Family Life: A Novel

by Akhil Sharma

  “Get up. Get up,” my mother said to a woman bending down before her.

  My father said, more roughly, “There is no reason for this.”

  At school, I told Jeff that I had seen a swami cause a rope to levitate, and then the swami had climbed the rope and vanished into the sky. I told Jeff that I had seen a swami who was thirsty knock on a wall, and the wall spout water.

  One day at lunch I told Jeff and Michael Bu a fairy tale that my grandfather had told me and I claimed that it had happened to my uncle. I told them that one of my uncles in India could speak the language of birds. This uncle had overheard two crows discussing a murder. As I told the story, I leaned forward over the lunch table, feeling the usual panic in my face. “My uncle went to the police station to tell them. The policemen he talked to thought that the only person who could know what my uncle was saying was the murderer, and so they arrested him.”

  Michael asked, “Do Indian crows speak the same language as American crows?”

  The question baffled me. I sat there silently for a moment. Then, not knowing how to reply, I answered, “Chow wow, eat dog lo mein.”

  JEFF AND MICHAEL began to show their dislike openly. It was now June and hot. In the mornings, when I would try to join them in some ordinary conversation, such as last night’s episode of The A-Team, they would turn their backs on me and keep talking. Once, I came up to them on the playground, and they just walked away. When I walked after them, they went faster and began laughing.

  One lunch period, I sat down across from Jeff and Michael in the cafeteria and said, “We’re starting to move the furniture that we’ve bought. We’ll move to our house right after school ends, and then Birju will be brought a few days later.”

  Jeff and Michael went on with their conversation.

  “I’m going to take French next year,” Michael said, keeping his eyes directly on Jeff.

  “I’m going to take French, too,” I said. “My brother studied French.” I remembered Birju calling me monsieur and how funny it had sounded.

  “Spanish is more useful,” Jeff said, looking at Michael.

  “France is a more important country than Spain,” I answered.

  “Do you hear something? I don’t hear anything,” Michael said.

  “The Spanish teacher seems nicer,” said Jeff.

  I said, “On Saturday mornings, nurse’s aides come to Birju’s room and shave his crotch. They do this because of Birju’s urinary catheter. The catheter looks like a condom. To keep it from slipping off, they have to tape it. They don’t want the tape to get caught in the hair.” Jeff and Michael stared at me. They appeared shocked.

  “When they do that,” Michael said, “does your brother’s dick get hard?”

  Speaking calmly, like I was talking about some ordinary thing, I said, “Birju’s G-tube needs to be changed every six weeks. It needs to be changed or he gets infections. The G-tube is actually two tubes next to each other. The G-tube goes in here.” I pressed two fingers to the right side of my stomach. “One tube is thin and longer than the other and has a balloon at the end. Once both tubes are in Birju’s stomach, the doctor fills the balloon with water. This keeps the tubes from sliding out. The thick tube is what the food goes through. To change Birju’s tube, the doctor takes the water out of the balloon and slides out the tubes.” Jeff and Michael were staring at me, and my voice got higher and higher as I told this awful truth. “When the doctor puts in the new tube, the tube sometimes misses the hole in the stomach. It scratches the outside of the stomach.” I lifted up the two fingers I had been holding against my side. I bent them into a hook and scratched the air. “Sometimes the outside of the stomach starts bleeding.”

  Later, during science class, with the lights off because Mrs. Salt was showing a video, I leaned all the way over my desk till my lips were right next to Jeff’s ear. I whispered, “Birju had some X-rays recently, and we discovered that he had broken three ribs a while ago. Maybe some aide dropped him off the bed one night and didn’t tell anyone. For months we moved him and exercised him when he had broken ribs.” Speaking the truth made me feel powerful.

  The next morning, I went up to Michael on the playground. He was talking to a boy, and without saying hello, I said, “The patients at the nursing home are always getting sick, and the antibiotics give them diarrhea.” Michael stared at me, confused. “Sometimes this happens at night, and the nurse’s aide doesn’t clean the person. There are acids in the shit, and if the person isn’t cleaned till morning, the acids cut the skin right here.” I was wearing shorts, and I used both hands to rub the insides of my thighs.

