THE WRITER TAKES SHAPE:
A REVIEW OF SHASHI BHAT'S
THE FAMILY TOOK SHAPE
BY LEE SHEPPARD

The Rusty Toque | Reviews | Issue 5 | November 15, 2013
PictureThe Family Took Shape
by Shashi Bhat
Cormorant Books
Reading Shashi Bhat’s debut novel, The Family Took Shape, was like driving a highway running parallel to a highway I know, so close to my highway that some of the towns it connects are familiar, but far enough that other towns are not. Mira Acharaya, the book’s main character, is my contemporary and we are both from the Greater Toronto Area. I grew up W, AS and P, however, while she grew up Indo-Canadian. So, when Mira is going to school, reading books, watching TV or going places it is a world that I recognize. The Indo half of her world is familiar as long as it sticks to Toronto’s Little India and food. Among the many things that I find foreign are her family’s prayer room and calling not-just-blood relations Aunty and Uncle, a verbal convention that makes true this Richard Bach quotation some ex once told me: “The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other's life.” I’m not even sure I address my parents’ siblings and in-laws as aunts and uncles anymore, and if I went around calling my mum’s friends aunty and uncle they would just think me even stranger than they already do.

Typically, the books I find entertaining—but also “Entertaining” books—are cause- and-effect narratives moving from one dramatic event to the next. I also like books that either show me myself in a way that I can recognize—though written with words far more beautiful or interesting, in order but also in usage, than I might have come up with—or that make me a tourist in parts of the world or in communities that are strange and unfamiliar at first, but that through reading become a reflection of my own humanity and, by helping me to become more empathic, a reinforcement of that humanity. The Family Took Shape consistently meets the latter two of these three criteria: since the forces that shape Mira and her family are both the same as and different from the forces that shaped me, the book both shows me myself and takes me somewhere new. It has limited cause-and-effect logic, however, because of its explicit focus on Mira’s identity formation and—though less—on the constant evolution of her family. The narrative jumps chronologically, picking up threads of whichever story is relevant to the change coming at the end of each chapter.

Straddling the first two chapters of The Family Took Shape is one of the most dramatic events in the book, which is told as cause-and-effect narrative. Mira’s brother, Ravi—who has been diagnosed with mild autism—is chased from the bus stop by a smirking, freckled bully. The bus comes. Mira explains to the driver that Ravi is “over there.” The driver doesn’t wait for Ravi so Ravi doesn’t make it to school. After the bus driver, Mira doesn’t mention the event to anyone. Her brother is still not home at the end of the day. The chapter ends with the sentence, “Even then, she didn’t call her mother.”

The next chapter begins with the frenzied search for Ravi, who is brought home a few pages later by a neighbour whose house Ravi has gone to. Mira’s mother is so happy that they all eat ice cream, which Mira lets melt, so that eating it is “more like a punishment.” Not only does this story nicely set up Mira and Ravi’s relationship, it makes a strong argument that an event can be both character-shaping and dramatic. It is one of the few action-packed stories in the book.

Mira’s father, who we eventually discover has been killed in a car accident, first appears in a photo Mira “wished she could step into … like into a Mary Poppins chalk drawing.” We are not told how Mira or her family experienced the trauma of her father’s death. Though this part of Mira’s story would be morbid, it would satisfy readers interested in reading through the dramatic (or traumatic) events; readers interested primarily in the development of Mira’s character and her relationship with her family; or readers who are interested in both.

Later in the book, Mira’s mother reveals that when Mira was six and Ravi eight—about the time the book starts—she spent three days and nights with a man who picked her up in Sears with the line, “Come home with me to my mansion.” When Mira asks, “What about me and Ravi?” her mother replies, “You were here.” Mira then asks, “By ourselves?” Mira’s mother doesn’t answer. Mira goes back to her dorm, wondering why she doesn’t remember her mother’s absence.

Like Mira’s father’s death, this episode is one I think has tremendous dramatic potential in addition to its potential to build the story of Mira’s development. Where this story is used, it functions to deepen Mira’s understanding of her mother as being like Mira herself—a sexual being, a person who is more than simply a mother. This revelation spurs Mira to confess various of her own lapses of judgment to her boyfriend, Harshvardhan. A few pages later, Mira and Harshvardhan are planning their wedding. A reader can conclude that being able to identify with her mother makes Mira able to see herself as someone’s bride and someone’s mother, which is to say that this story is important, placed where it has been.

Still, I wish that Mira and Ravi’s three days of Pippi Longstocking-like existence—father dead, mother missing—were narrated for us because the story would be not just interesting and exciting, but would provide further opportunities for the development of Mira’s character.

The story of Mira’s mother’s disappearance is a fairytale in its implausibility and beauty. We are told that Mira, who I have come to associate with Bhat for reasons I will explain, “didn’t enjoy all the truth-bending in children’s literature: the personification of animals and suspension of disbelief. She wanted her child to read about the real world, however simplified and beautified; she preferred to find the wonder in things that were actual and concrete, things she could see for herself.”

