Family Life: A Novel

by Akhil Sharma

  Once, a boy leaned over my shoulder and demanded to know what I was eating. I said I was eating snake. The boy believed me. He began shouting, “snake”. A crowd gathered around me. I felt boys pressing against my back. Other boys stood on the benches of the long tables.

  The vice principal, a short white-haired man, appeared. “What are you eating?” he demanded.

  “Okra,” I said.

  “Come with me.” He led me through the crowd, pushing the boys out of his way. He took me to detention hall, a room with white cinder block walls.

  The recent immigrants at the lunch table found me annoying. They saw me as a troublemaker for responding to the insults. To them, I was a show-off for not keeping quiet. This was true to an extent. Part of my motivation for fighting was that I did not want to be like the recent immigrants and so I was deliberately trying to be different. There were other ways that I was a show-off too. I often reminded the boys I sat with that I was in more advanced-level classes than they were. Sitting with these children, a part of me was surprised that not all Indians were smart.

  Often in the evening, my mother and I would leave the house and go for walks. As we went down sidewalks, cars would drive past us and people would shout curses; haji, Gandhi, sand nigger. The first time this happened, I, for some reason, thought my mother would not understand that we were being cursed and so I told her that these were people I knew from school, that they were calling out to me in greeting. My mother nodded as if she believed me.

  I began not wanting to go on these evening walks. When we did go, I carried stones in my pocket.

  Weeks passed. The weather got colder. The days tipped backward into darkness. Some evenings our house and street appeared dark while the sky was light. In October the trees shed their leaves, and our house stood undefended on its lawn.

  THE WORST THING about our new life with Birju was worrying about money. Now that I was going to school and the miracle workers had mostly stopped coming, we needed to hire a full-time nurse’s aide during the day. We decided not to use the agency because the agency charged almost twelve dollars an hour and we thought we could get someone much cheaper. My father put advertisements in the local newspaper. The ads said that pay was based on experience.

  A Filipino aide with long black hair came to be interviewed. She stood by the exercise bed. When she learned how much my mother intended to pay, she shouted, “Why not you tell me on the phone? Why you make me drive so long? You do this to a black, she burn your house down.”

  My heart jumped when she shouted at us. At the same time, I felt that it was OK to be shouted at as long as we did not spend the extra money.

  The cold weather affected our plumbing. Some of our water came from a well. When the white washing machine shook and churned, the dim laundry room filled with a marshy smell.

  In the kitchen one night, standing at the stove, my mother yelled, “I don’t care how much it costs.”

  “You don’t care because you don’t pay the bills,” my father yelled back.

  “What are we going to do now?”

  “You were the one to say buy the house. We’ve gotten cheated.” The kitchen was very bright. My father said the new plumbing might cost five thousand dollars. The room hung reflected in the windows. My father started crying. I was stunned. What did it mean to spend five thousand dollars? The house had cost eighty-four thousand. I wondered if, in America, one could return a house the same way that one could return a belt to a store.

  We also worried about the insurance. The insurance company said no to everything. They said no to the Isocal formula. They said no to the disposable blue pads that we put under Birju for when he soiled himself. They said no to the nurse’s aides. On Saturday and Sunday afternoons, my father sat at the kitchen table and filled out insurance forms. On the table were rubber-banded stacks of letters, a stapler, his checkbook, and a yellow legal pad on which he wrote letters to the insurance company. My mother and I always kept very quiet while my father did this work.

  SEVENTH GRADE WAS the first time we were divided into honors-level classes and accelerated levels and track one and track two. This was when I began to think that I was smart enough. I didn’t think I was very smart—only that I had enough intelligence to get by. Even the idea of being smart upset me; it made me angry. I came home with my grades from the first quarter and saw Birju lying on his exercise bed and wondered what the point of all As was. Still, I was glad to be better than other boys.