  “You’re a freak,” Michael said.

  “It’s the truth,” I answered. To say the horrible truth and to know that I had seen unbearable things, made me feel that I was strong and Michael was weak.

  Fifteen minutes later, inside my classroom, all of us stood by our desks and said the Pledge of Allegiance. I stood with my hand over my heart, and Jeff did the same thing two feet in front of me.

  Once the pledge was done, before we took our seats, I told Jeff about the naked girl. “She’s down the hall from my brother. She’s eighteen or nineteen. Her boyfriend strangled her, and when he thought she was dead, he put her in a closet. She didn’t die. She became brain damaged.” Jeff turned around and glared. “Nobody comes to see her, so she’s almost always naked. They only dress you at the nursing home if they think you’ll have visitors. Otherwise, it’s too much work because the people who live there are always soiling themselves. Sometimes the door to her room is open. Her pussy has black hair. The hair looks like ants.”

  I finished speaking. Jeff didn’t say anything. I had been nervous and I became even more so. I put a hand on my desk and tried leaning casually against it. Jeff punched me in the middle of my chest. I felt as if a wave had gone over me. I stumbled backward and fell.

  Mr. Esposito skipped lightly across the room. He grabbed Jeff’s wrist. Jeff’s hand was still clenched. Mr. Esposito shook Jeff’s wrist till the fist opened.

  I pushed myself onto my knees and stood. “I fell,” I said.

  THAT SATURDAY MY father and I went to Jeff’s house, a blue ranch-style home with vinyl siding and cement steps that rose up to a cement platform and a screen door. Behind this was a blue wooden door.

  The door opened, and there stood a tall, slender woman in black jeans.

  “I’m Rajinder Mishra,” my father said. I had brought my father there because I felt that perhaps Jeff did not appreciate how terrible it was to have Birju the way he was, and if somebody else told him about Birju, he might then perhaps become sympathetic. I had told my father that Jeff did not believe that I had a brother in a nursing home and that it was important that he understand. “Ajay,” my father said, glancing down, “is a friend of Jeff’s.”

  I held up two Superman comic books. Returning these was the excuse for visiting. “They’re Jeff’s.”

  Jeff’s mother led us into a kitchen with blue counters and cupboards. Several brown grocery bags sat on the counters near the refrigerator. Mrs. Miles shouted, “Jeff!” She then asked my father if he would like some coffee.

  “Could I have water?” My father’s lips were white and chapped from the dehydration of his drinking.

  Jeff’s mother poured him a glass, and my father drank it quickly.

  Mrs. Miles opened the refrigerator and began emptying the grocery bags into it. My father and I stood silently side by side. After a moment, my father said, “Your son has been very kind to Ajay.” Mrs. Miles looked over her shoulder and smiled.

  My father put his hand on the back of my neck. I sensed that he was about to talk about Birju, and I regretted having brought him.

  “My other son, Ajay’s older brother, had an accident in a swimming pool and was severely brain damaged two years ago. Two years this August.”

  “I’m sorry,” Mrs. Miles said. She closed the refrigerator door and turned toward us. She had blue eyes and a strong, masculine jaw. She l
ooked serious and handsome.

  “We had only been in America two years when it happened. Ajay is sensitive. Your son has been a good friend.”

  “Jeff’s a sweetheart,” Mrs. Miles said.

  “Ajay’s sensitive, and it’s difficult for him to make friends.”

  Mrs. Miles opened her mouth to say something. Jeff came into the kitchen. He was wearing gray sweatpants and a white undershirt. There was a diagonal crease on one cheek as if he had been lying on it. Jeff saw us, paused midstep, rolled his eyes, and kept moving forward.

  I tugged my father’s hand and said, “We have to go.”

  “We brought your comics,” my father said, smiling and pointing to where they lay on the counter. “I was just telling your mother about Ajay’s older brother. Ajay’s older brother had an accident in a swimming pool and is brain damaged.”

