Family Life: A Novel

by Akhil Sharma

  FAMILY LIFE

  A NOVEL

  Akhil Sharma

  This book is dedicated to my beloved wife Lisa Swanson; my poor brother Anup Sharma; and my brave and faithful parents Pritam and Jai Narayan Sharma

  Table of Contents

  Family Life

  FAMILY LIFE

  My father has a glum nature. He retired three years ago, and he doesn’t talk much. Left to himself, he can remain silent for days. When this happens, he begins brooding, he begins thinking strange thoughts. Recently he told me that I was selfish, that I had always been selfish, that when I was a baby I would start to cry as soon as he turned on the TV. I am forty and he is seventy-two. When he said this, I began tickling him. I was in my parents’ house in New Jersey, on a sofa in their living room. “Who’s the sad baby?” I said. “Who’s the baby that cries all the time?”

  “Get away,” he squeaked, as he fell back and tried to wriggle away. “Stop being a joker. I’m not kidding.” My father is a sort of golden color. Skin hangs loosely from beneath his chin. He has long thin earlobes the way some old people have.

  My mother is more cheerful than my father. “Be like me,” she often tells him. “See how many friends I have? Look how I’m always smiling.” But my mother gets unhappy too, and when she does, she sighs and says, “I’m bored. What is this life we lead? Where is Ajay? What was the point of having raised him?”

  AS FAR BACK as I can remember my parents have bothered each other.

  In India we lived in two cement rooms on the roof of a two story house in Delhi. The bathroom stood separate from the living quarters. It had a sink attached to the outside of one of the walls. Each night my father would stand before the sink, the sky full of stars, and brush his teeth till his gums bled. Then, he would spit the blood into the sink and turn to my mother and say, “Death, Shuba, death. No matter what we do, we will all die.”

  “Yes, yes, beat drums,” my mother said once. “Tell the newspapers, too. Make sure everyone knows this thing you have discovered.” Like many people of her generation, those born before Independence, my mother viewed gloom as unpatriotic. To complain was to show that one was not willing to accept difficulties; that one was not willing to do the hard work that was needed to build the country.

  My father is two years older than my mother. Unlike her, he saw dishonesty and selfishness everywhere. Not only did he see these things but he believed that everybody else did, too, and that they were deliberately not acknowledging what they saw.

  My mother’s irritation at his spitting blood, he interpreted as hypocrisy.

  MY FATHER WAS an accountant. He went to the American consulate and stood in the line that circled around the courtyard. He submitted his paperwork for a visa.

  My father had wanted to emigrate to the West ever since he was in his early twenties, ever since America liberalized its immigration policies in 1965. His wish was born out of self-loathing. Often when he walked down a street in India, he would feel that the buildings he passed were indifferent to him, that he mattered so little to them that he might as well not have been born. Because he attributed this feeling to his circumstances and not to the fact that he was the sort of person who sensed buildings having opinions of him, he believed that if he were somewhere else, especially somewhere where he earned in dollars and so was rich, he would be a different person and not feel the way he did.

  Another reason he wanted to emigrate was that he saw the West as glamorous with the excitement of science. In India in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, science felt very much like magic. I remember that when we turned on the radio, first the voices would sound far away and then they would rush at us, and this created the sense of the machine making some special effort just for us.

  Of everybody in my family, my father loved science the most. The way he tried to bring it into his life was by going to medical clinics and having his urine tested. Of course, hypochondria had something to do with this; my father felt that there was something wrong with him and perhaps this was a simple thing that a doctor could fix. Also, when he sat in the clinics and talked to doctors in lab coats, he felt that he was close to important things, that what the doctors were doing was the same as what doctors would do in England or Germany or America, and so he was already there in those foreign countries.

  To understand the glamour of science, it is important to remember that the sixties and seventies were the era of the Green Revolution. Science seemed the most important thing in the world. Even I, as a child of five or six, knew that because of the Green Revolution there was now fodder in the summer and so people who would have died were now saved. The Green Revolution was effecting everything. I heard my mother discuss soy recipes with neighbors and talk about how soy was as good as cheese. All over Delhi, Mother Dairy was putting up its cement kiosks with the blue drop on the side. That the Green Revolution had come from the West, that organizations like the Ford Foundation had brought it to us without expectations of gain or payment, made the West seem a place for great goodness. I personally think that all the anti-Western movies of the seventies like Haré Rama, Haré Krishna and Purab aur Pachhim sprang not from the unease of hippies arriving but from our sense of inferiority before the munificence of the West.

  My mother had no interest in emigrating for herself. She was a high school teacher of economics, and she liked her job. She said that teaching was the best job possible, that one received respect and one learned things as well as taught them. Yet my mother was aware that the West would provide me and my brother with opportunities. Then came the Emergency. After Indira Gandhi suspended the constitution and put thousands of people in jail, my parents, like nearly everyone, lost faith in the government. Before then, my parents, even my father, were proud enough of India being independent that when they saw a cloud, they would think, That’s an Indian cloud. After the Emergency, they began to feel that even though they were ordinary and not likely to get into trouble with the government, it might still be better to leave.

