Family Life: A Novel

by Akhil Sharma

  My mother, who was standing behind my father’s chair, would not let him say this unchallenged. “Whatever you say, I am happy I’m here to take care of my son. What if I were dead and there was nobody to care for Birju? Thank God I have breath in me so I can love him.”

  The pundit had us invited to a Ramayan Path in somebody’s house. The steps leading up to the front door were covered in slippers and sandals and sneakers. Inside, too, the foyer was swimming in shoes and sandals. To our left was the living room. It was empty of furniture. White sheets were spread over the floor, and a man sat near the altar at the front and read from a Ramayana in his lap.

  It had been a long time since we were around so many people.

  “What are we going to do?” my father murmured, looking down as he stepped on the back of his loafers to pop them off.

  “We’re going to meet people,” my mother hissed.

  We went into the room to our right. This was jammed with guests and also sofas standing on their ends. There were so many people that I could only mostly see stomachs and waists. Walking through the crowd, nervous, I felt that the men and women around me were not living real lives, that my family, because it was suffering so intensely, was living a life that was more real than these people’s, whose lives were silly like a TV show.

  My mother and I and my father ended up in the kitchen. Here the light was diffuse because of the steam from the pots boiling on the stove. Our hostess, a large Punjabi woman, came up to us. She had a ponytail and was wearing the baggy shirt and pantaloons of a salwar kameez.

  “Ah, Mrs. Mishra,” she said, taking my mother’s small hands in her large ones, “your story is like a fairy tale.”

  I liked this flattery. Still, I felt that our torment was being diminished by being compared to something unreal.

  “Brother-in-law, thank you for coming. When I tell people your story, they are amazed.” Mrs. Kohli pressed her hands together before her. My father stammered a namaste.

  Mrs. Kohli introduced us to a woman standing nearby. The woman was in pants and a shiny silk blouse. This meant either that she was lower class, since she was not dressed appropriately for a religious ceremony, or she was very educated and did not have to be like other people. “Her son is in a nursing home,” Mrs. Kohli told the woman.

  “My son had an accident in a swimming pool,” my mother said. “He’s in a coma.” She said this shyly, as if she were sharing something precious. I became irritated. I thought, No. Birju is not in a coma. He is brain damaged. He is destroyed.

  “Can he not talk at all?” the woman asked.

  “No,” my mother said and looked embarrassed.

  “If you are in a room with him and sitting next to him, will he not know it?”

  “There is no coma,” my father said. “He is not asleep. Our son has his eyes open. He can’t walk or talk. My wife says this coma thing because she thinks this sounds better.”

  Mrs. Kohli smiled. She nodded her head proudly. “See? A parent’s love knows no shore.”

  My father said, “I’m going to go sit down.”

  Mrs. Kohli took us to meet other women. Again, my mother said that Birju was in a coma. These women, too, kept asking whether Birju really could not talk at all.

  About an hour or so after we arrived, the reading of the Ramayana was nearing its end. Women sat cross-legged with their heads covered as if they were in temple. My mother and I sat together. My father sat nearby, his head bowed, looking down at the white sheet.

  Usually, the host or hostess is the one who reads the end of the Ramayana. Mrs. Kohli came walking through the crowd, stepping carefully past knees. She reached my mother and me. Looking at my mother, she said, “Please come. Read the last verses.”

  “Ji, that is for you to do.” My mother appeared at a loss, like someone trying to refuse an expensive gift from someone she hardly knew.

  WE BEGAN RECEIVING invitations to people’s houses, usually in connection with some religious ceremony. When we went, we were treated very respectfully, especially my mother. As soon as she entered a house, she was surrounded by women. It was as if we represented something—love of family, sacrificing for others. I, too, began to say that Birju was in a coma. This seemed what people wanted to hear. Once I told a man that Birju was brain damaged, that there was no hope, and he looked down at me and smiled and nodded like I was saying something other than what I actually was.

