around the Corner from Fantasia

  The Family Took Shape

  The Girl Who Couldn’t Be Hypnotized

  Rare Birds

  Ordinary Fears

  Sublimation

  Acknowlegements

  To Mom, Dad, and Jay

  Drawing Lessons

  FOR MIRA’S SIXTH birthday, her brother Ravi drew a picture of her, pressing so hard the paper warped with the side of his hand. He coloured so darkly the page looked wet, and the markers he used dried out, so a quarter of the drawing faded into pastels. When he gave her the drawing, she said thank you, though she was upset he’d ruined the set of markers they shared. She herself would never have coloured that way; she coloured gently, using only a light pressure. “I don’t think this picture really looks like me,” she said to her mother, though Ravi was standing right there and could hear her. He looked away, smiling with his teeth, the way Mira smiled in the drawing, her teeth the only white on the page except for the blanks in her eyes. Her nose squiggled and she didn’t have lips. She stood on spiking grass but behind her was only a pattern that advanced and receded irregularly, made of shapes she’d only just learned about in school — rhombuses, pentagons, scalene triangles. From her scalp to her shoes, he had coloured her cerise.

  Ravi, age eight, had given her the same gift for the two previous Christmases, and for last year’s birthday. Always a drawing of her, with identical oval eyes, blackened pupils looking wide and sideways, lacking lashes or brows; in real life such eyes would catch with dust, would water constantly. The figures kept their arms slightly lifted from their torsos, in the shape of an upside-down V, and Mira thought Ravi was the only person she’d ever seen stand like that in real life. She pasted the drawings on the door of her bedroom closet, and the bodies formed arrows aimed at the ceiling.

  Mira was a child who valued homemade gifts. For Mother’s Day, she wrote a poem on a pink paper heart, glittering in fine lines of silver ink, and along with it a bottle of home- made bubble bath, which they’d showed her how to make at school. She’d emptied a jar of grainy Dijon mustard to put it in, and it looked much more beautiful than mustard — instead of black-speckled yellow, the bubble bath was a layer of pink and a layer of coarse white salt, separated by a carefully cut circle of acetate. Mira thought the salt looked like rocks on the moon. The bottle sat for years on the bathroom shelf; her mother only took showers, as the tub wasn’t long enough to sit in. Mira wasn’t offended; she thought the potion looked better in the jar than it would in the bathtub. She liked it as a display piece. She had developed a firm aesthetic, which she expressed through her incisively chosen rock collection and her various arts and crafts, and which she spent much of her time pondering quietly, slipping around the house in sock feet, settling into quiet corners from where she startled her mother.

  The house had been louder when her father was alive. He had boomed around, his movements characterized by their volume. Her mother had been louder then, too, her voice bouncing and echoing from her body like air through a conch. Both Mira and her brother were mostly silent. Ravi had his drawings, his sweet-smelling dried markers and pointed pencil tips that Mira helped him sharpen when they wore dull or snapped. Mira wondered sometimes if her mother wished she were louder, or that she was more mischievous, that she would cause trouble. She wondered this because of the stories her mother told her, about the things she’d done when she was a girl. While they ate their cereal in the morning, she told Mira and Ravi about how she’d refused to eat any food but chakuli for breakfast, watching her mother and aunts fry the dough into marvellous crunchy spirals. When she brought Ravi a set of coloured pencils, she told them she’d once drawn all over the whitewashed outer walls of her family’s home, not just on any day, but on the day of her eldest brother’s wedding. Hun- dreds of guests were to arrive in the valley, and the servants had needed to repaint everything fresh. Mira’s mother gathered with Mira and Ravi in the family room, and as they flung whole bananas into the fireplace to roast them, then pulled them out with tongs and peeled off their black skins, she told them about how, once, she’d jumped into a pile of burning dry banana leaves that her father had left to disintegrate over-night in the mud field behind the stables. The leaves, she said, had flown up around her, flaring like fireworks, and Mira had found that image so lovely that she thought perhaps she would try it too, if she ever had the chance.

  SEVERAL MONTHS AGO, Mira had waited in the anteroom while the psychiatrist interviewed Ravi and their mother. Those were the words he’d used — “interviewed,” “anteroom” — and Mira tumbled them over in her head while she waited, trying to think of situations in which she might say them. They had come to the psychiatrist because Ravi’s teacher said he was exhibiting repetitive movements: flapping his limbs, tapping his desk with his curled fingers, squealing during class, laughing for no reason. Her mother had told her all of this — people always told Mira things she wasn’t old enough for — as she went around the house collecting Ravi’s drawings to take in to the doctor with her. Mira overheard the rest later, in the doctor’s office building lobby after the appointment, as she sat in a too-big leather chair and watched her mother on the payphone crying, using more words — “mild autism,” “developmentally delayed” — clutching the rolled-up drawings in one hand like a newspaper, her other hand holding Ravi’s.

