Family Life: A Novel

by Akhil Sharma

  “ARE THINGS GETTING worse?” I asked God. November had just begun. Soon it would be Thanksgiving and then Christmas, and after this there would be a new year and in that year there would not have been a single day in which Birju had walked or talked.

  “What do you think?”

  “They seem to be.”

  “At least Birju’s hospital hasn’t forced him out.”

  “At least Birju isn’t dead. At least Daddy’s bus has never fallen off a bridge.”

  God was silent.

  “I’m ashamed,” I said.

  “About what?”

  “That after the accident, I was glad I might become an only child.”

  “Everybody thinks strange thoughts,” God said. “It doesn’t matter if you think something.”

  “When I was walking around in the schoolyard and you asked if I would switch places with Birju, I thought, No.”

  “That, too, is normal.”

  “Why don’t you make Birju like he was?”

  As soon as I asked the question, God stopped feeling real. I knew then that I was alone, lying under my blanket, my face exposed to the dark.

  “Christ was my son. I loved Job. How long did Ram have to live in the forest?”

  “What does that have to do with me?” Normally this was the time to start discussing my glorious future. But the idea of a future in which Birju was sick made fame seem pointless.

  “I can’t tell you what the connection is, but you’ll be proud of yourself.”

  I didn’t say anything. God and I were silent for a while.

  “What are three minutes for you?” I asked. “Just get rid of the three minutes when Birju was at the bottom of the pool.”

  “Presidents die in less time than that. Planes crash in less time than that.”

  I opened my eyes. My mother was on her side, and she had a blanket pulled up to her neck. She looked like an ordinary woman, her face sagging, her mouth open. It surprised me that you couldn’t tell, just by looking at her, that she spent all day every day in a hospital, that she spent all day sitting by her son who was in a hospital bed, who was once going to go to the Bronx High School of Science but who was now so brain damaged that he could not walk or talk, could not turn over in his sleep, and had to be fed through a rubber tube that went into his side.

  AND I KNEW things were getting worse. My parents fought with such anger that it was as if they hated each other.

  One fall day, when all the trees had lost their leaves and the world looked like a fire had gone through it, my parents fought so bitterly in Birju’s room that my mother told my father to go home and take me with him. My father drove us away. The route back to my aunt’s took us along unpopulated two-lane roads. There were scrubby trees along the road, and between them I could see a lowering misty sun chasing us.

  On one of the roads was a small bar with a gravel lot. The bar looked as if it had been a house once. Now it had a neon sign, an orange hand lifting a sudsy mug of beer. Instead of driving past, my father turned into the lot. I wondered why. I had never known anyone who drank. I had always assumed that people who drank were either Muslims or poets, or else rich and depraved.

  The tires made a crunching sound as we rolled up toward the wooden steps of the little house. “One minute,” my father said, and reached past me and pushed open the door on my side.

  Inside, the bar was dark and the air smelled of cigarette smoke and something stale and sweet. The floor was linoleum, like the kitchen at my aunt’s. A basketball game was playing on the TV.

  My father spoke to the bartender, a big man in a sleeveless sweatshirt. “Is anything half off?”

  “Well drinks.”

  “I’ll have a double of your cheapest whiskey.”

  My father lifted me onto a stool. I looked around. There was an old, fat man in shorts sitting at a table. He was wearing an undershirt, and his stomach sat in his lap like a small child. He was wearing sneakers and no socks and the skin around his ankles was black like a bruised banana.

  The bartender returned with the drink. My father drank it in a gulp. It was the first glamorous thing I had ever seen him do. It was the act of a gangster or cowboy. Then he ordered another. The announcer raised his voice, and we looked at the TV. My father asked if I had ever seen a basketball game all the way through.

  “I’ve seen the Harlem Globetrotters.”

  “I’ve heard they don’t play other teams because they can defeat everyone else so easily.”