  People visited us at the nursing home. Mostly these were couples with children. Often, it appeared, they hoped to teach their children a lesson. Once a man scolded his five-year-old daughter in front of us. “See what we do for you? Would an American do what Auntie and Uncle are doing? An American would say, ‘You have to stand on your own two feet. You live your life, and I will live mine.’ This is what we Indians do. We love our children too much. Go touch Birju brother’s feet.” The girl went slowly, hesitantly, to the hospital bed. Birju was wearing white socks. His feet were lying on a sheepskin, and because their tendons had shrunk, they turned inwards and almost met.

  We also had men visit who said they could make Birju normal. These were men who worked as travel agents, candy-shop owners, engineers. A few came with their wives. Most came alone. Once, a mathematician who taught at a university visited. He had a horseshoe of hair around his scalp and a little narrow mustache. He sat by Birju with his hands on his stomach, his legs stretched before him, and he began quietly to lecture on Hindu scripture. He chuckled as he spoke, as if he were surprised by his own intelligence. Some of the words he used were English, and he used these when he wanted to show that he recognized science. “Ji, this akashvani, obviously this is a radio.” He said “obviously” in English. “Many things,” he said in English, “which Westerners say they invented, we had thousands of years ago. Aeroplanes. Television.” Then he switched to Hindi. “There is proof. It is not like I am just saying this.” He said this and laughed. He picked his nose, examined the snot, and flicked it beneath Birju’s bed.

  I was used to people saying Indians had invented most things. I had heard such claims many times before. A few men that visited said God had appeared to them in a dream and told them how to wake Birju. Others said that they had learned a cure from a saint in India.

  I did not like these “miracle workers.” It seemed to me that they wanted to try their so-called cures on Birju because doing so would make them feel that they were at the center of important things. Still, there was comfort in having visitors. I dreaded the moment of their departure, when my parents and I would be alone again with Birju. When people left, the loneliness came so quickly that it was as if a window had been opened and cold air had rushed in. Sometimes this loneliness was so great that I almost wished that they had not visited.

  Ordinary people, people who were calm, cheerful, and polite, also came. They invited us to their homes for dinner. In some ways my mother liked them more. With her suspicious nature, she saw melodrama as a way of covering things up. But the melodramatic people said more extreme things. They gave us more attention.

  EVERY DAY AT two-thirty, my mother would fetch me from school and bring me to the nursing home. My father arrived at six. At seven, we went back to our apartment.

  Our apartment consisted of one room with a sofa in the middle, facing a kitchenette and a television that sat on a cardboard box. Each night, I flung a sheet over the sofa and slept on it. My parents slept on a sponge mattress behind the sofa. On Friday and Saturday nights, my father stayed up very late watching movies on the VCR. Before the accident, he hadn’t liked movies as much as my mother and I did. Now, he sat right in front of the television with the sound turned very low until two or three in the morning. He liked comedies especially: Gol Maal, Naram Garam, Chhoti Si Baat. Periodically through the night, I would wake and the room would be jumping with blue lights. When I rolled over on my side, I would see my father sitting there, directly in front of the TV. Almost always, he was drunk. His mouth would be open as if he were captivated by what he was
seeing. Sometimes on weekends, my father did not come to the nursing home until noon or one o’clock. He would remain lying on the mattress as we ate breakfast. He would remain lying there as my mother and I left and stepped into the hallway.

  Spring came. In the park that we passed on our way to and from the nursing home, the branches of the trees grew mossy with budding leaves. And then summer arrived. School ended, and I spent all day at the home.

  In the morning, when we left the apartment, it would be bright and hot and humid. Our building was near the end of Main Street, a few hundred yards from the large old post office. There were parking meters on the sidewalk, gray metal poles the shape of matchsticks, upright, proper, brave, waiting for a coin so that they could come to life. When I walked past a parking meter, I would reach out and touch it.

