by Akhil Sharma
That’s when Ajay first felt that his father might have done something wrong. The thought made him worry. Once they were on the road, his father said gently, “Don’t tell your mother.”
Fear made Ajay feel cruel. He asked his father, “What do you think about when you think of Birju?”
Instead of becoming sad, Ajay’s father smiled. “I am surprised by how strong he is. It’s not easy for him to keep living. But, even before, he was strong. When he was interviewing for high school scholarships, one interviewer asked him, ‘Are you a thinker or a doer?’ He laughed and said, ‘That’s like asking, ‘Are you an idiot or a moron?’ ”
From then on, they often stopped at the bar on the way back from the hospital. Ajay’s father always asked the bartender for a cigarette before he sat down, and during the ride home he always reminded Ajay not to tell his mother.
Ajay found that he himself was changing. His superstitions were becoming extreme. Now when he walked around the good-luck tree he punched it, every other time, hard, so that his knuckles hurt. Afterward, he would hold his breath for a moment longer than he thought he could bear, and ask God to give the unused breaths to Birju.
IN DECEMBER, A PLACE opened in one of the good long-term care facilities. It was in New Jersey. This meant that Ajay and his mother could move back to New York and live with his father again. This was the news Ajay’s father brought when he arrived for a two-week holiday at Christmas.
Ajay felt the clarity of panic. Life would be the same as before the accident but also unimaginably different. He would return to P.S. 20, while Birju continued to be fed through a tube in his abdomen. Life would be Birju’s getting older and growing taller than their parents but having less consciousness than even a dog, which can become excited or afraid.
Ajay decided to use his devotion to shame God into fixing Birju. The fact that two religions regarded the coming December days as holy ones suggested to Ajay that prayers during this time would be especially potent. So he prayed whenever he thought of it—at his locker, even in the middle of a quiz. His mother wouldn’t let him fast, but he started throwing away the lunch he took to school. And when his mother prayed in the morning, Ajay watched to make sure that she bowed at least once toward each of the postcards of deities. If she did not, he bowed three times to the possibly offended god on the postcard. He had noticed that his father finished his prayers in less time than it took to brush his teeth. And so now, when his father began praying in the morning, Ajay immediately crouched down beside him, because he knew his father would be embarrassed to get up first. But Ajay found it harder and harder to drift into the rhythm of sung prayers or into his 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, his mother asked the hospital chaplain to come to Birju’s room and pray with them. The family knelt together beside Birju’s bed. Afterward, the chaplain asked her whether she would be attending Christmas services. “Of course, Father,” she said.
“I’m also coming,” Ajay said.
The chaplain turned toward Ajay’s father, who was sitting in a wheelchair because there was nowhere else to sit. “I’ll wait for God at home,” he said. That night, Ajay watched It’s a Wonderful Life on television. To him, the movie meant that happiness arrived late, if ever. Later, when he got in bed and closed his eyes, God appeared. There was little to say.
“Will Birju be better in the morning?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“When you prayed for the math exam, you could have asked for Birju to get better and, instead of your getting an A, Birju would have woken.”
This was so ridiculous that Ajay opened his eyes. His father was sleeping nearby on folded-up blankets. Ajay felt disappointed at not feeling guilt. Guilt might have contained some hope that God existed.
When Ajay arrived at the hospital with his father and mother the next morning, Birju was asleep, breathing through his mouth while a nurse poured a can of Isocal into his stomach through the yellow tube. Ajay had not expected that Birju would have recovered; nevertheless, seeing him that way put a weight in Ajay’s chest.
The Christmas prayers were held in a large, mostly empty room; people in chairs sat next to people in wheelchairs. His father walked out in the middle of the service.
Later, Ajay sat in a corner of Birju’s room and watched his parents. His mother was reading a Hindi women’s magazine to Birju while she shelled peanuts into her lap. His 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, Ajay began to cry. He tried to be quiet. He did not want his parents to notice his tears and think that he was crying for Birju, because in reality he was crying for how difficult his own life was.
His father noticed first. “What’s the matter, hero?”
His mother shouted, “What happened?” and she sounded so alarmed it was as if Ajay were bleeding.
“I didn’t get any Christmas presents! I need a Christmas present!” Ajay shouted. “You didn’t buy me a Christmas present!” And then, because he had revealed his own selfishness, Ajay let himself sob. “You have to give me something. I should get something for all this.” Ajay clenched his hands and wiped his face with his fists. “Each time I come here I should get something.”
His mother pulled him up and pressed him into her stomach. His father came and stood beside them. “What do you want?” his father asked.
Ajay had no prepared answer for this. “What do you want?” his mother repeated.
The only thing he could think was, “I want to eat pizza and I want candy.”
His mother stroked his hair and called him her little baby. She kept wiping his face with a fold of her sari. When at last he stopped crying, they decided that Ajay’s father should take him back to his aunt and uncle’s. On the way they stopped at a mini-mall. It was a little after five, and the streetlights were on. Ajay and his father did not take off their winter coats as they ate in a pizzeria staffed by Chinese people. While he chewed, Ajay closed his eyes and tried to imagine God looking like Clark Kent, wearing a cardigan and eyeglasses, but he could not. Afterward, Ajay and his father went next door to a magazine shop and Ajay got a bag of Three Musketeers bars and a bag of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, and then he was tired and ready for home.