  Jeff went to the grocery bags and, standing on his toes, peered into one.

  I tugged at my father again.

  We left the house.

  Outside it was hot and humid. We walked back toward our apartment through the town’s nice neighborhood. The houses that lined the road were large and set back, some behind tall oaks.

  “He’s stupid not to believe you.”

  I didn’t say anything. I peered at the trees and the houses beyond them. I wanted my father to not talk.

  “People are stupid, crazy,” he said. “A woman came up to me at temple and said, ‘I wouldn’t mind my son being sick if I got a lot of money like you.’” He raised his voice. “Vineeta buaji said we were being emotional. That’s why we were taking Birju out of the nursing home. I said, ‘If I’m not emotional about my own son, who am I going to be emotional about?’”

  We came to a red traffic light and stopped. “You have to ignore people like that Jeff boy. Expecting sympathy from somebody like that is like expecting sympathy from dirt.”

  The day Birju was supposed to be brought to our house, Mr. Narayan rang our doorbell at around eight in the morning. He stood in the doorway smiling, his face eager. “I thought you might have work for me,” he said.

  More people came. The morning was very bright. Cars filled our driveway and then others parked on the street along our lawn. As the doorbell rang and rang again, the excitement of having visitors gave the day some of the festiveness of Diwali in India when people, dressed formally, visit from morning till evening.

  The ambulance arrived around eleven. The cars in the driveway backed out. When the ambulance was parked, two orderlies, a large black man and a smaller white one, tugged Birju out of the ambulance on a stretcher and brought him up the cement path that curved from the bottom of the driveway to the front door.

  Birju’s room was the former dining room. It had yellow walls, a hardwood floor, and a chandelier with plastic candles hanging from the center of the ceiling. A hospital bed stood along a wall with a narrow window beside where Birju’s head would be. The orderlies rolled Birju into the room. They hefted him onto the bed. The people visiting stood against the walls. When he was on the bed, Birju raised his head and moaned, and turned his head this way and that, like he was trying to look through his darkness. My mother leaned over my brother and whispered, “You’re home.” She stroked his face, kissed his forehead. “Your Mommy is here.” I stood and watched. My chest hurt. I wondered, What now?

  The orderlies left. Mr. Narayan joined my parents at the bedside. They stared at Birju. Birju’s chin and cheeks were covered in saliva. The window was open, and its lace curtain drifted up trembling in the air. Mr. Narayan, looking moved, turned to my father. “Tell us what you want,” he said, “and we’ll obey.”

  My father stared at my brother. His face appeared swollen. He seemed stunned. I worried that he would complain. I wanted us to be dignified.

  Later, in the afternoon, in the kitchen, the women sat at the table and cut vegetables and sang prayers. The men did heavier work. They installed two air conditioners and lifted the washer in the laundry room and placed it on bricks. From outside came the roar of a lawn mower as one of the men cut the grass. All this activity made our house feel like a temple being gotten ready for a festival, when the people of the neighborhood gather and mop the floor and string flowers into garlands. Having so many visitors gave me the sense that my family was important.

  People kept arriving until nine or ten that night.

  THE NEXT DAY began with a bath for Birju. I came downstairs around six. Birju was lying naked on his hospital bed. My father was rubbing him down with coconut oil.

  We had given Birju sponge baths before but never a bath in a tub. “Hello, fatty,” I called out. I smiled. I walked boldly. I was nervous. The room was bright, and my mother was there, too, near the bed, spreading a towel over the back and seat of the wheelchair.

  My mother looked over her shoulder at me. “Birju, say, ‘I’m your older brother. Speak with respect.’” She was smiling. She moved quickly, and her glass bracelets jingled as she smoothed the towel. Because I was pretending to be cheerful, I assumed she was acting, too.

  I stood at the foot of the bed. Birju’s pubic hair was shaved to stubble. His stomach was a dome, and his G-tube, bound in a figure eight, resembled a ribbon on the side of a girl’s head. “Brother,” I said, “I have never met anyone as lazy as you. Making people bathe you.”