  We had sued the apartment building where Birju had had his accident. There had been a lifeguard on duty as Birju lay underwater. The fact that Birju was not spotted quickly was one mistake. When he was dragged out and was lying by the side of the pool, he was not given mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. This was a second mistake.

  My father said that Birju had not gotten mouth-to-mouth resuscitation because he was Indian.

  “Shut up,” my mother shouted.

  This was in Birju’s room. My father was drunk, but he had said the same thing sober many times during the months that we waited for the financial settlement. I knew that what my father was saying was a lie. Hearing him say this was comforting, though, because then Birju’s accident was no longer purely accidental, unconnected to the larger world, lacking all meaning. Also, there was something satisfying about being angry.

  A YEAR HAD GONE by since Birju’s accident. My father began shaving him. The first time he did this was one afternoon. My mother and I stood and watched as he put shaving cream on Birju’s cheeks. “Take your time,” my mother said. “Be careful.”

  Birju lay there calmly as my father lathered him. It seemed unfair that something like this could happen and the world go on.

  One Friday night in December, my father came home late. My mother was cooking dinner. He entered the apartment and leaned back against the gray metal door. He was smiling. He crossed a foot over a knee and began unlacing a boot.

  “Do you have news?” my mother asked.

  “Yes,” my father said. He kept smiling.

  “Don’t say anything.”

  My mother took a spoon, dug it into the sugar bowl that was on the counter, and passed it to him. My father put the heaped spoon in his mouth. The handle stuck out like a thermometer.

  My mother said, “Now you can speak.”

  My father removed the spoon. “Six hundred and eighteen thousand dollars.”

  I didn’t know what this meant. I had thought we might get a hundred million dollars or maybe a billion. Six hundred and eighteen thousand dollars was so small that it hardly seemed to count. It seemed a very ordinary thing, like a cup or a pair of shoes.

  I began to feel I had not heard correctly. I was lying on the sofa, a hardcover science fiction book standing upright on my stomach.

  My mother stared at my father. She was yellowy in the apartment’s fluorescent light, and the skin beneath her eyes looked singed. “You said it would be one million.”

  “A third goes to the lawyer.”

  “That means six hundred and sixty-six thousand.”

  “There were expenses.”

  “Fifty thousand dollars to mail letters, to xerox,” she said angrily.

  “Shuba, Shuba.”

  “What did he do for three hundred thousand dollars?” My mother said this and looked away from my father. She was silent. After a moment, she turned back to him. “I don’t care about money. As long as we can afford medicine, that’s all that matters.”

  She spread newspaper on the floor, and we sat down to eat. My mouth was dry as I chewed, and when I swallowed, the roti felt sharp.

  After dinner we walked to the temple to give thanks. It was snowing. The snowflakes, as they drifted through the glow of the streetlights, resembled moths. I thought about the amount of the settlement.

  My father had said that financial settlements were based on how much the person injured could earn. As I walked, I thought of how much the money meant in terms of hourly pay. I reasoned that my mother went to the nursing home every day. She was there from eight thirty to seven. This meant she worked about ten hours a day, seven days a week. I was there from three to seven every weekday and both days on the weekend. I was not working all the time, though, when I was at the home. My father was also there on weeknights and weekends. If I were to undercount, my father and I each spent twenty hours a week at the nursing home. Birju was damaged all the time, and so this could count as a hundred hours of work a week. Two hundred and ten hours a week times fifty weeks was about ten thousand hours a year. If Birju remained alive for ten years, that was a hundred thousand hours of work. Six hundred and eighteen divided by a hundred was six dollars and eighteen cents.

  I had been hoping for a ridiculously low sum, like a dollar. When I got the six dollars and eighteen cents, I was startled. My mother, I knew, had gotten paid five and a half dollars an hour when she worked at the sewing factory. Six dollars and eighteen cents did not seem unfair for a boy.