  In 1978, my father left for America.

  IN AMERICA, MY father began working as a clerk for a government agency. He rented an apartment in a place called Queens, New York. A year after he left us, he sent airplane tickets.

  The Delhi of the seventies is hard to imagine: the quietness, the streets empty of traffic, children playing cricket in the middle of the street and rarely having to move out of the way to let cars by, the vegetable vendors who came pushing their carts down the street in the late afternoon, crying out their wares in tight, high-pitched voices. There weren’t VCRs back then, let alone cable channels. A movie would play for twenty-five or fifty weeks in huge auditorium theaters, and then once the movie was gone, it was gone forever. I remember feeling grief when the enormous billboards for Sholay at the end of our street were taken down. It was like somebody had died.

  It is also hard to remember how frugal we were. We saved the cotton that comes inside pill bottles. Our mothers used it to make wicks. This frugality meant that we were sensitive to the physical reality of our world in a way most people no longer are. When my mother bought a box of matches, she had my brother sit at a table and use a razor to split the matches in half. When we had to light several things, we would use the match to set a twist of paper on fire and then walk around the apartment lighting the stove, the incense stick, the mosquito coil. This close engagement with things meant that we were conscious that the wood of a match is soft, that a bit of spit on paper slows down how it burns.

  By the time our airplane tickets arrived, not every family hired a band to play outside their house on the day of the departure to a foreign country. Still, many families did.

  IT WAS AFTERNOON when the tickets came. My brother and I were in the livi
ng room playing Snakes and Ladders. The light was dim from the curtains that had been drawn to keep out the heat. When we heard shouts from the street, we knew it had to be the tickets.

  Birju and I climbed out onto the balcony that connected our apartment’s two rooms. Below us the street shimmered with August heat. I was eight at the time and Birju twelve. Five or six children my own age or even younger were walking in our direction. Leading them was a skinny sunburnt young man and a fat gray-haired woman in pantaloons and a baggy shirt. Children kept breaking away from the group. Every house on our street had boundary walls, topped with shards of glass. These walls were broken with iron gates, and the children stopped before the gates and shouted, “Shuba auntie’s tickets have come.” I had never heard us shouted about before. I became excited. I smiled. I wanted to shout and wave that we were home.

  Behri auntie, the fat woman leading the crowd, was a neighbor. Almost anybody who was not a relative but toward whom we had to show respect was an “auntie” or “uncle.” I knew Behri auntie didn’t like us and was coming just to be present when the tickets arrived so later she could say she was there. The thin man was the messenger. He walked proudly, his head high, not acknowledging the children following him. He was holding a large manila envelope in one hand.

  Birju and I on the balcony flattened ourselves into the little shade that lay along the wall. Birju looked down at the street and muttered, “Everybody becomes your friend when you’re going to America.” He had curly hair and a round fat chin that seemed to lengthen his face with its weight. Hearing him, my pride at being shouted about turned to embarrassment. Both my brother and my mother had a way of speaking that made them sound as if they knew secret things. People might be able to fool themselves and each other, but my brother and mother could look into them and see the truth. My brother had another thing that gave him an air of authority. He was ranked first in his class, and as happens in such cases, everybody in our neighborhood treated him as special. Because of his good grades, he appeared to be somebody who had a destiny. There was a sense with Birju that he was already connected to the wider world. When he passed judgment, it felt like when the radio made an announcement and one felt that whatever one had heard had to be correct.

  “Your mouth drips poison,” I said.

  A few minutes later, the crowd arrived in our living room. Behri auntie sat down panting on a stool.

  “Well, Shuba,” she said, “at last you are getting your wish.”

  My mother had been napping and her hair was loose. She was wearing a wrinkled cotton sari. Silently she examined the tickets, which looked like checkbooks. The messenger stood before her, and the children who had come with Behri were scattered around the dim space, writing their names on the luggage tags that the messenger had brought.

  When my mother didn’t reply, Behri said, “Your mister must be very happy, too.” Even I knew that there was something improper about the word “mister.” In those shy days, when even husbands and wives never touched in public, to wander out of Hindi was to suggest that something indecent was being referred to.

  “Mishraji will be happy to see Birju and Ajay,” my mother said, and her using my father’s last name with a “ji” attached signaled that we could not be accused of indecency.

  “He will be happy to see you, too. He’s been away for a year.” After Behri said this, there was a lingering silence. I wasn’t sure of the meaning of all that was being exchanged, but I understood that some battle was occurring.

  “Happy, Shuba?” Behri said, as if to confirm her victory.

  “Why shouldn’t I be happy?” my mother asked sounding irritated.

  Confronted, Behri looked away.

  In the silence that followed, the messenger leaned toward my mother. He whispered, “Reward, reward.” He used the Urdu word “inam,” as if to turn the giving of a tip into something Mughal and aristocratic.

  The idea of tipping for ordinary services had only recently entered India. Nobody wanted to tip, though, and so everyone looked for nonblameworthy ways to avoid doing so. Tipping was therefore often condemned as Muslim or a foreign affectation.