The one-pager from Cormorant Books that came with the review copy of The Family Took Shape, quotes Bhat as saying, “I … liked the idea of writing a distorted projection of my own life—my life through a weird alternate lens, elongating parts and minimizing other parts and revealing some parts that are entirely new.”

Throughout the book, Mira seems to be becoming a writer. On the second page of the novel we learn that for Mother’s Day Mira, “wrote a poem on a pink paper heart” and that “she had developed a firm aesthetic, which she expressed through her incisively chosen rock collection and her various arts and crafts.” Mira’s thoughts are full of writerly imagery and descriptions. Of a cat Ravi has drawn, “its body … made out of falling stacks of blue squares”, Mira thinks, “it might clatter as it moved.” Ravi’s laugh is a “frightening … uncontrollable chortling that grabbed him from the inside and shook his whole body. … Once,” she remembers, “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.”

Language is alive for Mira in a way that many writers will relate to. “Atrocities, Mira loved the word, simultaneously space-age and ancient, chemical and dark; she wanted to brew atrocities in a laboratory, build atrocities on the moon.” Mira remembers her mother saying that her father’s name, “Ashwin, had sounded like a combination of a sneeze and a sigh.” She also notices that when her mother speaks to school officials, “her syntax, usually a bit creative, settled into polite regular patterns, as though she’d rehearsed.”

Most exciting, though, if Mira is becoming a writer, are the moments she glimpses stories behind objects, creates stories to explain things to herself, or tells herself stories about what her life might have been.

Looking at a painting of the goddess Saraswati, Mira observes, “She wore a white sari; the artist had painted its folds pale pink and trimmed the hem with gold, and Mira thought about what combinations of paint colours had been used to make the gold look so real and about how respectful you must have to be while working on a religious portrait, to avoid wearing shoes or accidentally swearing if you made a mistake.” This thought is the seed of a story about an icon painter.

On a family trip to Pittsburg, Mira and her mother are distracted from their preparations for a wedding when they hear a man yelling at Ravi. Ravi has been peering through the window of the hotel room the man is sharing with his wife. Mira imagines the moment:

He would have bent his shoulders to look in the woman’s window, ducked his head to see through the glare, and covered the glass with his large, sweaty hand, thinking which is the room is this the room? In his frustration, he started knocking on the window, his fist determined and steady against the glass, the woman cowering inside. Had she answered, Ravi’s words would have emerged identical to his thoughts, a panicked, ‘Which is the room? Is this the room?’

Almost immediately afterwards, Mira laments that she didn’t handle the angry man differently, imagining how she would have dealt with things if she were “a girl over whom embarrassment rolled like water on a waterproof jacket.”

She would have gone right out of the room and joked through it, diffusing the situation with a Rainman reference. Buddying up to the angry man, she’d say, ‘Sorry man, by brother’s a little slow. I mean, he’s no Rainman or anything, but you know. He didn’t mean it.’ The man would smile, disarmed, a hand in his hair, and say that no harm had been done.

Mira becomes a pharmacist. Sure, she keeps rocks, is interested in mixing paints and smashes an urn on the ground only to marvel at the “transformation,” all characteristics that strike me as vaguely scientific. She is also obsessed with wishing Ravi’s autism fixed, something that one might imagine eventually being within the power of a pharmacist to do. Still, I am disappointed and I imagine that in some earlier draft of this novel Mira did become a writer. Maybe an early reader or an editor discouraged her—perhaps Bhat discouraged herself—from writing an autobiographical debut novel.

Or perhaps becoming a writer is too much of a fairytale for Bhat’s tastes. I certainly imagine that becoming a pharmacist is much more actual, concrete, and possible an outcome for even an exceptionally creative Indo-Canadian child, just as it is for a WASP. Pharmacists can have literary minds, too, of course, and the book’s final image is both literary and scientific.

Mira is in India to meet family and to perform a naming ceremony for her new son. A young cousin who aspires to be a scientist asks her to show him an experiment. She places some camphor on a windowsill. Over a number of days it sublimates: goes from solid straight to gas. The book ends during a ceremony performed by one of Mira’s uncles, a healer, who believes the ceremony will prevent Mira’s infant son from becoming autistic like her brother.

She thought maybe, too, she could smell camphor, a scent she would always cling to because it reminded her of hope and faith and belief, and of breathing eucalyptus deeply through a cold, and of her brother playing with his back rounded in her mother’s basement prayer room, and of the first time she had learned about sublimation in chemistry class, and of how beautiful she thought it was that a solid could disappear into air.

Reading this, it occurred to me that, beyond expressing Mira’s wish that Ravi’s autism would disappear, this—the book’s final sentence—suggests a metaphor for Bhat’s writing, which sublimates reality by turning it to words.
LEE SHEPPARD is a writer, a contributing editor of the literary magazine Pilot and a teacher at West End Alternative Secondary School in Toronto where he has developed and currently teaches two project-based courses: ReelLit a film-studies and video production program and The West Enders, a creative writing and illustrating program that produces an eponymous illustrated literary journal.