Manahil Bandukwala Reviews Shashi Bhat’s The Most Precious Substance on Earth
The Most Precious Substance on Earth. Shashi Bhat. McClelland & Stewart. $24.95 CDN, 272 pp., ISBN 9780771094965
CW: sexual assault, sexual harassment
Shashi Bhat’s novel, The Most Precious Substance on Earth, had me hooked from the very first chapter. Told in vignettes reminiscent of Téa Mutonji’s award-winning collection, Shut Up You’re Pretty, Bhat’s book follows the perspective of the main character Nina from her early teen years up until adulthood. The vignette style of the narrative shows that whatever Nina encounters in life, she can slowly work through the difficulties. Like all of us, Nina takes life one step at a time, making the book a very real portrait of living.
Bhat’s writing is gripping, hilarious, and makes piercing critiques on the experience of navigating the world as a young South Asian girl and woman. Nina was born in Halifax to Indian parents and she continuously must reassert her belonging with people she meets across her life.
The blurb states that the novel is “an unforgettable portrait of how silence can shape a life.” Within the book, each chapter is presented as its own short story. We see Nina as a fourteen-year-old navigating high school life with her best friend Amy, stumble with her through her failing MFA, re-enter high school as Nina takes up teaching English, and follow her on a soul-searching trip through South Asia that does not end up the way she pictured.
Nina is a daydreamer. Oftentimes she conjures vivid images of what she imagines will happen, but none of those imaginations pan out the way she hopes. At one point, she thinks, “It’s painful trying not to yearn for that peculiar, intimate warmth of a human skull pressing against you.”
The early stories that follow fourteen-year-old Nina take on a young voice that accurately captures the feeling of being a teenager and fixated on what is most important at any given time. In the first chapter, “Why I Read Beowulf,” Nina describes her intense crush on her English teacher, Mr. Mackenzie: “Sometimes, in my most reckless moments of imagination, I see him dropping the piece of chalk in amazement.” As the story progresses, Bhat explores what it means when a teacher takes advantage of a student’s crush and Nina is left to grapple with the aftermath of Mr. Mackenzie’s assault.
Bhat’s endings to each chapter have a poeticism to them that lingers and makes each story incredibly memorable. The ending of “The Wave” reads: “I taste salt. My ears become seashells as the sound of rushing water fills them. When you live so close to the ocean you forget sometimes to listen for that sound, and then suddenly it’s there. You forget sometimes that nobody is watching. That you’re just another student.” Even though Nina is researching laws for statutory rape and struggling with who to tell about the assault, the end of this particular narrative sees Nina realize she is just another student whose individuality is lost in an enormous wave.
Bhat avoids leaving Nina’s realization as simply a “harsh reality of life.” Instead, Nina continues to reflect on her experiences as a high school student when she comes back to teach. We witness her awareness of the power dynamics between teachers and students and how gender affects the way these dynamics play out. In “You Are Loved By Me,” Nina watches out for the ninth-grade girls at a school dance. Afterwards, her colleague, Jeffers, says: “These girls…one of them makes up a story and it can destroy your life.” Nina responds by saying, “I was looking out for her.” In the same story, she must deal with one of her own students sexually harassing her by writing out his sexual fantasies in a short story and submitting it for an assignment. The differences for the men and women teachers in high school demonstrate the dangers of gendered violence across all ages.
Nina spends much of her teenage years not speaking and not knowing when to speak. As an adult, she continues to struggle with speaking up and doing what she thinks is right. In the chapter, “A Human Shape,” one of her students submits a poem with content about an eating disorder. She is torn between reaching out to the student and risking crossing boundaries or going to the guidance counsellor and risking exposing the student. Ultimately, the decision leaves her feeling as though teaching is “a job for somebody both more and less human than I am.”
The Most Precious Substance on Earth follows Nina’s perspective, and so we see the ways Nina perceives herself as failing herself and those around her. But at the novel’s conclusion, Nina finds out that she was not as much of a failure as a teacher as she perceived herself to be. Bhat’s strength as a writer infuses what would otherwise be a narrative of harsh reality with numerous inklings of hope.
Manahil Bandukwala is a visual artist and writer. Her most recent forthcoming work is a collaborative piece with Liam Burke titled Orbital Cultivation, and is out with Collusion Books in 2021. She is Coordinating Editor for Arc Poetry, and Digital Content Editor for Canthius. She is a member of VII, an Ottawa-based creative writing collective. See her work at manahilbandukwala.com.