The Shape of Family Read online

  Jaya nodded slightly. “Do . . .” She looked at the improvised temple and the floor. “Do you want to sit on a chair or couch? Would you be more comfortable?”

  Her mother’s face flickered with confusion, then she smiled. “Hmph. You’ve become so American. Come join me—just take your bath first.”

  Jaya washed her hair and dressed in fresh clothes for the first time in days. When she returned downstairs, the scent of incense drew her in. She sat cross-legged on the floor next to her mother, facing the shrine. Without opening her eyes, her mother began singing a prayer song in low, even tones. The melody was familiar, one Jaya had learned as a child, and like a moving sidewalk, it pulled her along with its rhythm until she caught on to the words and began to sing. As her mother rang the small silver bell to keep rhythm, their voices harmonized perfectly and their two sounds became one.

  Frail is the human being, with a million shortcomings. But you are omnipresent and you are merciful. Since you have given us birth, you will also bear our burdens. Jaya let those words wash over her, penetrate her, envelop her. A deep, visceral comfort emerged from falling into the rituals she had practiced as a child.

  On the third repetition of the verse, Jaya felt her breath slow and deepen. She straightened her back and let air and prayer flow through her body and cleanse her soul. Her mind detached from its aura of pain and connected to something deeper, something outside of her. After two more repetitions, her mother slowed down on the final verse and they concluded with a resonant, “Om shanti, shanti, shanti.” Peace. After a long moment, Jaya opened her eyes and saw the beautiful shrine before her, noticed intricate carvings in the wood and the detailed expression on the face of the Shiva figurine. She blinked a few times, uncertain what had just happened to make her feel lightness for the first time since she had lost her little boy.

  * * *

  Jaya began to join her mother at the shrine every morning, a reason to get out of bed along with the sacred obligation to bathe before prayers. The time she spent chanting and singing created a kind of numbness that buffered her from the anguish she otherwise felt in her waking hours. She spent more and more time in that state, drawn to the comfort it provided. As sitting on the floor came to feel natural again, Jaya reflected on her mother’s observation that she’d become too American.

  It used to be that every time someone asked Jaya where she was from, she had a difficult time answering. She’d explain that her parents were from India and she’d been born in Delhi but had lived all over the world when growing up. Earlier in her life, she might have described herself as European, having spent her adolescent identity-shaping years in Portugal and Ireland. Now she was considered American and expected to hyphenate her identity between the country where she began her life and the one where she now lived. But did that term, “Indian-American,” truly capture her identity? Had she not met Keith that night at the pub, Jaya might have happily stayed in London for the rest of her life. Or moved to another country in the world, where her international policy work took her. Or even ended up back in Delhi when her parents resettled there.

  “Indian” represented the most meaningful part of her—the culture and history she felt running through her blood; the language, food and music that made her feel at home. It was an inextricable, essential part of her; not just what she had been born with, but what she embraced. “American” represented the choices she’d made as an adult—the man she’d chosen to marry; the children she’d borne, Prem, with his love of baseball, and Karina with her stubborn independent streak. This was the place where she’d chosen to make a life, standing up and taking the oath of citizenship with tears in her eyes in a government building over a decade ago.

  It was the nation where she’d felt personally violated when terrorists flew planes into buildings on a clear September morning, where that same day she went to the local hardware store to purchase an American flag and mount it outside their home, a small gesture of solidarity with her neighbors. Being American was woven into the fabric of her life—her connections with people, places, her family and the way she lived. Would she still feel as American, Jaya wondered, if she were to extricate herself from that fabric, to pick up and move back to India or somewhere else? Would it simply travel with her like the habits she’d acquired from the places she’d lived, like eating dates after dinner in Kuwait? Or would America be eternally in her blood like India was?

  * * *

  When the small white pills ran out, Jaya found herself waking in the middle of the night, unable to return to sleep. One such night, she crept out of bed and downstairs to the kitchen for some herbal tea. It was an eerie feeling to be the only one awake in the house and, it felt to her, in the world. Her phone blipped with a message from her younger brother, Devesh, just starting his workday in London. She picked it up and read:

  Meh

  An expression of indifference; to be used when one simply does not care.

