Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese [98]
Ask The Twins to come inside for dinner.
Boys, isn't it time for your bath?
ShivaMarion, do you want spaghetti or injera and wot tonight?
“You” or “Your” never meant one of us. When we replied to a question, no one cared which of us had spoken; an answer from one was an answer for The Twins.
Perhaps the adults believed that Shiva, my busy, industrious brother, was naturally parsimonious with his words. If the sound of the anklet which he insisted on wearing counted as speech, then Shiva was a terrible chatterbox, only silent when he muffled the tiny bells under his sock for school. Perhaps the adults believed I never gave Shiva much of a chance to speak (which was true), but no one wanted to tell me to shut up. In any case, in the hullabaloo of our bungalow, where the bridge crowd congregated twice a week, where a 78 rpm spun on the Grundig, and where Ghosh's lumbering tread rattled the dishes as he struggled to learn the rumba and the cha-cha-cha, two years went by before the adults fully registered that Shiva had stopped speaking.
WHEN WE WERE INFANTS, Shiva was considered the more delicate: it was his skull that Stone attempted to crush before Hema saved us. But then Shiva hit all his developmental milestones on time, lifting his head when I did and crawling when it was time to crawl. He said “Amma” and “Ghosh” on cue, and we both decided to walk when we were a month shy of one year of age. Hema and Ghosh were reassured. According to Hema, we forgot how to walk within a few days of taking our first steps, because we had discovered how to run. Shiva spoke as much as he needed to well into his fourth year, but about that time he began to quietly hoard his words.
I hasten to say, Shiva laughed or cried at the appropriate times; he often acted as if he were about to say something just when I piped in; he punctuated my words with exclamations from his anklet and he sang la-la-la lustily with me in the bath. But when it came to actual words— he had no need for them. He read fluently, but refused to do so aloud. He could add and subtract big numbers at a glance, scribbling out the answer while I was still carrying the one over and counting fingers. He was constantly jotting notes to himself, or to others, leaving these around like droppings. He drew beautifully, but in the oddest places, like on cardboard cartons or the back of paper bags. What he loved to draw best at that stage was Veronica. We had an issue of Archie comics in the house—I bought it from Papadakis's bookstore; the three frames on page sixteen had to do with Veronica and Betty. Shiva could reproduce that page, complete with balloons, lettering, and crosshatch shading. It was as if he had a photograph stored in his head and could spill it onto paper whenever he wanted. He left nothing out, not even the page number, or the stain of the fly that had met its death on the margin of the original. I noticed that he always accentuated the curved line under Veronica's breast, particularly when compared with Betty's. I checked the source, and sure enough, the line was there, but Shiva's was thicker, darker. Sometimes he improvised and departed from the original image, rendering the breasts as pointed missiles about to launch, or else as pendulous balloons that hovered over the kneecaps.
Genet and I covered for Shiva's silence. I did it unconsciously; if I was talkative to excess, it was because I saw this as the necessary output for ShivaMarion. Of course, Ihad no problem communicating with Shiva. In the early morning, the shake of his anklet—ching-ding—said, Marion, are you awake? Dish-ching was Time to get up. Rubbing his skull on mine said, Rise and shine, sleepyhead. All one of us had to do was think of an action and the odds were the other would rise to carry it out.
It was Mrs. Garretty at school who made the discovery about Shiva's having given up speech. The Loomis Town & Country School catered to the merchants, diplomats, military advisers,