A Life of Adventure and Delight

by Akhil Sharma

  “If I failed the math test and told you that story, you’d slap me and ask what one has to do with the other.”

  His mother turned to the altar.

  “What sort of sons did you give me, God?” she asked. “One you drown, the other is this selfish fool.”

  “I will fast today so that God puts some sense in me,” Ajay said, glancing away from the altar and up at his mother. He liked the drama of fasting.

  “No, you are a growing boy.” His mother knelt down beside him and said to the altar, “He is stupid, but he has a good heart.”

  PRAYER, AJAY THOUGHT, should appeal with humility and an open heart to some greater force. But the praying that he and his mother did felt sly and confused. By treating God as someone to bargain with, it seemed to him they prayed as if they were casting a spell.

  This meant that it was possible to do away with the presence of God entirely. For example, Ajay’s mother had recently asked a relative in India to drive a nail into a holy tree and tie a saffron thread to the nail on Birju’s behalf. Ajay invented his own ritual. On his way to school each morning, he passed a thick tree rooted half on the sidewalk and half on the road. One day, Ajay got the idea that if he circled the tree seven times, touching the north side every other time, he would have a lucky day. From then on, he did it every morning, although he felt embarrassed and always looked around beforehand to make sure no one was watching.

  One night, Ajay asked God whether he minded being prayed to only in need.

  “You think of your toe only when you stub it,” God replied. God looked like Clark Kent. He wore a gray cardigan, slacks, and thick glasses, and had a forelock that curled just as Ajay’s did.

  God and Ajay had begun talking occasionally after Birju drowned. Now they talked most nights while Ajay lay in bed and waited for sleep. God sat at the foot of Ajay’s mattress. His mother’s mattress lay parallel to his, a few feet away. Originally, God had appeared to Ajay as Krishna, but Ajay had felt foolish discussing brain damage with a blue God who held a flute and wore a dhoti.

  “You’re not angry with me for touching the tree and all that?”

  “No. I’m flexible.”

  “I respect you. The tree is just a way of praying to you,” Ajay assured God.

  God laughed. “I am not too caught up in formalities.”

  Ajay was quiet. He was convinced that he had been marked as special by Birju’s accident. The beginnings of all heroes are distinguished by misfortune. Superman and Batman were both orphans. Krishna was separated from his parents at birth. The god Ram had to spend fourteen years in a forest. Ajay waited to speak until it would not appear improper to begin talking about himself.

  “How famous will I be?” he asked, finally.

  “I can’t tell you the future,” God answered.

  Ajay asked, “Why not?”

  “Even if I told you something, later I might change my mind.”

  “But it might be harder to change your mind after you have said something will happen.”

  God laughed again. “You’ll be so famous that fame will be a problem.”

  Ajay sighed. His mother snorted and rolled over.

  “I want Birju’s drowning to lead to something,” he said to God.

  “He won’t be forgotten.”

  “I can’t just be famous, though. I need to be rich too, to take care of Mummy and Daddy and pay for Birju’s hospital bills.”

  “You are always practical.” God had a soulful and pitying voice and God’s sympathy made Ajay imagine himself as a truly tragic figure, like Amitabh Bachchan in the movie Trishul.

  “I have responsibilities,” Ajay said. He was so excited at the thought of his possible greatness that he knew he would have difficulty sleeping. Perhaps he would have to go read in the bathroom.

  “You can hardly imagine the life ahead,” God said.

  Even though God’s tone promised greatness, the idea of the future frightened Ajay. He opened his eyes. There was light coming from the street. The room was cold and had a smell of must and incense. His aunt and uncle’s house was a narrow two-story home next to a four-lane road. The apartment building with the pool where Birju had drowned was a few blocks up the road, one in a cluster of tall brick buildings with stucco fronts. Ajay pulled the blanket tighter around him. In India, he could not have imagined the reality of his life in America: the thick smell of meat in the school cafeteria, the many television channels. And, of course, he could not have imagined Birju’s accident, or the hospital where he spent so much time.