  A: What do you want for dinner? B: Meh.

  Do kids say this in America? Mine won’t stop. Help!

  Jaya smiled. Dev had been forwarding her daily emails from a website called Urban Dictionary, part of his effort to better understand his children. Smita and Sachin were seven and nine, sandwiching Prem’s age, though they seemed more mature due to their urban upbringing. Dev had met his wife, Chandra, at graduate school in London. Ironically, it was the first time either of them had dated another Indian person, to the delight of their respective parents, who nonetheless took credit for the serendipitous pairing. Chandra worked as a mutual fund manager, while Dev practiced law with a large firm. Jaya emailed him back a smiley face and, almost immediately, her phone rang.

  “You’re up!” Dev sounded more delighted than concerned about her insomnia. “It’s so hard to call with the time difference.” He carried most of the conversation, complaining about the utter dullness of his role as a junior barrister. But the next time she was awake at that hour, Jaya called him right away, as it made her feel a little less alone in the dark house. These days, she often felt suspended in time and space, recalling the time she was ten years old and she and Dev were playing on a merry-go-round. He and the other younger children sat atop it while they called out for Jaya to spin it faster and faster. She ran in circles until she felt as though she might actually fly into the air. And fly she did, when she lost her grip on the metal bar, with the centrifugal force of the carousel, landing on the hard ground and breaking her left arm in two places.

  Jaya had always felt responsible for her little brother and served as his counsel, being the first to reach all the major milestones of graduate school, marriage, home and children. But now, she found herself comfortable with him in a way she only could be with someone who had known her all her life. They spoke conspiratorially about their mother, as they had when they were young, comparing notes on the meticulousness of her vegetable chopping and the way she shooed everyone out of the kitchen when she was cooking. Jaya now felt a deep ache for her brother and her parents, who all lived so far away. Some part of her imagined moving closer to them, feeling the urge to cling to the family she had left. Her mother and Dev offered the unspoken familiarity of her childhood, reminding Jaya of who she was at her core, before she’d formed this new life of hers, which now seemed to be splintering.

  12 | karina

  AUGUST 2009

  The yellow roses were in full bloom. Karina had been watching the bushes for weeks, watering them in the morning and giving them special rose food from the carton in the garage. Normally, her mother tended the roses herself—it was the one area of the garden she didn’t ask anyone to help with. Karina stroked one of the pale yellow petals to its base and was surprised by how firm and strong the flower bud was. Following the stem down with her finger, she landed upon the first thorn and lingered there for a moment. She pushed her finger into the tip of the thorn for a second . . . two . . . three. The release flooded through her, and her hand dropped away.

  She leaned forward and
inhaled the fragrance. Her mom would love these, she thought, reaching for the clippers. Karina arranged four stems at different stages of bloom in a tall vase and placed them at the center of the kitchen table, where her mother sat, drinking a cup of tea and idly flipping through a newspaper.

  “Oh,” Mom said when she looked up and noticed the roses. She reached out toward one of the flowers but stopped short and pulled back her hand. “Isn’t that beautiful?” she said, turning to look at Karina. “From outside?”

  Karina nodded, smiling. Her mother’s gaze shifted to the window overlooking their backyard, and she seemed to stare at something invisible off in the distance. “It seems wrong for beauty to still exist in the world, doesn’t it?”

  * * *

  The empty summer days left Karina with long hours to spend with her grandmother, with the occasional escape to Izzy’s house. Izzy was the only one who treated her normally after Prem died. She didn’t look at her with sad eyes nor did she avoid her, as did most kids. When Karina was in a bad mood or didn’t feel like talking, Izzy let her be. Of all her friends, Izzy had known Prem the best, including all his funny little habits. Sometimes she would mention him, like when they ate ice cream sandwiches. Izzy recalled how Prem used to lick the ice cream out from between the chocolate wafers, digging his little tongue into that groove until it became deeper and deeper, holding it up proudly to show them.