/>   RAVI’S CLASSROOM AT school was room 314, the special education room. Once a week, the special education class was paired up with another class in the school, for game or a craft activity. When it was Mira’s class, the first time she saw her brother’s classroom, she recoiled at its massiveness, the way the desks were spaced far apart to leave room for wheelchairs, the way the pencil jars held only the fattest red pencils, instead of slim yellow ones. Mira could tell her brother was uneasy. Ravi beat his fingers against his leg and pursed his lips as he watched other students blur past the tiny window on the classroom door. At one point, a boy in the hallway came right up to the window in the door and mashed his face up against the glass. He smirked at Ravi, and hit his palm flat on the glass with a startling thud. One of the teachers noticed and took a purposeful step towards him. When the boy noticed, he pulled his face away. The lunch bell rang and Mira’s class was allowed to go outside, but Ravi’s wasn’t. The special education class never left room 314, except once a week, when their straggling group would adjourn to the gymnasium, forming a circle to heave a rubber ball around.

  “What kind of future can a boy get out of a class like that?” Mira overheard her mother say on the phone, probably talking to Lala Aunty. Mira flipped through a photo album in the adjacent room. She stopped at a picture of their family, from a few years earlier, standing in front of the buildings at Queen’s Park. She peered in at her amorphous baby face; she only knew it was herself by the context. Ravi was in his stroller, and her mother and father casually propped their weight against the purple brick steps. Mira wished she could step into the picture, like into a Mary Poppins chalk drawing. She could almost. In her imagination, she remembered the atmosphere exactly — the clash of traffic, the parabolic glass of a nearby office building, the people emerging from the subway, cutting across the circle of streets, moving southward like birds. Her family stood away from everything, cushioned by the urban park’s ellipse of grass. She would take the camera back from the stranger who’d taken their photo, and she’d take that family, like that, forever, and that father, reincarnated now into God-knows-what. She was Hindu; she knew about being reborn. Now when she saw deer in the backyard, she stared at their deer faces, challenging them to recognize her, but they froze and then ran, the way all deer will, forgetting they were once ladybugs or tigers or husbands or fathers.

  IT WAS LALA Aunty who suggested the art lessons. She tended to be the instigator of such things. “He has potential, definitely, there is no doubt about it. You know, postcards, greeting cards, et cetera et cetera, what a star he will be. Probably Hallmark will hire him,” her eyebrows fluttered with enthusiasm.

  “I have never seen this sort of thing at Hallmark,” said Mira’s mother, gesturing at the drawings she had spread out on the kitchen table, where the three of them, Mira, her mother, and Lala Aunty, sat eating apple slices. On the bottom of one of the papers, it said CAT, in tilting, boxy letters. Above that there was a cat, though not any cat that Mira had ever seen. Its body was made out of falling stacks of blue squares — several different blues: azures and navy and powder blue. Mira recalled the names of all the marker colours, and the cat had oval, human eyes. She thought it might clatter as it moved. The background, like his other drawings, was completely filled with an indecipherable pattern. Another pattern said HOUSE across the bottom. She recognized it as their own house, but with geometric details that hurt her eyes — a thinly penned grid across the garage door, trees in the yard with exact individual leaves, and bricks drawn on the house walls from the violet grass to the ochre sky.

  “He is a true original,” said Lala Aunty. “Anyhow, I know someone, friend-of-friend, who teaches art lessons, so we will send him there. And Mira, too, if she feels like,” she said, putting her arm artificially around Mira’s small shoulders.

  THE ART TEACHER’S house was only two blocks away, so Mira and Ravi walked there together after school. The front of the house looked more like the side of a house should look, Mira thought. But it had a door on it, so they knocked. The woman who opened it had hair like the top of an old dandelion. Mira wished it were windy outside, and pictured individual hairs alighting on the grass, reborn as new weeds.

  Mira wore her house key around her neck on a string. The woman reached out and tucked the key into the neck of Mira’s shirt. “You should wear it on the inside,” the woman said, and then introduced herself as Mrs. Heinz. The statement made a lot of sense to Mira, who lived in fear of abduction, of strangers. She thought, shuddering, of a tall thin man wearing a black hat, coming up to her, grabbing the key and pulling her with it, leash-like, demanding she reveal her address. She wondered why her mother hadn’t given her this advice.

  They went all together down to the basement, which was arranged like a gallery with student art hung on the unfinished walls, pink fibreglass peeking around the corners of frames. Mrs. Heinz sat them down and offered them orange juice, and Ravi said yes but Mira declined, because she had the idea that it was polite to always refuse things that were offered to her in other people’s houses, even if she wanted them. On the worktable in front of her was an art set, open like a brief-case. It held pliable tubes of acrylics, pale linen-textured papers, and flat paintbrushes with bristles as flexible as human hair. Mrs. Heinz returned with juice for both Ravi and Mira. Mira worried she would knock hers over and it would paint the paper like a watercolour sunset, and then Mrs. Heinz wouldn’t let her paint anything else, and she would never get to use those exquisite brushes.

