Family Life: A Novel

by Akhil Sharma

  Before we came to America, I had never read a book just to read it. When I began doing so, at first, whatever I read seemed obviously a lie. If a book said a boy walked into a room, I was aware that there was no boy and there was no room. Still, I read so much that often I imagined myself in the book. I imagined being Pinocchio, swallowed by a whale. I wished to be inside a whale with a candle burning on a wooden crate, as in an illustration I had seen. Vanishing into books, I felt held. While at school and walking down the street, there seemed no end to the world, when I read a book or watched The Love Boat, the world felt simple and understandable.

  Birju liked America much more than I did. In India, he had not been popular. Here he made friends quickly. He was in seventh grade and his English was better than mine. Also, he was kinder than he used to be in India. In India there had been such competition, so many people offering bribes for their children to get slightly better grades, that he was always on edge. Here doing well seemed as simple as studying.

  One of the boys that Birju befriended was an Indian from Trinidad. My mother and Birju talked about him often. My mother wanted Birju to avoid him because the boy did not get good grades. I think she also looked down on him because he was not from India and so was seen as out of caste.

  “He thinks a sanitation engineer is an engineer, Mommy,” Birju said, sounding upset, as if his friend’s misunderstanding hurt him. “I told him it was a garbage man.”

  My mother was boiling rice at the stove. Birju, I remember, was standing beside her in a tee shirt with brown and yellow horizontal stripes that made him look like a bumblebee.

  “Why is that your problem? Why are you going around educating him?”

  “He doesn’t have good parents. His mother and father aren’t married. Neither one of them went to college.”

  “He’ll drag you down before you save him.”

  My school was on the way to Birju’s, so Birju used to walk me there every morning. One morning I started crying and told him about the bullying. He suggested that I talk to the teacher. When I didn’t, he told our parents. My father came to school with me. I had to stand at the front of the class and point at all the boys who had shoved me and threatened me. After this, the bullying stopped. I had been upset that Birju told our parents. I hadn’t thought that what he suggested would make a difference. The fact that it did surprised me.

  In India, Birju had collected stamps, and he would sit for hours and look at them. Now, he made model airplanes. He spent whole days at our kitchen table, his mouth open, one hand holding tweezers and the other a magnifying glass.

  MY MOTHER TOOK a job in a garment factory. The morning that she was to start, she came into the living room wearing jeans. I had never seen her wearing something formfitting before. Birju and I were sitting on one of the mattresses. “Your thighs are so big,” Birju said, laughing.

  My mother started screaming. “Die, murderer, die.”

  Birju laughed, and I joined him.

  In India, when my father said we should do something, we wouldn’t really start doing it till our mother had decided whether it made sense. In America, our parents were closer to equal importance. My father had all sorts of plans for us. Mostly these involved us assimilating. He made us watch the news every evening. This was incredibly boring. We didn’t care that there were hostages in Iran or that there was a movie called The Empire Strikes Back. He also bought us tennis rackets and took us to Flushing Meadows Park. There he made us hit tennis balls because he believed that tennis was a sport for rich people. Both Birju and I wore white headbands.

  My father was still irritable and suspicious as he had been in India, but he also had a certain confidence, like no matter what happened he would have done one thing that was uncontestably wonderful. “A green card is worth a million dollars,” he repeatedly told us. My mother, despite working in a garment factory, was mostly the same as she had been in India. She had been enthusiastic there about trying new things, taking me and Birju to movies and restaurants, and she was the same in America. She took Birju and me for walks in grocery stores so that we could see things we had never seen before—canned hearts of palms, boxes of colorful cereals. My mother said that she wished she was a teacher but she did not feel diminished by her work. “Work is work,” she said.

  My relationship with Birju changed. In India, my mother used to come home around the same time we did. Now, Birju was expected to take care of me until she returned from work. He was supposed to boil frozen shelled corn for me and give me a glass of milk. He was supposed to sit with me and watch me do my homework as he did his. Till America, I had somehow not paid much attention to the fact that Birju was older than I was. I had thought that he was bigger, but not more mature. Now, I began to understand that Birju dealt with more complicated things than I did.

  BIRJU AND I were sent to spend the summer with our father’s older sister. This was in Arlington, Virginia. She and our uncle lived in a small white two story house beside a wide road. The houses in Arlington had yards. The hot humid air there smelled of earth and the newness of green plants. Among the exotic things about Arlington was that the television networks were on different channels than in Queens. I turned nine while I was there.

  In Arlington, Birju began studying for the test to get into the Bronx High School of Science. He had to study five hours a day. While I got to go out, Birju had to stay in the living room and work until he was done with his hours.

  When we returned to Queens, Birju had to study three hours every weeknight and all day on weekends. Many nights I fell asleep on my mattress as he sat at the round, white kitchen table, his pencil scratching away.

  Despite all the time Birju was spending with his books, my mother felt that he was not studying hard enough. Often they fought. Once she caught him asleep on the foam mattress in the room that my parents shared. He had claimed that he needed quiet and so instead of studying at the kitchen table where he could be watched, he should be allowed to go into their room to study. When my mother came into the room, he was rolled onto his side breathing deeply.