  Dad took Karina to the counselor every week, and afterwards he’d take her for frozen yogurt and ask her how she was feeling. Karina hated going to that office, which was just a room in the woman’s basement, with its own entrance from the street. There was no natural light except from the window wells, which contributed to her feeling of being underwater. Sometimes, she had nightmares from which she would wake to think she was lost at sea on a small, sinking raft.

  “When do you most feel the loss of your brother?” the counselor asked Karina.

  There was no time when she didn’t feel the emptiness where Prem used to be, the keen sense of imbalance in their family. “Mealtimes,” she answered. There were four bodies at the dinner table again, but Prem’s chair was half occupied by her grandmother getting up and down to retrieve warm food from the stove. Prem was not there to bore them with his accounts of entire episodes of Space Rangers, or to test out eight successive knock-knock jokes from his new book.

  “And when there’s no one to vote with me for Clue over Trivial Pursuit.” Karina smiled. The sooner she could prove to this woman she was fine, the sooner she could stop coming here.

  The counselor returned her smile. “What else feels different?”

  “Well, we’re not getting a dog anymore. We had one all picked out.” Karina shrugged instead of trying to speak through the tightening of her throat.

  “How do you feel about that?”

  She shook her head. “It’s fine. It makes sense. You know, we couldn’t handle it right now. I can’t really . . . I can’t really take care of someone . . . something else. Maybe in a year or two.” She gave the counselor a bright smile and glanced at the clock on the wall.

  “You’re going to be returning to school in a few weeks. How do you feel about that?”

  Karina shrugged. “Okay. Fine. I mean, it’s high school, so that’ll be different. Bigger, I guess.”

  “Does that make you nervous, a bigger school with more students?”

  “No. The opposite.” Karina looked forward to being in a sea of people, most of whom didn’t know her. There might not be more kids who looked like her, but at least there would be more kids and she could lose herself. Less chance that someone knew all about her family.

  * * *

  Two weeks before Karina started high school, the orchids began to die. There were five potted orchids in their home, one for every room downstairs. Each had been delivered at different times in the weeks after the accident, but, as if in collective protest, they all stopped flowering at once. The purple one in the dining room was the last to drop its blooms, standing defiantly after the others had wilted. During breakfast one day, her mother touched the barren stem in the small pot for a long time. Her grandmother was going to throw them all out, but Karina wanted to keep them, to see if she could coax them back to life.

  High school began at the end of August, and Karina signed up for a full schedule of rigorous classes, despite the school counselor’s warning for freshmen to give themselves time to adjust. She pushed herself in each of her classes, taking some pleasure in the depletion she felt each night when she crawled into bed, hours after her parents had gone to sleep. Though her father left her lunch money, Karina made her own breakfasts and lunches. She hitched rides to school with friends or rode her bicycle. There was already so much pain in their home that Karina wanted her parents to see only good things when they looked at her, to feel proud and happy; not to see in her the reason her brother was gone.

  Karina spent much of her time after school at Izzy’s house, doing homework and playing with Dominick. Izzy’s parents often invited Karina to stay for dinner, and she always did. She was grateful for the relief the Demetris’ spaghetti and casseroles provided from her grandmother’s Indian cooking night after night.

  * * *

  Mrs. Galbraith, Karina’s biology teacher, was grading papers one day after school when Karina went into the science room. “Hey, Mrs. G, do you have any books on orchids?”

  “Orchids? Hmm, let me see.” She crossed the classroom and started looking through the bookshelf, where Karina joined her. “Well, there’s this.” She held up a book on bonsai and chuckled. “Not quite the same. Why orchids?”

  “Well, I . . . we have a few of them at home and they had flowers for a couple months, but now they’ve all dropped their blooms. I was wondering if I did something wrong.”

  Mrs. Galbraith leaned against the wall. “I know you’re supposed to let them dry out between watering, since they’re used to tropical environments.”

  “Yeah, I read that online,” Karina said.

  “Do you have a moisture meter?” Mrs. Galbraith ducked into a cabinet beneath the sink and pulled out a long metal rod with a green frog on the end. “I know it looks silly, but it’s a copper probe.” She showed Karina how to place the bright metallic orange tip into the soil so it would register the moisture well below the surface, near the roots. “You can borrow this one if you’d like.” She held out the frog to Karina.

