‘The Family Took Shape’ by Shashi Bhat

Reviewed by Charlene Van Buekenhout

Shashi Bhat established her reputation as a short story writer, and with one in particular, “Indian Cooking,” which was a finalist for the 2010 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. With The Family Took Shape we are treated to a very charming and affecting first novel from a writer with a promising future.

Bhat has a gift for astute observations of common, ordinary life experiences and making these fascinating by magnifying the details to great effect. I found this story so compelling, yet it follows a mostly unremarkable life. The main life we follow is that of Mira Acharya. Her parents were originally from India but moved to Canada before the children were born.  India’s cultural and religious presence is well embedded in the book and Mira is a perfect example of the Indian and Canadian cultures co-existing, yet it’s not about the cultures — yes they play a role, but it is in shaping Mira, not as a commentary.

At the beginning of the story she is six years old, and we follow her through life until her child-bearing years (which, for Mira, are from twenty-five to thirty). The voice, however, is third person limited from Mira’s perspective, the perspective being an older self remembering a younger one with more clarity through time. Once in a while the voice dips in and out of the all-knowing Mira, the remembering Mira, and the Mira of the present. This is very interesting, and engaging, but for a six-year-old, the language that describes her feelings and perceptions is suspiciously sophisticated at times. Still, it is terribly accurate, and Bhat’s gift for describing life with such accuracy and without cliché (or if with cliché, it is discussed with such detail that you cannot repute its existence within the sentences) is appealing enough to forgive the high language.

Mira’s immediate family consists of a mother, a deceased father, and an older brother with autism. Is this the beginning of a story about a young heroic girl battling through all of these hardships to what is surely victory and success awaiting her and her family?  On the contrary! It is a much more interesting book that deals with the habitual and ordinary ins and outs of their lives amidst these circumstances.

To Mira, Ravi’s (her brother’s) autism and behaviour is their family’s normal. Not that she agrees with this normalcy — at times it embarrasses her to the point of cruelty and negligence — but isn’t that a normal part of sibling life?  When Ravi encounters a bully, Mira does not speak up for him or defend him, resulting in his disappearance for the better part of a day.  When the situation is resolved and Ravi is home safe and sound, Mira is scolded slightly by her mother who shakes Mira by her arms.

In these occasional bursts at reprimanding her children we see Mira’s mother dealing not only with her sudden status as a single mother, but with an autistic son at a time in which much less support was available.  Later in the novel, we get a glimpse into the effects of this stress on the mother, though the appalling incident that occurs is without consequence, and life moves on.

Mira’s own encounter with a bully (in the guise of a friend) results not in compassion for Ravi, but fuels anger inside of her, resulting in attempts to bully him. Throughout these early and middle years, a lot of what you’d call textbook behaviour is exhibited, but it’s not delivered in a clichéd manner, and actually, the description and commitment in magnifying the mundane details of everyday life is refreshing.

An example of this is the scene in which Mira attempts to make friends with a group of girls at school:

She approached, opening her granola bar and chewing it, to seem more casual. “Hi,” she said, but wasn’t close enough yet, so they didn’t hear her. “Hi,” she said again, stepping closer to the side of the bench, and this time it was startlingly loud.

Oh, the humanity of being an adolescent girl who is shy and awkward, attempting to be absorbed into a group of friends without fuss. I identified intensely with Mira, which is mostly embarrassing, and I hope it is due to Bhat’s excellent writing and not to my own shameful memories of adolescence, because Mira is not really portrayed as a good person.

She’s not a bad person, she’s just discovering who she is, and in a lot of ways, this is a coming of age story complete with bad decisions, unfortunate circumstances, emotional struggles and coping, and the occasional stroke of good luck and judgement that you hope is character building, but may all end up another notch on the ladder of life. Mira is not her brother’s champion, she makes life difficult for her mother, she is shy, she overeats, she does well in school, but is not the overachiever or perfect child that she would like to be (nor does she appear to strive much toward becoming that perfect child).

I can’t reinforce enough the refined accuracy in Bhat’s descriptions. She is especially excellent when describing socially awkward situations in such a way that immediately puts you right inside of them. The best example of this is the dinner party at Lala Aunty’s. Mira’s mother gets up from her couch seat only to find it has been taken upon returning. The following play by play of how her mother would have to eat, drink and interact with others while standing is pure gold — an exact re-enactment of the circumstance could not be as clear.

The novel has a looping narrative. The story moves along in linear fashion, but within that structure Bhat moves back and forth in time through memories and experiences, triggered by a moment in the present, and looping through other experiences, gathering information so that we can see the shape Mira’s life takes on.  An interesting thing about this is that we get an experienced perspective on older memories (not so that they lead to moral lessons, but that they add more of an enhanced view on situations). At times this format gets in the way of the story a bit.

For example, Mira and Ravi’s Mother takes them to a wedding where they don’t know the bride and groom at all.  On the way there, Ravi asks “When will I get married?” to which the mother replies “Well, you have time” and touches the picture of Lord Ganesha on the dashboard. Mira goes on to explain the expression “Ganeshana Madhuve” through the shared experience of her and her mother’s relationship. The explanation turns into a brief Hindu god creation story, this then turns into a memory of what Ravi and Mira thought about the story the time their mother told it to them, which then turns to Mira’s thoughts about her brother in relation to the story and her own fantasies of him being “normal”. This rumination is important as it allows us to see that Mira is not ignorant about Ravi and does not wish him to magically be something he’s not.

This incident then is followed by a story about Mira’s French class assignment to read Le Chien Jaune by Georges Simenon, and the discussion regarding the confusion about the character le colosse.  Finally the teacher clarifies  “He is, you know, un peu retarded.” To which the class immediately responds “Ohhhhh” leaving Mira to quietly protest this simplified and crude description, yet only to herself.  Only after this do we get back to the wedding in what is our present time in the novel.

In the end, we get a lot of information to add to the package or shape of the story, and it is at most times a charming and interesting style, but with all of the twists and turns, getting lost in the time space of the narrative is not difficult and can also cause a lot of explaining sentences, and an over-use of the word “because”. This quibble can be cured, I think, by reading the whole book in one sitting, if you’ve got the time.

Bhat’s visual imagery is clear and fresh and she transports each memory and moment to the reader with ease, in order to allow for combined images. In this example, Mira as a pre-teen shatters an urn out of curiosity and rebelliousness, but this image mirrors her shattered family dynamic through death and growth, and then later (obviously, but poignantly) uses the symbol again as the family unit minus the father, leaves their old family home behind: “As the light went black, the moths flew away but Mira could see them, their swiftly moving wings, and to her they looked like pieces shattering, though they moved of their own accord.”

This novel has made me laugh, cringe and (yes) tear up significantly.  So I was mildly annoyed at the copy-editing and continuity mistakes that came up more often than I was willing to forgive, from typos (“Ira” instead of “Mira”) to full name changes (Mira’s baby “Abhi” was accidentally renamed “Ravi,” Mira’s brother’s name, for a sentence: “Mira settled into the chair holding Ravi, and closed her eyes”) to continuity lapses (“Mira was carrying the pasta to where Ravi sat on the kitchen floor, waiting — the movers had already taken the table and chairs.[…] When she went back upstairs, she found her brother at the table”). One or two I could forgive, but all the way up until the end of the book, there were these glaring mistakes, and I say glaring, because the book is so good, I was crushed that they existed at all. I highly recommend this novel even with these faults. The story has stayed with me well after I had finished reading, and I now look forward to more from this writer.

Cormorant | 240 pages |  $22.00 | paper | ISBN # 978-1770860919