  “They only play against each other or if the president asks, like when they had to play against aliens to save the earth.”

  “Aliens?”

  I realized that my father had been teasing me and I had confused TV with reality. My ears became hot.

  The second drink came. My father drank this quickly, too, and asked for a beer. As we waited, he put his elbows on the bar. “I never thought this would be my life,” he said.

  The sun was setting when we left the bar. The air was moist and cold. In the car, my father rolled down his window.

  AROUND THANKSGIVING, THE insurance company said that it would pay for a nursing home. No one was happier to hear this than my aunt. “There is no point in denying what has happened, Shuba. We have to keep trusting God. We can’t just trust God when he’s doing what we want. We have to trust him even when things are not as we would like them.”

  In December, my aunt’s only grandson turned one. She had a birthday party for him and didn’t tell us. When we came home from the hospital the night of the party and saw people sitting in the living room eating cake from paper plates, my aunt led us back into the kitchen. She said, “I thought it would depress you, seeing other people’s happiness.”

  “Are you other people?” my mother said. “Is your happiness not my happiness?”

  “Have some cake,” she said. “What is there to be angry about? I made a mistake.” As my aunt walked out of the kitchen, she said, loud enough to be heard by the guests, “I feel like I’m in court. Every word I have to watch.”

  Two weeks later, my mother told me that we were moving to a new home in New Jersey.

  AS CHRISTMAS DREW near, a Christmas tree appeared in the hospital’s lobby, and the hallways began to have cutouts of Santa on his sleigh taped to the walls. I began praying whenever I thought of it—at my locker, during lunch, even in the middle of a quiz. I prayed more than I had ever prayed before, but I found it harder and harder to drift into the rhythm of sung prayers or into the nightly conversations with God. How could chanting and burning incense undo three minutes of a sunny August afternoon? It was like trying to move a sheet of blank paper from one end of a table to the other by blinking so fast that you started a breeze.

  On Christmas Eve, my mother asked the hospital chaplain to come to Birju’s room and pray. She and I knelt with the priest beside Birju’s bed. Afterward, the chaplain asked my mother whether she would be attending Christmas services the next morning. “Of course, Father,” she said.

  “I’m coming, too,” I said.

  That night, I watched It’s a Wonderful Life on television in the living room. To me, the movie meant that if you become unhappy enough, almost anything can pass as happiness. Later, when I lay down near my parents and closed my eyes, God appeared.

  A part of me felt that God would have to grant whatever request was made of him on his son’s birthday. “Will Birju be better in the morning?”

  “No,” God answered.

  “Why not?”

  “When you asked for the hundred percent on the math test, you could have asked for your brother.”

  The next morning, when I arrived at the hospital with my mother and father, Birju was asleep, breathing through his mouth while a nurse’s aide stood by the hospital bed, pouring a can of Isocal formula into his G-tube, the yellowish rubber hose that went into his stomach. I hadn’t expected Birju to be better; still, seeing him this way made my chest very heavy.

  All day, I sat in a corner of Birju’s room.
My mother sat by the hospital bed and read women’s magazines to Birju while she shelled peanuts into her lap. My father was reading a thick red book in preparation for a civil-service exam. The day wore on. The sky outside grew dark. At some point, the lights were turned on, and at the idea of the day being over and nothing having changed, I started crying. I tried to be quiet. I did not want my parents to notice my tears and think that I was crying for Birju, because in reality I was crying for myself, for having to spend so much time in the hospital, for now having to move to a town I didn’t know.

  My father noticed first. “What’s the matter, hero?”

  My mother shouted, “What happened?” She jumped up. She looked so alarmed that it was as if I were bleeding.

  “I didn’t get any Christmas presents. I need a Christmas present,” I said. “You didn’t buy me a Christmas present.” And then, because I had revealed my selfishness, I let myself weep. “You have to give me something. I should get something for all this.” I clenched my hands and wiped my face with my fists. “Each time I come here, I should get something.”