  “Thanks. I’ll bring it back.”

  “And I’ll keep looking for orchid books,” Mrs. Galbraith said.

  When Karina returned the following week, she found Mrs. Galbraith standing at one of the tall lab tables, her gloved hands deep in a pot of soil. “Ah, Karina, I’m glad you’re here. Give me a hand, will you?”

  Karina dropped her backpack on the floor and joined her.

  “This tree is going into that bowl.” Mrs. Galbraith gestured with her chin to a ceramic bowl sitting across the table. “When I lift this up under the root ball, can you move the soil left in the old pot to the new one?”

  “Sure.” Karina pushed up her sleeves, slid over the bowl and scooped in the leftover soil. She examined the miniature tree in Mrs. Galbraith’s hands. “Is that a . . .”

  “Japanese maple bonsai.” Mrs. Galbraith smiled at her. “Seeing that book got me thinking: this might be a good project for my students. I’ve had this one at home for years.” She lowered the small tree into its new home and patted down the soil around it. Karina had never seen a bonsai tree, and it was oddly fascinating to see such a small replica.

  Mrs. Galbraith took off her gloves and carried them over to the sink. “I have something for you.” She opened a drawer and removed two books. “These should help you with your orchids. I haven’t had a chance to read them, but there’s good information in there about dormancy periods, which it sounds like yours might be going through. Take a look and let me know what you learn?”

  “Sure. Thanks.” Karina took the books, which both appeared brand new. “Turns out I was o
verwatering the orchids. That moisture meter went all the way to ten once I put it down below the surface. I’m letting them dry out now. Hopefully, a couple of them will come back.”

  Mrs. Galbraith shrugged. “Orchids are fickle. I never got the hang of them. Bonsai, on the other hand . . . very sturdy.” She smiled. “Do you want to see how to prune this one?”

  Karina watched as she trimmed the tree, and then tried it herself with the small scissors. She began helping Mrs. Galbraith with the bonsai after school and in the mornings whenever she had time. Once she’d learned what to do, she fell into deep concentration during these periods, using the tiny shears and tweezers to create sculpted branches and even layers of deep red leaves. A perfect miniature she could create entirely with her hands.

  13 | keith

  AUGUST 2009

  Keith was grateful for Jaya’s mother’s presence. She managed the incoming visitors, tidied the debris of grief from their home and spent hours engaged with Karina. Every night, she prepared simple Indian meals, and though it was hard for Jaya to take much pleasure in food, Keith knew the familiarity of her mother’s cooking brought his wife some comfort.

  After weeks of feeling like a shell of a human being, emotions ready to be triggered at any moment, Keith needed a reprieve. The managing partner of his office had sent the largest floral bouquet he’d ever seen with a kind note, telling him to take his time. But Keith was up for partner this year; he knew his colleagues were using every chance to prove themselves and he felt pressure to do so as well. Jaya’s mother encouraged him to return to work, and with her there to look after Jaya, Keith felt comfortable enough to start back slowly.

  The day Keith returned to the office, he sat at his desk, surrounded by the Lucite mementos the bank produced to commemorate each completed deal. He had a bookshelf full of them, dozens and dozens of shapes that signified the work he’d done, valuable work. A career to be proud of. Keith flipped through the presentations prepared for his review and wrote notes in the margins, making useful suggestions about new ways of looking at the numbers. He even caught a couple of errors. He went out to lunch with Matt and Greg, guys he’d known since they were all new associates together after business school. They were awkward around Keith until he told them the best thing they could do was not treat him any differently than before. They both seemed visibly relieved and, from there, they quickly descended into familiar talk of clients who were assholes, who was hot in the new crop of summer associates, and which assistant Murphy was banging. By the end of the day, Keith felt better than he had in weeks. He continued working into the early evening, reviewing documents that could have waited until the next day. As he pulled into the driveway that night, Keith felt more hopeful than he’d been since Prem’s death. He was back to work, where he felt competent again. He could return to normal. That’s what he wanted.