  My classes had mostly Jews, a few Chinese, and one or two Indians. The Indians were not Indian the way I was. They didn’t have accents. They were invited to birthday parties by white children.

  I preferred talking to the Jews over the Chinese or the Indians. The Jews were white, and so they seemed more valuable than these others. Also, with the Chinese and the Indians, I sensed they watched me with suspicion the same way I watched them, that since they knew immigrants, they understood that I was untrustworthy, that immigrants are desperate and willing to do almost anything.

  ONE VERY COLD night in November, our front doorbell rang. We opened the door, and a jowly man was standing outside. Behind him was a tall boy in a long winter coat. We had met the man at temple, but we didn’t know him well. We invited them in.

  In the kitchen, the man stood wearing his ski jacket and in his stocking feet. The SAT was that weekend, and he asked my mother to bless his son. “Put your hand on his head, and it will be done.” He spoke in a jolly tone, which was intended to make him seem simpleminded, someone with whom there was no point in arguing.

  My mother looked surprised. She remained standing even though the polite thing would have been to sit so the man would know that we wanted him to stay. “Ji, what use is this?” she said. When people visited our house, they often asked my parents to bless their children. This was just out of politeness, though. I too often touched people’s feet to show respect. What the man was doing was different. He was asking for a blessing so that something specific would occur and this felt closer to us being treated like we were holy.

  “You may not believe in yourself, but the whole world believes in you.” Again, there was a deliberate simplemindedness to how the man was speaking.

  It is common among Indians to look at someone who is suffering and sacrificing and think that that person is noble and holy. Also, seeking blessings before exams is ordinary. In America, even parents who might define themselves as agnostic show up at temple before the SAT.

  Being treated as holy felt dangerous, like we were risking God’s anger.

  The man gestured to his son. The boy, the shell of his coat squeaking, hurried to my mother. He kneeled. Did they actually believe my mother’s blessing had power, or was it like how we allowed the miracle workers to try their cures?

  My mother put her hands on the boy’s head. She looked tired. “God give you everything you want.”

  The next night, a couple visited with their son. They knew us better and came to the back door.

  After the test results were released, the man who had sounded simpleminded approached us at temple and thanked my mother. He did this despite the fact that his son had not done especially well.

  NEWS OF MY mother’s blessings spread. There was an SAT in November, another in January, and a third in March. With each there was an increase in people coming for blessings. Some were middle-class people, and they spoke casually to my mother, as if to a friend. They were obviously only bringing their children as a form of insurance, making sure they did everything they could to take care of them. Others—those who didn’t know us or were lower class—were more formal. The poorest and least educated of these would go into Birju’s room and touch his pale, swollen, inward-turned feet, as if the sacrifices being made for him had turned him into an idol.

  My mother continued to appear uncomfortable when asked to bless a boy or girl. She would lean back when she blessed, as if trying to be far away from what she was doing. She would also speak quickly and under her breath. Usu
ally she borrowed the formulas that older people use at weddings. “Live a thousand years. Be healthy and happy.” And this too was a way of making the blessing into something ordinary.

  A few of the women who came for blessings returned regularly. They came several times a week and had tea. Sometimes, if they found milk or juice on sale, they would bring cartons of these. The women were deferential to my mother, calling her “elder sister” or using the formal, plural you in Hindi. My mother was formal in return, afraid, I think, of intimacy because intimacy might lead to the women spending more time in the house and learning of my father’s drinking.

  In my mind I called these visitors “the women with problems.” They wouldn’t have thought of themselves this way. Having spent most of their lives in India, where a bad marriage is often accepted as a part of life and where depression and mental illness are described as a person being moody, they saw these things as just life. Unhappy, though, and sometimes embarrassed that their lives were not as perfect as in the movies or as one was expected to pretend them to be at temple, they wanted to talk to someone. My mother, because she was considered holy, was also seen as someone who would be compassionate and whose very presence might be calming.