  Behri heard the “inam” and, wanting to be angry at someone, whipped her head toward the messenger. “Inam? That’s not the sort of neighborhood you have come to, Brother. We are ordinary people. We don’t speak English. We don’t wear blue jeans. We don’t drink wine and have three wives.”

  Birju, like me, enjoyed bullying people, especially when he could get away with it. Seeing that an adult was harassing the messenger and since a messenger is poor and not a regular visitor, he, too, joined in chiding the man. “Reward! Brother, have you caught a bandit? Have you caught a fugitive? Can I ask this? If you have, we’ll make sure the police give you a reward.”

  My mother, after her fight, was not now going to agree with anything Behri said. Though she, too, hated tipping, she said, “Ajay, go get my purse.” I left and went to our bedroom. The armoire where my mother kept the purse was in there. I came back after a moment with the bag.

  The messenger took the one rupee coin. He touched it to his forehead.

  Once he was gone, Behri said, “Shuba, you are already American.”

  Then she pushed herself off the stool. She turned to the children. “Come, come. Go home.”

  AT FIRST having the tickets thrilled me.

  The next morning, I went to the milk shop at the end of our street. The shop was a cement booth about as wide as a ticket counter. It was a hot, bright morning and I was sweating by the time I arrived. The air near the shop smelled of milk and spoilage and the incense that the milkman burned every morning as part of his prayers. There was a crush of boys on the sidewalk, spilling off it onto the road, holding up their milk pails, calling out, “Brother, Brother,” to get the milkman’s attention.

  Some of the boys looked at me and glanced away, their heads turning like oscillating table fans. Others glared as if I had taken something from them. To me, both reactions showed jealousy, and they thrilled me.

  I came up to a boy and pressed my hands together before me. “Namaste,” I said. The boy looked at me strangely. I knew it was odd to speak so formally to someone my own age, but I felt that being excessively proper would make me even more special; not only was I going to America, but I was polite and humble. “How is your family? Everybody happy? Healthy?” Speaking increased my excitement. I tried not to smile. I took out a luggage tag from the pocket of my short pants. The tag had an elastic loop coming out of a small hole. “Our tickets arrived. We got these also. Do you want to see?” I held out the tag.

  The boy was boxed in. If he refused to look, he would be revealing his jealousy and so appear weak. He took the tag. After handling it for a moment, he gave it back in silence.

  I spoke again. “I learned that everybody in America has their own speedboat.” Nobody had told me any such thing. As I said this, though, it felt true. “Brother, I can’t swim. I hope I don’t drown.” To be modest and to also be leaving for America made me feel like I was wonderful.

  The crowd shuffled. The boy I was talking to moved away. I turned to another boy and pressed my hands together once more.

  THE SUNDAY AFTER the tickets arrived, my mother took me and Birju to see my grandparents. She shook us awake while it was still dark. We went out onto the roof and bathed using a bucket and a mug. It was strange to bathe with the moon above us. And when the horizon began to brighten that first light felt rare and precious. And then, a little later, as the sky brightened, we walked down the street toward the bus stand. Birju walked beside my mother and I walked in the shadow of the boundary walls. In the shade, the dust was heavier and things smelled different, as if a fragment of the night lingered.

  Everything about where my grandparents lived was pleasingly miniature. Their lane was so narrow I could reach out and touch the houses on both sides. In the morning, when we arrived, the gutters ran with soapy water and the lane smelled of soap and also of hot oil and dough from the paratha
s being fried.

  My grandfather, seeing us, straightened up from sweeping his small whitewashed courtyard. “Who are these two princes? Are they saints who have come to bless my house?” He wore white pajamas and a homemade sleeveless undershirt with long shoulder straps. I hurried forward and to show that I was good and knew to display respect, touched his feet.

  “We have gotten our airplane tickets, nanaji,” Birju said. Hearing this, I wished I had said it so that then I would be the one bringing the news.

  “I’m not letting both of you go. One of you I will keep.”

  “We’ll miss you,” Birju said, reaching down to touch our grandfather’s feet. He had long, bony arms.

  “I will miss you, too,” I murmured, again feeling jealous that Birju had said something that made him look good.

  There were small rooms on two sides of the courtyard. These were cool, shadowy places. They smelled of mothballs, and this was pleasant because it suggested closed trunks and things that would be revealed when the seasons changed.

  Around eleven that morning, I fell asleep on a cot in one of the rooms. When I woke, Birju was lying next to me, smelling of the coconut oil that my mother put into his hair because of his dandruff. My mother and grandmother were sitting on the floor near the courtyard. They were talking in whispers and making seemi, rubbing wads of dough between their fingers so that the dough became thin as a thread, then pinching off small pieces so that these fell on the towels spread in their laps. The seemi looked like fingernail clippings.

  “You don’t speak English,” my grandmother whispered.

  “I will learn.”

  “You’re almost forty.”

  “I’m going for Birju and Ajay.”

  “Isn’t it better for them to be here with their whole family?”

  “Their father is there.”