  The next day in Birju’s room, my mother proposed that my father take me to a movie. It was as if we had decided to pretend that we had received good news and should celebrate. My mother said I should see Gandhi. “Go see it and learn something.” I didn’t want to see a movie. I felt shame at the thought of spending money. If I were going to see a movie, though, I wanted to see E.T. “What rubbish,” my mother said. “Monsters from the moon.”

  THE AGREEMENT CAME in the mail. It was actually several contracts printed on legal-sized paper. Because we didn’t have a table in our apartment, my father spread the contracts on the sofa. He and my mother kneeled and signed. I wondered if I, too, would be asked to sign. I hadn’t signed many things in my life. I imagined refusing and demanding more money. I asked my mother if I had to sign.

  She laughed. She kissed me. “Why should you sign?”

  It seemed to me that the judge who had decided how much Birju was worth must have also decided that I didn’t matter very much. I might talk about loving my brother, but he probably hadn’t believed that I actually did.

  THE NURSING HOME that Birju was in was not good. We had known this for a while. One morning my mother and I walked into Birju’s room. The lights were off and the window shades down. Birju was on his bed, on his side, behind the raised railings. He was panting.

  My mother turned on the lights. Tears were streaming down Birju’s face. He was propped up by pillows. Every two hours an aide was supposed to enter Birju’s room and turn him from one side to the other. The night aide must have forgotten to do so.

  “Every night when I leave him, I feel like I’m leaving him in a stairwell,” my mother said. She hurried around the bed so that she was between the bed and the wall. She told me to come hold Birju so that he remained on his side. I put my hands on his arm and hip. He was so wet from sweat it was as if someone had poured water over him. My mother removed the pillows, and I slowly lowered my brother onto his back.

  Regularly, we found things lying beneath Birju, things that the night aides had dropped: thermometers, latex gloves, cookies, once even a pair of scissors. What scared us most was when he was not fed on time. Birju was supposed to be given half a can of Isocal formula every three hours. Often the aide forgot or got too busy to do so, then came and gave him a full can. The full can was too much food. Birju’s face turned purple when this happened. We cranked up the top of his bed in case he vomited. Often he did. He’d open his mouth as if to burp. The Isocal, white and smelling of medicine and without the vinegar of gastric juices, would gush out along with whatever medications he had been given, including his beclamide, which kept him from having convulsions.

  This was frightening because convulsions could cause
more brain damage. My mother screamed at an aide once. The aide had given Birju a whole can and was still standing by the side of the bed as Birju vomited. “What does this mean?” she screamed. “What about the beclamide? Do we have to give him the beclamide again?” My mother’s fists were clenched, and she was leaning forward. “Do you know? Do you think we’ll be able to get a doctor to tell us? How long will it take to find out?”

  Often I imagined being a gangster. I imagined looking like Amitabh Bachchan and beating the nurse’s aides and having them spend all night sitting trembling in Birju’s room.

  After the settlement, we began visiting other nursing homes to see if we could move Birju to one of them. The first home we went to was in Connecticut. It cost $160,000 a year, but we went so we could see what such a home was like. We drove there on a January afternoon, crossing bridges and driving on wide, sunny highways.

  The nursing home was up a long private road lined with trees. The road led to a vast lawn. A large yellow house surrounded by a porch looked out over the lawn.

  The house was bigger inside than it appeared from the outside. There were hallways that seemed to run the length of a football field.

  We were shown around by a woman in her fifties. She had blond hair and wore a wool suit buttoned with large buttons to the neck. As we walked down the hall on either side of her, the woman explained the therapy programs the home used. Every patient had physical therapy every day from a therapist, not an aide. Every patient also received stimulation therapy including speech therapy.

  My mother, sounding nervous, asked, “Have you ever had a patient like Birju start talking?”

  The woman stopped. She looked at my mother. “I am sorry. I wish I had.” She paused again. “The oral therapy is so that the patient’s ability to swallow doesn’t diminish.”

  As we continued down the hall, the woman pointed to a nurses’ station, a counter in the hallway. “Each station has a computer.”