  A woman visited us because her husband had become very religious. Mrs. Hasta was pretty. She had long hair that reached her hips and shiny white teeth. Her husband was an engineer who had recently been denied a promotion. His managers had told him that he didn’t write English well.

  Now, Mrs. Hasta told my mother that her husband had begun praying for an hour every morning and two hours every night. She told this to us at our kitchen table. She looked down as she spoke. “The children cry when he tells them to sit with him and pray. I told him to let them pray on their own, and so he says to them, ‘If this is how you want to be, then that is the fate God has given me.’ He looks at the children so angrily they cry.” Because of my mother’s reputation for piety, Mrs. Hasta asked her to intervene on her behalf and arranged for her husband to pay us a visit.

  He arrived late one afternoon while my mother was feeding Birju his pureed fruit. Mr. Hasta had once been fat and was now skinny so the skin on his face hung loose and wrinkled. He stood at the foot of Birju’s exercise bed and started an argument. “Have you read Swami Vivekananda?” he asked my mother. “What about Osho? He used to be called Rajneesh.”

  After he left, my mother said, “That man has such pride.”

  I said, “He couldn’t get promoted and now he lectures us.”

  “Where do these idiots come from?” she spat.

  We were both bruised from not being treated as special.

  Several women visited because their sons were eating meat and they wanted them to be vegetarian. These women were usually lower class since middle-class people, thinking their children would be accepted into America, were more willing to let them behave like Americans. Often the visits were slightly ridiculous. Once, Mrs. Disai, short, dark skinned, oval faced, entered our kitchen walking beside her son who was sixteen or seventeen, tall, broad shouldered, muscular. There were not that many children older than I was back then. I saw Mukul and thought of Birju. I wondered why Mukul was all right and my brother wasn’t, and I began resenting him.

  “Confess to Shuba auntie,” Mrs. Disai said, seated at the kitchen table. “Tell her everything.” Mukul said nothing. He was at the head of the table. He was wearing cologne, which seemed overly glamorous. The sort of person who wore cologne was bound to have a girlfriend and so not focus on his studies. “Talk, talk,” his mother said. “Reveal your shame.”

  “Why should I be ashamed?” he said.

  “He has fallen into bad company,” Mrs. Disai explained. “His friends are all Spanish. We came here before other Indians. We were here even before Mr. Narayan. We used to drive with Mr. Narayan to New York to buy groceries. Back then, the only boys who would welcome Mukul were the Spanish and the blacks.”

  My mother sat with her back to the window. She tried to get Mukul to change. “Why do you need to eat meat?” she asked. “Don’t hens love their little chicks?”

  “Look at how big you are,” Mrs. Disai demanded. “You’re already a buffalo.”

  “Gandhiji ate meat, too,” my mother said, nodding and sounding understanding. “It’s in his autobiography. He did it only once. You, too, can put meat in the past.”

  Mukul stared at the table and sighed.

  “He wants to be like the blacks, like the Spanish. Why don’t you get divorced? Steal? Then you will be like them. Then you’ll be happy.”

  “Listen to your mother,” my mother said. “Don’t break her heart.”

  “Say something,” Mrs. Disai shouted. “Do you have any brains? Do you want me to die?”

  “You won’t die,” Mukul said. He had a rumbling voice. To me, he seemed too relaxed and too accepting of himself.

  “And you’ll live forever if you eat Chicken McNuggets?”

  Mukul let out a long breath.

  “Come look at what we do for you,” she hissed.

  The three stood up from the table and walked toward Birju’s room. I had been watching quietly from near the stove. Now I hurried after because this was my time to show off.

  Once the three of them were lined up by the exercise bed, I climbed on. I placed one of Birju’s feet against my shoulder and began leaning forward and then rocking back. The stretching was part of Birju’s physical therapy.

  “This is love, animal,” Mrs. Disai scolded. “And you won’t do one thing for me.”

  Before they left, she stood in the kitchen and made her son put his hand on her head and swear not to eat meat.