  My mother, finishing with the towel, straightened herself. “Tell him, ‘I’m not lazy. I’m a king.’”

  My father slipped his arms through Birju’s underarms. He pulled him up until Birju was half sitting. My father grinned. He leaned down and said into Birju’s ear. “Why are you so heavy? Are you getting up at night and eating? You are, aren’t you? Admit it. I see crumbs on your chin.”

  I laughed. I grabbed Birju’s legs below the knees. My mother rolled the wheelchair next to the bed, and my father and I counted to three. We swung him into it. My father began pulling the wheelchair backward through the room. He pulled it out a doorway and across a narrow hall, into the bathroom.

  The bathroom had a tub with a small bathing chair inside. My father put one leg into the tub and kept one leg out. He put his arms through Birju’s underarms. Again, we counted. “One, two, three.” My father yanked and twisted, and I lifted. We hefted and slid Birju onto the chair.

  My father held an arm across Birju’s chest to keep him from toppling forward. I took a red mug and poured warm water over Birju’s head. He began to relax. His legs, which had been sticking out toward the tap, eased down. I poured water over his shoulders and arms. My father rubbed Birju’s neck with soap. He lathered his shoulders. Birju started urinating, a thick, strong-smelling, yellow stream. When Birju finished peeing, my father bent him forward. He shoved a bar of soap in the split between Birju’s buttocks. Gray water and flecks of shit dropped into the tub.

  I chattered. “I dreamt I was fighting twenty people. I hit one. He fell over. I hit another. He fell over. It was fun.” I kept talking and talking. I was smiling, for I wished it to appear that I wasn’t seeing what was occurring before me.

  Around noon, my father and I went to the pharmacy. This intimidated me. I had seen my father scream at my mother about how much things would cost. I was scared of spending money. I felt that once money was spent, it would be gone forever and couldn’t be replaced.

  The pharmacy was on Main Street, a few shops from the train station. The store had a glass front. In the back was a high counter where one submitted one’s prescriptions and where the store owner sat.

  I stood with outstretched arms near the counter. My father put a case of Isocal formula in my arms. Then he placed another on top of this.

  “How do you want to pay?” the store owner said.

  “Put it on my tab,” my father answered and to me, in Hindi, said, “Move.”

  I turned around and began hurrying.

  “No,” the store owner, a slender white-haired man with a goatee, called. I stopped and turned back around.

  My father signed a receipt. He signed it with
his left hand, the pen moving awkwardly and not making full contact with the paper. I believed he was signing with his left hand so that perhaps he could deny that it was his signature.

  When we came back to the house, we had lunch. It was strange to eat on a plate at a table instead of, as at the nursing home, on a sheet of aluminum foil balanced on our pressed-together knees. All day that day, walking around the house barefoot, I noticed the feeling of the kitchen linoleum or the soft carpet of the living room and suddenly remembered that at the home I would be wearing shoes. Each time, the feeling of freedom was like the beginning of summer vacation, when one looks at a clock and is amazed, all over again, not to be in school.

  I kept going to look at Birju, but I couldn’t get used to seeing him in an ordinary room in an ordinary house. Every time, I was startled.

  Birju was restless. He ground his teeth, and his eyes darted around.

  At some point in the late afternoon, I decided to go outside and throw a ball. This seemed like something any ordinary boy might do.

  Outside, it was bright and humid. I stood in the center of our front lawn and flung a fluorescent green tennis ball straight into the air. It went higher than our brown shingle roof, and came down more slowly than it rose. The sky was so pretty and blue that it was like something from a cartoon. I caught the ball and spun in place. I threw it again and bent my knees catching it. I threw it one more time and tried catching the ball behind my back. I missed. The ball went bounding away.

  I threw the ball over and over, sometimes with my left hand. When I did this, the ball went up at a slant.

  Throwing the ball, I didn’t feel any better. I kept seeing Birju lying on his bed, his head tilted up, the white curtain on the window beside him rising and falling.

  My tee shirt grew damp and stuck to my skin. Before long I wanted to go back inside, but to go inside felt like giving up. I stayed on the lawn and threw the ball.