  THE HOSPITAL WAS BORING. Vinod, Ajay’s cousin, picked him up after school and dropped him off there almost every day. Vinod was twenty-two. In addition to attending county college and studying computer programming, he worked at a 7-Eleven near Ajay’s school. He often brought Ajay hot chocolate and a comic from the store, which had to be returned, so Ajay was not allowed to open it until he had wiped his hands.

  Vinod usually asked him a riddle on the way to the hospital. “Why are manhole covers round?” It took Ajay half the ride to admit that he did not know. He was having difficulty talking. He didn’t know why. The only time he could talk easily was when he was with God. The explanation he gave himself for this was that, just as he couldn’t chew when there was too much in his mouth, he couldn’t talk when there were too many thoughts in his head.

  When Ajay got to Birju’s room, he greeted him as if he were all right. “Hello, lazy. How much longer are you going to sleep?” His mother was always there. She got up and hugged Ajay. She asked how school had been, and he didn’t know what to say. In music class, the teacher sang a song about a sailor who had bared his breast before jumping into the sea. This had caused the other students to giggle. But Ajay could not say the word “breast” to his mother without blushing. He had also cried. He’d been thinking of how Birju’s accident had made his own life mysterious and confused. What would happen next? Would Birju die or would he go on as he was? Where would they live? Usually when Ajay cried in school, he was told to go outside. But it had been raining, and the teacher had sent him into the hallway. He sat on the floor and wept. Any mention of this would upset his mother. And so he said nothing had happened that day.

  Sometimes when Ajay arrived his mother was on the phone, telling his father that she missed him and was expecting to see him on Friday. His father took a Greyhound bus most Fridays from Queens to Arlington, returning on Sunday night in time to work the next day. He was a bookkeeper for a department store. Before the accident, Ajay had thought of his parents as the same person: MummyDaddy. Now, when he saw his father praying stiffly or when his father failed to say hello to Birju in his hospital bed, Ajay sensed that his mother and father were quite different people. After his mother got off the phone, she always went to the cafeteria to get coffee for herself and Jell-O or cookies for him. He knew that if she took her coat with her it meant that she was especially sad. Instead of going directly to the cafeteria, she was going to go outside and walk around the hospital parking lot.

  That day, while she was gone, Ajay stood beside the hospital bed and balanced a comic book on Birju’s chest. He read to him very slowly. Before turning each page, he said, “OK, Birju?”

  Birju was fourteen. He was thin and had curly hair. Immediately after the accident, there had been so many machines around his bed that only one person could stand beside him at a time. Now there was just a single waxy, yellow tube. One end of this went into his abdomen; the other, blocked by a green, bullet-shaped plug, was what his Isocal milk was poured through. When not being used, the tube was rolled up and bound by a rubber band and tucked beneath Birju’s hospital gown. But even with the tube hidden it was obvious that there was something wrong with Birju. It was in his stillness and his open eyes. Once, in their house in Queens, Ajay had left a plastic bowl on a radiator overnight and the sides had drooped and sagged so that the bowl looked a little like an eye. Birju reminded Ajay of that bowl.

  Ajay had not gone with his brother to the
swimming pool on the day of the accident, because he had been reading a book and wanted to finish it. But he heard the ambulance siren from his aunt and uncle’s house. The pool was only a few minutes away, and when he got there a crowd had gathered around the ambulance. Ajay saw his uncle first, in shorts and an undershirt, talking to a man inside the ambulance. His aunt was standing beside him. Then Ajay saw Birju on a stretcher, in blue shorts with a plastic mask over his nose and mouth. His aunt hurried over to take Ajay home. He cried as they walked, although he had been certain that Birju would be fine in a few days: in a Spider-Man comic he had just read, Aunt May had fallen into a coma and she had woken up perfectly fine. Ajay had cried simply because he felt crying was called for by the seriousness of the occasion. Perhaps this moment would mark the beginning of his future greatness. From that day on, Ajay found it hard to cry in front of his family. Whenever tears started coming, he felt like a liar. If he loved his brother, he knew, he would not have thought about himself as the ambulance had pulled away, nor would he talk with God at night about becoming famous.