  She began shouting, calling him a liar. Birju ran past her into the kitchen and returned with a knife. Standing before her, holding the knife by the handle and pointing it at his stomach, he said, “Kill me. Go ahead; kill me. I know that’s what you want.”

  “Do some work instead of being dramatic,” my mother said contemptuously.

  I became infected with the anxiety that Birju and my parents appeared to feel. When the sun shone and I went to Flushing Meadows Park, I had the sense that I was frittering away time. Real life was occurring back in our apartment with Birju studying.

  The day of the exam finally came. On the subway to the test, I sat and Birju stood in front of me. I held one of his test preparation books in my lap and checked his vocabulary. Most of the words I asked him he didn’t know. I started to panic. Birju, I began to see, was not going to do well. As I asked my questions and our mother and father watched, my voice grew quieter and quieter. I asked Birju what “rapscallion” meant. He guessed it was a type of onion. When I told him what it was, he began blinking quickly.

  “Keep a calm head,” my father scolded.

  “Don’t worry, baby,” my mother said. “You will remember when you need to.”

  The exam took place in a large, white cinder-block building that was a school but looked like a parking garage. The test started in the morning, and as it was going on, my parents and I walked back and forth nearby along a chain-link fence that surrounded basketball courts. The day was cold, gray, damp. Periodically, it drizzled. There were parked cars along the sidewalk with waiting parents inside, and the windows of these grew foggy as we walked.

  My father said, “These tests are for white people. How are we supposed to know what ‘pew’ means?”

  “Don’t give me a headache,” my mother said. “I’m worried enough.”

  “Maybe he’ll do well enough in the math and science portions that it will make up for the E
nglish.”

  My stomach hurt. My chest was heavy. I had wanted the day of Birju’s test to come so that it would be over. Now, though, that the day was here, I wished Birju had had more time.

  Midway through the exam, there was a break. Birju came out on the sidewalk. His face looked tired. We surrounded him and began feeding him oranges and almonds—oranges to cool him and almonds to give his brain strength.

  My mother was wearing Birju’s backpack. “It’s raining, baby,” my mother said, “which means that it’s a lucky day.”

  “Just do your best,” my father said. “It’s too late for anything else.”

  Birju turned around and walked back toward the building.

  Weeks went by. It was strange for Birju not to be studying. It was strange not to see his study guides on the living room floor beside his mattress. It was as if something was missing and wrong. Often Birju wept and said, “Mommy, I know I didn’t pass.”

  A month went by and then two. A warm day came when I could tie my winter coat around my waist during lunch hour, then another such day, like birds out of season. Spring came. In Delhi, they would be turning on fountains in the evening, and crowds would gather to watch.

  The results arrived. Because Birju had said it so many times, I knew that an acceptance letter would come in a thick envelope. The one that he showed me was thin and white. Tears slid down his cheeks.

  “Maybe you got in,” I murmured, trying to be comforting.

  “Why do you think that?” Birju asked. He stared at me as if I might know something he did not.

  Our mother was at work. She had said not to open the envelope until she arrived, that we would take it to temple and open it there. This made no sense to me. I thought what the envelope contained had already been decided.

  My father arrived home after my mother. As soon as he did, Birju demanded that we go to temple.

  Inside the large chamber, my mother put a dollar in the wooden box before God Shivaji. Then we went to each of the other idols in turn. Normally we only pressed our hands together before each idol and bowed our heads. This time we knelt and did a full prayer. After we had prayed before all the idols, we got on our knees before the family of God Ram. Birju was between our parents.

  “You open it, Mommy.”

  My mother tore off one side of the envelope and shook out a sheet of paper. In the first paragraph was the answer: Yes!

  “See? I told you we should open it at temple,” she said.

  We leapt to our feet and hugged.

  With her arms still around Birju, my mother looked over his shoulder at me. “Tomorrow, we start preparing you,” she said.

  It sounded like a threat.

  We began being invited to people’s houses for lunch, for dinner, for tea. This was so Birju could be introduced to these people’s children. Back then, because immigrants tended to be young and the Indian immigration to America had only recently begun, there were few Indians who could serve as role models.

  We took the subway all over Queens, the Bronx. We even went into Manhattan. We traveled almost every weekend. My mother would sit quietly in people’s living rooms and look on proudly as Birju talked.

  Once, as we were getting ready to leave our apartment to go on one of these visits, Birju said, “Why do we have to go?”

  My mother answered, “They have a girl they want you to marry.” She said this and laughed.

  “For me,” my father said, “there is one thing only.” He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together. “Dowry.”

  “Leave me alone,” Birju said.

  My father grabbed Birju and kissed his cheek. “Give me one egg, chicken. One egg only.”

  “Don’t say that,” my mother said. “We’re vegetarian. Say, ‘Give me some milk, goat, clean, pretty goat.’”

  The pride of getting into his school changed Birju. He sauntered. Entering a room, he appeared to be leaning back. When we spoke, he would look at me as if he were looking at someone bafflingly stupid. One time when he looked at me this way, I blurted, “You have bad breath.” I felt foolish for having pitied him when he was studying.