He held the candy in his lap while his father drove in silence. Even through the plastic, he could smell the sugar and chocolate. Some of the houses outside were dark, and others were outlined in Christmas lights.
After a while, Ajay rolled down the window slightly. The car filled with wind. They passed the building where Birju’s accident had occurred. Ajay had not walked past it since the accident. When they drove by, he usually looked away. Now he tried to spot the fenced swimming pool at the building’s side. He wondered whether the pool that had pressed itself into Birju’s mouth and lungs and stomach had been drained, so that nobody would be touched by its unlucky waters. Probably it had not been emptied until fall. 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 his brother had lain for three minutes on its concrete bottom one August afternoon.
WE DIDN’T LIKE HIM
We didn’t like him. Manshu was fourteen, and we were eight or ten, and, instead of playing with boys his own age, he forced himself into our games. Often he came out into the lane and, if we were playing stick-stick, he’d say, “Give me the stick.” Intimidated, we’d hand it over.
The lane had three- and four-story houses on both sides, so closely pressed together that the alley was always in shade. Once, we were playing cricket in the lane, Manshu batting. Nobody could get him out. The boy who was bowling, an eight-year-old, became angry and flung the ball away. Manshu twisted the boy’s arm behind his back, forcing h
im to his knees. Then he gently tapped the top of the boy’s head with the cricket bat, as if the boy were a wicket being driven into the ground.
Manshu was large, dark-skinned, round-faced. He was my father’s sister’s husband’s sister’s son. Since he belonged to my aunt’s husband’s family, we had to show him the respect due to a family that takes a daughter away. The fact that I had to show deference was one more reason that he irritated me. And, because I was related to Manshu, the other boys treated me badly. They blamed me for his behavior, as if whatever he was doing were being done by my family.
Manshu’s father had died when he was six. He lived with his mother in a large room on the second floor of an old house. The room had a high ceiling and blue-green walls. The nicest thing about it was that there was a swing hanging from the center of the ceiling.
Manshu’s mother had diabetes and got tired very quickly. Many evenings, after she had gone to bed, Manshu would visit our house. When he came, he paid no attention to me. Instead, he addressed himself to my parents. He had a way of speaking that suggested that he understood other people’s motivations. “Uncle,” he said to my father once, “you know what Mrs. Kohli is like.” When he spoke as if he knew things, I would think, Who are you to talk this way? Because I was eight and cruel, the way children are, I also thought, Why do you think you can talk when you don’t even have a father?
My parents belonged to a generation that is mostly gone now, those very formal men and women who measured distance with kos and counted change in annas. When Manshu visited, my mother made him sherbet and presented it to him on a tray, which is the way she would have served it to an adult toward whom the family had to show formality.
My parents were polite with Manshu but periodically they said something that revealed that they found him and his mother irritating. Once, my mother told my father that everything Manshu said was probably a repetition of something his mother had uttered. Another time, when Manshu passed seventh standard and his mother went around the lane giving out boxes of sweets, my father said, “Surely he must have cheated.”
Manshu’s mother was always fainting. She would pass out in the lane, and some neighbor would come out and hold a glass of glucose water to her lips until she got up again. One day, when Manshu was sixteen, she fainted in the alley, but this time she didn’t get up. For a while after she died, I did not believe that she was actually gone. A mother dying was the sort of thing that happened only in movies. I somehow imagined that Manshu’s mother would come back in a few weeks, and that she would be angry when she returned. She would accuse people of disloyalty for having thought she could die.
Not long after her death, I went to Manshu’s room with my parents. It smelled like it always had, of medicines and rubbing alcohol, of incense and cooking spices. The fact that nothing had changed felt wrong. It was confirmation that a horrible thing could occur and it would not matter. The fact that Manshu’s misfortune could be ignored meant that I, too, might suffer misfortune and be treated this way. I got scared. I wanted to leave so badly that I did not care if I hurt Manshu’s feelings.
MANSHU WAS HANDED OVER to my aunt’s husband, who lived a few lanes away, but he continued to spend time in our lane. At first, I was embarrassed whenever I saw Manshu. He was quiet, meek. He appeared chastened. His curved shoulders would remind me that his mother was dead, and then I’d feel ashamed that I was more fortunate than he was.
Now, playing cricket with us, if he batted for a while and nobody could get him out, he would surrender the bat and let somebody else take a turn. This thoughtfulness may have been due to the fact that his uncle did not like him; Manshu felt that he had no one to take care of him so he was afraid of offending. It may also have come from the tenderness we all feel when someone we love dies.