  But that didn’t happen, and they spent the hour drawing a pair of sneakers — whose, it was unclear. They were dusty, shoelaces knotted, logo nearly invisible, and Mira painstak- ingly recreated everything she noticed. She could be an artist, maybe. She had often thought, while being read aloud to at school, the teacher holding up the pages to show the pictures, that she could have drawn those pictures, those smiling dogs and hiding, whiskered mice. She could be the one to design greeting cards and sell her work to Hallmark. People she knew would go into the store and select a greeting card, and Mira’s signature in the corner, a loop dissolving into a line, would be so artistic, so cryptic, they wouldn’t even recognize it as hers.

  Ravi ignored the details of the sneakers, and instead he drew what seemed to Mira a different pair of shoes entirely, though there were laces and soles; they were in the wrong colour, their necks stood higher in his drawings, footwear from another decade.

  The next class, they drew a baseball glove. “Is it a hand?” their mother asked when she saw her son’s version. The draw- ing was colourless then, but Mira saw him in his room at night with the desk lamp on, tinting the sketch brown with a pencil crayon that Mrs. Heinz had given him. And suddenly to Mira it did look like a hand, a horrible webbed hand, or like Ravi’s own hand, bloated and soft.

  IN THE WEEKS that followed, Ravi’s drawings accumulated all over the house. Flipping through the phonebook for the pizza delivery number, Mira found entire pages covered in round, tiny-beaked birds. The back of the tv guide was painted with concentric circles. Inside the cover of one of her chapter books, she found the image of a slender, running boy. Ravi hid the morning newspaper indiscriminately with multicoloured fish in crowded schools, their bodies striped and spotted and finned. “Where did he see these things, to draw them?” her mother asked her, and Mira shrugged. She kept her own draw- ings neatly in her desk. They were on pads of paper, as drawings should be. And they looked like what they were — a tree with a bird’s nest balanced in the nook of its branches, an old woman with a web of wrinkles on her face, which Mira had copied from a book.

  The backgrounds of Ravi’s drawings were still filled with their patterns of shapes, and the animals still had human eyes. They scared Mira; she believed she saw emotions in those eyes, in the subtle ways they widened or narrowed at one side, or a white dot of glint in their pupils that might signify anger or elation or sorrow of the kind she had never seen in her brother. Ravi didn’t have e
motions; he was always only himself. He smiled widely, always, or laughed in his frighten- ing Ravi way, a sort of uncontrollable chortling that grabbed him from the inside and shook his whole body. He would cup his brown fist with his mouth to try and stop it. Once, when he’d laughed that way at the breakfast table, their mother had grabbed his glass of milk and spilled it over his head in a single splash, as though to douse him like a flame. He still hadn’t stopped laughing. The milk slid down his face as Mira watched, chewing her cereal slowly.

  MIRA HAD SEEN the boy who was bullying Ravi at school, but she didn’t say anything. Her mother arranged Ravi’s drawings into a portfolio, a red folder with large pockets. “Will you make sure Ravi gives these to his teacher?” she asked Mira, on a Monday morning.

  “He’s supposed to be the older one,” Mira said, and walked out of the room.

  Her mother’s idea, she knew because she’d heard her say so, was that Ravi’s school teacher would be impressed with the drawings, and perhaps would go easier on Ravi when grading his tests. It was a far-fetched idea. He could barely read. Mira, two years younger, helped him with his reading homework, and though she knew he wasn’t like her, that there was some-thing the matter with him, she couldn’t understand why he had so much trouble. She had seen other kids like him, and adults, too. Once, at the mall, she had seen a grown man standing by himself, not doing anything unusual, not making a scene, but she knew from his eyes, and from the low humming noise she heard him make as she passed, that he had more in common with her brother than she did.

  Another time, outside the hospital where her mother worked, she had seen a man sitting on the street outside the shoe store, with one dead leg. He wore a bright white shoe on his good foot, but the dead leg was covered in a thick salmon- coloured bandage. She was waiting outside the hospital for her mother to pick up something she’d forgotten inside, thinking of legs, trying not to look at the man, looking instead at the blue baggy legs of doctors, the tan and white legs of nurses, the steel legs of gurneys moving past, fat-leg-white-leg-steel- leg-naked-leg, she focused, when the man had laughed and then clutched at her leg, as though he meant to prop himself up with it, to use as a cane. She had kicked and screamed, and a lady nearby had ushered her into the hospital lobby, asked her where her mother was, and suggested she wait in one of the chairs at reception. There was something wrong with that man’s mind, was how she reassured herself. He didn’t know what he was doing. He wasn’t going to do anything; he wasn’t going to steal her leg, replace his leg with hers. It wouldn’t even fit.