  My mother acted as if everything Birju said was smart. One afternoon, as he sat leaning back in a chair at the kitchen table, only two of the chair’s legs on the floor and one skinny arm reaching behind him and touching the wall so that he would not fall, he told our mother, “You should be a tollbooth collector.”

  “Why?” she asked from the stove, where she was boiling frozen corn.

  “In a tollbooth, people will only see your top.”

  My mother had been talking about trying to get a government job. She didn’t want to wear uniforms, though, because her hips embarrassed her.

  She laughed and turned to me. “Your brother is a genius.”

  I wished I had thought of what Birju had said.

  I wondered sometimes if my parents loved my brother more than they loved me. I didn’t think so. They bothered him and corrected him so much more than they corrected me that I assumed they secretly preferred me to him.

  Birju got a girlfriend. The girl was Korean. She had creamy white skin and a mole on her left cheek. She would visit while our parents were at work. I didn’t like Birju having a girlfriend. A part of me thought that to be with a different race was unnatural, disgusting. Also, when she came over and they went into our parents’ room and closed the door, I could see that Birju would one day be leaving our family, that one day he would have a life that had nothing to do with us. And since he would be going to the Bronx High School of Science and was the most valuable person in the family, this made me angry.

  When Nancy was visiting, I would sometimes get upset. I would go knock on my parents’ door and when Birju opened it, I would say he needed to give me milk.

  After Nancy left, Birju used to hum, move around the apartment excitedly, periodically bursting into song. I once asked him what he and Nancy did behind the closed door. He said, “Babies like you don’t need to know such things.”

  We went to Arlington again in the summer. By now, after almost two years in America, I had grown chubby. I could grip my stomach and squeeze it. Birju was tall and thin. He was five feet six and taller than our parents. He had a little mustache and tendrils of hair on the sides of his cheeks.

  Once more I lay on my aunt’s sofa and watched TV. Once more the TV shows in the afternoon were different from the ones in Queens, and they made me feel that I was living far from home. Once more I saw the lawns outside the houses of Arlington, and it seemed to me that the people who lived in these houses must be richer, happier, and more like those on TV than my family or our neighbors in Queens.

  Most days, Birju went to a swimming pool at a nearby apartment building. One afternoon in August, I was stretched out on my aunt’s sofa watching Gilligan’s Island when the telephone rang. The shades were drawn, making the room dim. After she hung up, my aunt came to the doorway. “Birju had an accident,” she said. I didn’t understand what she meant. “Get up.” She motioned with a hand for me to rise. I didn’t want to. Gilligan’s Island was half over and by the time we got back from the pool where Birju was swimming, the show would be finished.

  Outside, it was bright and hot. We walked along a sidewalk as cars whizzed by. There was a hot breeze. I kept my head down against the glare, but the light dazzled me.

  The apartment building that had the pool was tall, brown, with its front covered in stucco and carved to resemble brick. The pool was to the side, surrounded by a chain-link fence. The building towered over it, like it felt disdain for the pool. There was a small parking lot next to the pool and an ambulance was parked there with a crowd of white people gathered by its rear.

  We came up to the crowd. Being near so many whites made me nervous. Perhaps they would be angry with us for causing trouble. Birju should not have done whatever he had done.

  My aunt said, “You wait,” and moved forward. She had arthritis in one hip, and she pushed into the crowd with a lurching gait.


  I remained at the edge of the crowd. Alone, I felt even more embarrassed. I couldn’t see what was occurring. A minute passed and then two.

  My aunt came back through the crowd. She was hobbling quickly.

  “Go home,” she said, her face strained. “I have to go to the hospital.”

  I started on my way back. I walked head down along the sidewalk. I was irritated. Birju had gotten into the Bronx High School of Science, and now he was going to get to be in a hospital. I was certain our mother would feel bad for him and give him a gift.

  As I walked, I wondered whether Birju had stepped on a nail. I wondered if he was dead. This last was thrilling. If he was dead, I would get to be the only son.

  The sun pressed heavily on me. Considering that Birju was going to a hospital, I decided I should probably cry.

  I pictured myself alone in the house. I imagined Birju getting to be in the hospital while I had just another ordinary day. I imagined how next year Birju was going to get to be at the Bronx High School of Science and I would have to go to my regular school. Finally the tears came.

  JUST AS I had expected, Gilligan’s Island was over.

  I lay back down on the sofa and watched TV until five, when the news started. I then picked up a book and propped it on my stomach. I read for a while, but I was aware that my aunt was gone. I felt that something exciting was occurring and I was not getting to participate in an adventure.

  Six o’clock. Usually around this time, my aunt would be in the kitchen, taking things out of the cabinets. The quietness of the kitchen felt eerie. I got up off the sofa, went out the back door, and stood on the wooden deck. There was my uncle’s garden, the dusty tomato vines, the pepper plants with their hard, shiny green peppers.

  I returned to the kitchen. The stillness and the empty counters struck me. Suddenly I felt like I had been forgotten, that nobody cared about me.