Manshu began to visit the temple in our lane. The temple was narrow, with a marble-floored courtyard that had idols along all four sides and a tulsi bush in the center. In a larger temple, Manshu might have been able to sit quietly and be ignored, but Gaurji, the pandit, who lived on the second floor of the temple, saw it as his home. He did not like people to be there, other than for prayers. To him, they were intruding in his house. He would glower at the women who wanted to do service and came in the morning to wash the temple floor. Gaurji was irritable and slightly paranoid, as many pandits are, feeling that they are underpaid and not respected.
Manshu, because he was spending so much time at the temple, began to join Gaurji at each prayer. There were prayers in the morning, afternoon, evening, and night. During these, he sat right behind Gaurji. When Gaurji, bare-chested and skinny, his white dhoti wrapped around his narrow waist, rang his bell and blew on his shell, Manshu’s high wavery voice stood out. My father was part of the committee that oversaw the temple, and Gaurji, of course, found it suspicious that somebody related to my father was spending so much time there, watching him. Once, Manshu asked to look at the prayer books and Gaurji began hitting him, slapping his face and shoulders. “What do you want?” he shouted. “At last, tell me what you want.”
Manshu began to be religious. He was now seventeen or so. He stopped playing with us and started wearing sandalwood paste on his forehead. When he met somebody on the street, he said “Ram, Ram” instead of “Namaste.” Manshu’s religiosity became commonly known. Some women did their afternoon and evening prayers at home and liked to have another person present, because they felt that it would be more flattering to God to have two people praying than one. Manshu began to visit these women and sit before their altars as they sang. They would give him tea and crackers. My father found this embarrassing, as if Manshu were praying for food.
Manshu also bought some pamphlets on fortune-telling and astrology and started reading palms. He practiced at first on us children. We sat a step below him in the stairways of houses in the lane, our hands outstretched. When he read mine, I asked him whether I would be famous. “No,” he said. This made me doubt that he could forecast the future.
He told me that I would own a dog and have problems with my knees.
MANSHU DID NOT do well in higher secondary. He was not able to get into college and so began studying for his B.Com. through correspondence school. He graduated in 1988. It is hard now to believe how difficult it was to get a job in India before 1991 and the economic liberalization. People would graduate from college, even good colleges, and remain unemployed for three or four years. Manshu became a tutor and continued living with his uncle.
I did not do especially well in higher secondary, either. I was able to get into law school, but it was a Hindi medium one, instead of one taught in English. While I was in law school, I came home regularly. It was strange to see Manshu still wandering the lanes, still going into people’s homes to pray with them. He had grown a pandit’s potbelly and he had a little Brahmin ponytail now. He wore slippers, instead of shoes, like someone who has to keep removing his footwear to enter sacred spaces. So much was changing in my life and so little in his that I began to see Manshu as simpleminded.
The difference between the late eighties and the mid-nineties was so great that it was as if there were decades separating them. When Manshu graduated from college, everyone wanted a government job. When I graduated from law school, everyone wanted to work for a foreign company. I was not smart enough to get a job with a multinational. I opened an office near the courts in Tis Hazari. It was a tin-roofed shed in a lane of tin-roofed sheds that were rented by lawyers. During the day, I’d walk up and down the lane, past tea stands and men sitting on stools beneath trees, typewriters before them. I talked to other lawyers, the fortunate ones in black gowns who were going to appear before a judge, and the rest of us, who wore dress pants and white shirts with pens in our breast pockets and kept our business cards rubber-banded in our pants pockets.
When I moved into the Tis Hazari office, I had a prayer ceremony performed in the shed. Manshu sat in the center of the cement room and lit a fire and soon the place was full of smoke and it was
hard to breathe. Still, I sat there and sang prayers. Why not do something that might bring luck? Also, inviting the other lawyers in the lane to the prayer ceremony had been a way of getting to know people.
To cultivate business, I began helping my father with his volunteer work, which was how I started dealing with the committee that oversaw the temple.
No pandit ever wants to leave a temple. It is free housing and reasonable pay for not much effort. Also, one has an almost complete monopoly over the ceremonies held nearby in people’s houses, and this can double or triple one’s income. But Gaurji had a series of small strokes, and they made him even angrier. One winter evening, during prayers in the temple courtyard, he took the plates of food that had been put before the various gods for their dinner and began throwing them at the people who were seated cross-legged waiting for the prayers to start. I was sitting there when this occurred. He started calling us sister fuckers and ass sniffers. He stood before us, so angry that he was trembling. His eyes were dilated. I have only once or twice seen someone possessed, and seeing him, I had the same sense of astonishment I had when I witnessed a woman at Nizamuddin Dargah holding on to the marble jali, shouting “Mercy, mercy,” as people chanted nearby.
Gaurji’s youngest son wanted to replace his father; like me and Manshu, he had done badly in school. My father wanted to give the position to Manshu. He and the temple committee went to the temple and told the son that Manshu was going to be the new pandit.
The next morning, when the two old women who washed the temple floor arrived at the temple, the building’s blue wooden doors were chained from the inside, the chains clanking whenever they tried to push them open.
The doors remained chained for several days. People walked past them and said angry things, before touching the steps that led into the temple and then bringing their hands to their foreheads.