  My mother pulled me up and pressed me into her stomach. My father came and stood beside us. “What do you want?” he said.

  I didn’t know.

  “What do you want?” my mother repeated.

  “I want to eat pizza, and I want candy.”

  My mother stroked my hair. “Don’t worry, baby.”

  I sobbed, and she kept wiping my face with a fold of her sari. At last I stopped crying, and she and my father decided that I should be taken back to my aunt’s.

  On the way, we stopped at a strip mall. It was a little after five, and the streetlights were lit. First, my father and I went to a magazine shop and bought a bag of 3 Musketeers bars and a bag of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. Then we went next door to a pizza shop. We sat in a booth and kept our coats on as we ate. Since the accident, I had said a quick prayer whenever I ate. Now I wondered whether to pray. It seemed that I should still do everything possible to help Birju. I brought my hands together over the paper plate.

  Later, in the car, I held the bags of candy in my lap while my father drove in silence. Even through the plastic, I could smell the sugar and chocolate. Some of the houses we passed were dark. Others were outlined in Christmas lights.

  The car was warm and after a while, I rolled down the window slightly. The car filled with roaring wind. We approached the apartment building with the pool where Birju had had his accident. Because of the lights in the parking lot where the ambulance had stood, I could see the tall fence that guarded the pool. I tried to see past the fence into the dark beyond. I wondered what had happened to the pool’s unlucky water after the accident. Had it been drained? Probably it had not. All summer long, people must have swum in the pool and sat on its sides, splashing their feet in the water, and not known that my brother had lain for three minutes on its concrete bottom one August afternoon.

  We stood in my aunt’s driveway with our luggage in the car. “What has happened?” she sobbed. “What has God done?” As she and my mother hugged, my aunt clutched at her and would not let go. My mother gripped my aunt too and wept. My uncle was there. He put a hand on my shoulder, and I wanted to shrug it off. I was shivering, and my coat was in the car. Why hadn’t people been nicer when it mattered? I wondered.

  ON MY FIRST day in the nursing home, I sat by Birju’s bed and read to him from an old issue of Chandamama. It was raining and drops clicked off the windows. The room was about the size of the one in the hospital. Even with the ceiling lights on, it was dim. My mother kept walking in and out of the room. She was busy doing paperwork. When she entered, I continued reading without looking up. I had the sense that I was being watched, that we were providing evidence to the nursing home. I needed to show that my family was admirable and that we cared about Birju. I felt that if I did this, it would shame the people at the home to take good care of my brother.

  I began to ache from sitting on the hard chair. My voice got hoarse. At the hospital, I would have said, “Birju, let’s watch some TV.” More hours passed. I was conscious of how quiet the nursing home was. The door behind me was open. When a cart went by, I could hear its wheels hissing along the linoleum. At the hospital, there were always nurses and doctors hurrying about. The PA system regularly came on. The quietness made me feel that the home was not as good as the hospital, that the nursing home was where the world put people who were not important, people who could be put away someplace and forgotten. I began to feel that we had let Birju down, that by letting him be moved here, we had not taken care of him.

  The nursing home stood on one side of a road and opposite it was a hospital. The two were connected by a bridge that looked like a plastic straw. At five o’clock, my mother and I lifted Birju from his bed. My mother slipped her arms through his underarms, and I held him around the knees. We swung him into a wheelchair and rolled him through the hallways onto the bridge. There, facing out, our image reflected back at us, we waited for my father to come from the train station. He worked in New York, and each morning he took a train into the city. That evening, when my father arrived, he said that he had seen us hovering above the road, snow falling past us.

  That first day, he wasn’t drunk. But almost every day after this, he was. Sometimes he would smell of beer and other times of scotch. “Another bastard day,” he would say bitterly in Birju’s room.