  When Ajay’s mother returned to Birju’s room with coffee and cookies, she sometimes talked to Ajay about Birju. She told him that when Birju was six he had seen a children’s television show that had a character named Chunu, which was Birju’s nickname, and he had thought the show was based on his own life. But most days Ajay went into the lounge to read. There was a TV in the corner and a lamp near a window that looked out over a parking lot. It was the perfect place to read. Ajay liked fantasy novels where the hero, who was preferably under the age of twenty-five, had an undiscovered talent that made him famous when it was revealed. He could read for hours without interruption, and sometimes when Vinod came to drive Ajay and his mother home from the hospital it was hard for him to remember the details of the real day that had passed.

  One evening, when he was in the lounge, he saw a rock star being interviewed on Entertainment Tonight. The musician, dressed in a sleeveless undershirt that revealed a swarm of tattoos on his arms and shoulders, had begun to shout at the audience, over his interviewer, “Don’t watch me! Live your life! I’m not you!” Filled with a sudden desire to do something, Ajay hurried out of the television lounge and stood on the sidewalk in front of the hospital entrance. But he did not know what to do. It was cold and dark and there was an enormous moon. Cars leaving the parking lot stopped one by one at the edge of the road. Ajay watched as they waited for an opening in the traffic, their brake lights glowing.

  “ARE THINGS GETTING WORSE?” Ajay asked God. The weekend before had been Thanksgiving. Christmas would come soon, and a new year would start, a year during which Birju would not have talked or walked. Suddenly, Ajay understood hopelessness. Hopelessness felt very much like fear. It involved a clutching in the stomach and a numbness in the arms and legs.

  “What do you think?” God answered.

  “They seem to be.”

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

  “At least Birju isn’t dead. At least Daddy’s Greyhound bus has never skidded off a bridge.” Lately, Ajay had begun talking much more quickly to God than he used to. Before, when he had talked to God, Ajay would think of what God would say in response before he said anything. Now, Ajay spoke without knowing how God might respond.

  “You shouldn’t be angry at me.” God sighed. God was wearing his usual cardigan. “You can’t understand why I do what I do.”

  “You should explain better then.”

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

  “What does that have to do with me?” This was usually the cue for discussing Ajay’s prospects. But hopelessness made the future feel even more frightening than the present.

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

  They were silent for a while.

  “Do you love me truly?” Ajay asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Will you make Birju normal?” As soon as Ajay asked the question, God ceased to be real. Ajay knew then that he was alone, lying under his blankets, his face exposed to the cold dark.

  “I can’t tell you the future,” God said softly. These were words that Ajay already knew.

  “Just get rid of the minutes when Birju lay on the bottom of the pool. What are three minutes to you?”

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

  Ajay opened his eyes. His mother was on her side and she had a blanket pulled up to her neck. She looked like an ordinary woman. It surprised him that you couldn’t tell, looking at her, that she had a son who was brain-dead.

  IN FACT, THINGS WERE getting worse. Putting away his mother’s mattress and his own in a closet in the morning, getting up very early so he could use the bathroom before his aunt or uncle did, spending so many hours in the hospital—all this had given Ajay the reassuring sense that real life was in abeyance, and that what was happening was unreal. He and his mother and brother were just waiting to make a long-delayed bus trip. The bus would come eventually to carry them to Queens, where he would return to school at P.S. 20 and to Sunday afternoons spent at the Hindi movie theater under the trestle for the 7 train. But now Ajay was starting to understand that the world was always real, whether you were reading a book or sleeping, and that it eroded you every day.