  Seventh grade passed and I entered eighth. It was now normal for women to come to our house and sit at the kitchen table and drink tea. Once or twice a week, whole families appeared. Usually they came after dinner. I was glad for the company, especially for those who visited at night. Often, after Birju had been fed and put back in his bed, my mother and I would sit on either side of him and my father would go upstairs to his room. Then, as my mother and I played cards, I would feel so alone that it was like we were at the bottom of an ocean.

  The families that visited would talk for awhile about Birju and his health. They might discuss school or compare India and America. The problems that would lead to Indira Gandhi’s assassination were taking place and sometimes people spoke of this.

  I used to like listening to people speak of India. I would get excited. It was as if a part of me had begun believing that India did not actually exist, that it was a fairy tale, and having these people speak of it confirmed that it was real.

  MY FATHER’S DRINKING worsened. The disorder that had been restricted primarily to weekend mornings spread into the week. Sometimes my father was too hungover in the morning to bathe Birju. He would lie on his bed in his pajamas, one foot touching the floor to keep the room from spinning. When this happened, I took on his role in bathing my brother. Standing in the tub, holding Birju up, rubbing him with soap, feeling his flabby chest, his stretched stomach, I would be moved to tears that we were not better people, that my poor brother was in need and we were not as good as we should be.

  My parents fought so much that the walls vibrated with rage. Anything could spark a shouting match: a banana peel left on the kitchen table, a garden hose left overnight on the lawn. The anger was so quick and extraordinary that it appeared disconnected from what was supposed to be the cause. This made the fights feel hallucinatory.

  Adding to the sense of the fantastical were things that I saw and half failed to understand: my mother standing in the laundry room at two or three in the morning, shaking with rage as she put bed sheets smelling of urine into the machine. Another time, I noticed that there was a large rough patch on the pale blue carpet by my father’s side of the bed. Several days later, I was sitting on the school bus when I suddenly realized that my father must have vomited on the carpet.

  MY MOTHER WANTED to keep the family from embarrassment, and
so did I.

  When we had visitors, my mother was modest. She listened without speaking. She tried to efface herself and let the guests lead the conversation. This hiding herself appeared smart because who knew what attention could lead to?

  When visiting, people regularly asked to see my father. My mother would answer, with a downward glance, “He has great tiredness.” This was a strange phrase, both formal and awkward. “Unhai bahut thakan hai.” The phrase did not say that he was feeling tired but that he possessed tiredness, and with its indirection highlighted that something was being avoided and so asked the listener to not inquire further.

  Usually, my mother’s request was honored. Most men and women would use formal diction and say, “With a life like yours, who wouldn’t be tired?” A few people pressed my mother. They threatened to go upstairs and bring my father down. “I won’t take no for an answer,” a woman said once. This demand to see my father was flattery. It was a way of declaring intimacy, that the woman loved us enough to make demands. This woman was, I think, a little crazy—the sort of person who loved to say the things that are uttered in movies. My mother listened to the woman and gave a quick smile to acknowledge the flattery. She remained firm, though. The melodramatic woman looked at us eagerly, wanting us to engage. When my mother did not respond, the woman had to remain silent also, and then the conversation switched on its own to something else.

  While these people were in the house, I tried to be very good so that none of the positive opinion they had of us because of Birju was diminished by anything I did. To make sure we were perceived well, I would rush around the house carrying cups of tea, plates of biscuits, trying to appear sweet and helpful and trying to keep the visitors distracted from thinking about my father.

  Keeping him always hidden was not possible, of course. My father didn’t take house keys to work. One evening, returning home, he rang the back doorbell while my mother was entertaining her friend Mrs. Sethi in the kitchen. My mother didn’t hear it. When he rang again and my mother let him in, he accused her of trying to teach him a lesson. “You want to humiliate me, Shuba,” he shouted. “You think you know everything and the rest of the world knows nothing.”