  In the beginning, my mother remained silent about my father’s drinking. She looked shocked. I could tell she wasn’t speaking because she didn’t want to say anything in front of me. I knew that this meant I, too, was supposed to pretend not to see, and yet I wasn’t sure whether this meant I should act busy and energetic so that it would appear that I was too frantic to be able to see anything or whether I should act as I always had.

  Later, after perhaps ten days, my mother began to acknowledge that my father was drinking. First she was sarcastic. She muttered under her breath. “You are going to kill someone driving this way.” My father ignored her.

  Then she became openly angry. Wet-eyed, she shouted at him. “You have a son like this, and what do you do? Drown yourself.”

  MY PARENTS HAD moved to Metuchen because it was one of the few towns in New Jersey that had a temple. A month or so after we arrived, my mother combed my hair and took me with her to see the pundit. It was a Tuesday night, one of three evenings when he sat at the temple, another converted church with the musty American smell and a large idol-lined chamber with a refrigerator in the back for the ceremonial milk and bananas.

  My mother explained our situation to the pundit. “Birju is in a coma,” she said, though Birju’s eyes were open and he was not in a coma, but was brain damaged. “The doctors say that they don’t know what can happen. He could wake tomorrow.” I wondered why she was saying this. I guessed that it must be because people are more likely to help if they think there is hope. If there isn’t any, they might try to avoid us, because who wants to be around someone depressing? “I go every morning to the nursing home. His father comes in the evening. I am so glad there is a temple in town.”

  The pundit stood before us, leaning slightly forward. He was a handsome man in his thirties, tall, broad shouldered, with a thick mustache. It was strange to come to a pundit for help. This was not what one would have done in India. In India, pundits are not counselors or spiritual leaders, but functionaries, performers of rituals, the equivalent of low level government clerks who put stamps on papers and who always have their hands out for a bribe. My mother used to speak of pundits with disgust. “Nobody has ever seen the back of a pundit’s hands,” she would say. Once, she told a joke about a pundit who fell into a deep hole. People reached down into it and said, “Give us your hand.” When they said this, the pundit crossed his arms and began pouting. An old man then pushed his way to the front of the crowd. He said, “Is this any way to talk to a pundit?” He reached into the hole and said, “Take my hand.” Immediately, the pundit grabbed it.

/>   I felt contempt for the pundit because he was a pundit. I also felt contempt for him because he was not a real one. Mr. Narayan was an engineer who volunteered at the temple. In the seventies through the mideighties, when most of us prayed in one another’s homes, even communities that had managed to buy or build a temple could not afford to pay a pundit, and so the pundits tended to be volunteers, usually especially pious men who, because of their piety and because of a reputation for virtue, were asked if they would be willing to lead ceremonies and sit in the temple on certain nights. In India, it was unheard of for a pundit to visit parishioners who were sick, or to offer help to families in trouble. These volunteer pundits, though, perhaps because they were just very decent people, behaved like the Christian pastors in the hospital.

  A few days later, Mr. Narayan came to visit us in Birju’s room. It was a cold and sunny Saturday afternoon. It had been important to get him to come during the day so that my father would not be drunk. Mr. Narayan sat in a chair along the side of the hospital bed. He did not seem to care that Birju had his eyes open and so was not in a coma—perhaps the word coma did not mean something specific to him? Mr. Narayan sat up straight with his hands in his lap. It was strange to have him there. I had grown so used to our being alone with Birju that I had begun to feel that my brother was no longer real to the outside world. Yet Mr. Narayan’s presence made Birju feel less important—the fact that seeing Birju did not cause everything to change for Mr. Narayan made it seem like what had happened was not as important as I thought it was.

  Mr. Narayan had a bright, modest smile. He appeared eager to please and nodded at everything my parents said. His friendliness irritated me. “Why should I be proud of what I am doing?” my father said. “I am not glad to be doing it. I hate doing it.” Mr. Narayan nodded, as if this frankness showed virtue and he was agreeing not with the statement but with the honesty.