  He saw the evidence of this erosion in his mother, who had grown severe and unforgiving. Usually when Vinod brought her and Ajay home from the hospital, she had dinner with the rest of the family. After his mother helped his aunt wash the dishes, the two women watched theological action movies. One night, in spite of a headache that had made her sit with her eyes closed all afternoon, she ate dinner, washed dishes, sat down in front of the TV. As soon as the movie was over, she went upstairs, vomited, and lay on her mattress with a wet towel over her forehead. She asked Ajay to massage her neck and shoulders. As he did so, Ajay noticed that she was crying. The tears frightened Ajay and made him angry. “You shouldn’t have watched TV,” he said accusingly.

  “I have to,” she said. “People will cry with you once, and they will cry with you a second time. But if you cry a third time, people will say you are boring and always crying.”

  Ajay did not want to believe what she had said, but her cynicism made him think that she must have had conversations with his aunt and uncle that he did not know about. “That’s not true,” he told her, massaging her scalp. “Uncle is kind. Auntie Aruna is always kind.”

  “What do you know?” She shook her head, freeing herself from Ajay’s fingers. She stared at him. Upside down, her face looked unfamiliar and terrifying. “If God lets Birju live long enough, you will become a stranger, too. You will say, ‘I have been unhappy for so long because of Birju, now I don’t want to talk about him or look at him.’ Don’t think I don’t know you,” she said.

  Suddenly, Ajay hated himself. To hate himself was to see himself as the opposite of everything he wanted to be: short instead of tall, fat instead of thin. When he brushed his teeth that night, he looked at his face: his chin was round and fat as a heel. His nose was so broad that he had once been able to fit a small rock in one nostril.

  His father was also being eroded. Before the accident, Ajay’s father loved jokes—he could do perfect imitations—and Ajay had felt lucky to have him as a father. (Once, Ajay’s father had convinced his own mother that he was possessed by the ghost of a British man.) And after the accident, his father had impressed Ajay with the patient loyalty of his weekly bus journeys. But now his father was different.

  One Saturday afternoon, as Ajay and his father were returning from the hospital, his father slowed the car without warning and turned into the dirt parking lot of a bar that looked as though it had originally been a small house. It had a pitched roof with a black tarp. At the edge of the lot stood a tall neon sign of an orange hand lifting a mug of sudsy golden beer. Ajay had never seen anybody drink except in the movies.
He wondered whether his father was going to ask for directions to somewhere, and if so, to where.

  His father said, “One minute,” and they climbed out of the car.

  They went up wooden steps into the bar. Inside, it was dark and smelled of cigarette smoke and something stale and sweet. The floor was linoleum like the kitchen at his aunt and uncle’s. There was a bar with stools around it, and a basketball game played on a television bolted against the ceiling, like the one in Birju’s hospital room.

  His father stood by the bar waiting for the bartender to notice him. His father had a round face and was wearing a white shirt and dark dress pants, as he often did on the weekend, since it was more economical to have the same clothes for the office and home.

  The bartender came over. “How much for a Budweiser?” his father asked. It was a dollar fifty. “Can I buy a single cigarette?” He did not have to buy; the bartender would just give him one. His father helped Ajay up onto a stool and sat down himself. Ajay looked around and wondered what would happen if somebody started a knife fight. When his father had drunk half his beer, he carefully lit the cigarette. The bartender was standing at the end of the bar. There were only two other men in the place. Ajay was disappointed that there were no women wearing dresses slit all the way up their thighs. Perhaps they came in the evenings.

  His father asked him if he had ever watched a basketball game all the way through.

  “I’ve seen the Harlem Globetrotters.”

  His father smiled and took a sip. “I’ve heard they don’t play other teams, because they can defeat everyone else so easily.”

  “They only play against each other, unless there is an emergency—like in the cartoon, when they play against the aliens to save the Earth,” Ajay said.

  “Aliens?”

  Ajay blushed as he realized his father was teasing him.

  When they left, the light outside felt too bright. As his father opened the car door for Ajay, he said, “I’m sorry.”