A Life of Adventure and Delight

by Akhil Sharma

  Lakshman’s mother had begun drinking when he was eight. This was around when they were sent to America by his father’s family, to grow the family’s export business. From the very start, she behaved differently with alcohol than other people. At most parties, tea and juice were offered first and alcohol was an afterthought. At his parents’ parties, his mother was the one who offered drinks. She pressed liquor on whoever entered the house. “Whiskey, bourbon, wine,” she would say, smoothing each word. “Tea, Coca-Cola is also there.” Sometimes the men they had over would praise her for her drinking or talk about their own, how it was with the third drink that they began to get happy. Whenever a man praised his mother for her drinking, Lakshman became anxious. Because of movies, he experienced a sense of sexual danger seeing his drunk mother talking to a man. Instead of joining the children in the basement, boys and girls his age who were delighted to be allowed to stay up late and who were running and playing and shrieking, he would follow her around the house. Watching her made him feel safer but also kept him anxious. By the end of the night he would be so exhausted he wanted to cry.

  The drinking overtook her quickly. Around the time he was nine, she was drinking during dinner. His father, who rarely drank himself, protested. “Every night you have to drink?”

  “I can’t have a little happiness? Is there something wrong with me that I must suffer?”

  And when he was eleven she started drinking during the day. His parents’ marriage had been arranged because their families did business together; they had never shown each other any personal warmth. To the extent they spoke, it was either in shouts or in sarcasm. “Do you know what kind of people drink during the day?” his father said, shaking a finger at her. “Drunkards. You are a drunkard.”

  Lakshman, coming home from school, would sniff the air near his mother to confirm what he could tell with his eyes. If she was drunk, she seemed hollow, like she was directing her body from afar.

  His family’s life seemed strange to Lakshman, his father shouting at his mother periodically but mostly ignoring her, often refusing to be with her, getting up from the kitchen table and leaving the room when she came in.

  WHEN HE WAS THIRTEEN and about to graduate eighth grade and enter high school, his mother’s kidneys began hurting. He would come home and she would be standing in the kitchen, holding a pack of ice against her side. Her caring so little about herself seemed to show that she cared nothing at all for him or his father. He would want to mock her and shout at her, but he was afraid she would hit him.

  His mother did occasionally try to change. Once she went to a doctor and though she probably lied about how much she drank, the doctor still urged her to go to Alcoholics Anonymous. She went to AA meetings for a week or two and stopped.

  In the past, Lakshman’s father had traveled to India four or five times a year. As Lakshman’s mother’s drinking worsened, he began going more often. When his father was in India, Lakshman felt strange being alone with his mother, sitting at the kitchen table, doing his homework while his mother drank upstairs. The silence in the house was so intense it hummed.

  When Lakshman was fourteen and his father was in India on one of his business trips, his mother decided she was going to stay in bed and drink.

  Her room was large and had a cream-colored carpet. The bed was king-size, there was a picture window behind it and, to the side of the room, another window that looked onto a neighbor’s roof and driveway. His mother appeared cheerful as she moved around the room. She opened the windows completely, although it was winter. She put two cases of wine on the carpeted floor beside the bed. Lakshman stood in the doorway and watched his mother’s preparations. She put several jugs of water on the carpet also and, right next to the head of the bed, a large white plastic bucket to vomit in.

  “Daddy won’t like this,” Lakshman murmured.

  “Let him die,” she replied happily. She put several large bags of potato chips on the nightstand. Lakshman, watching his mother, felt that what she was planning was so bizarre that it could not possibly happen. With the windows open, the room quickly became icy. His mother got under the quilt and picked up a glass of white wine.

  Lakshman telephoned India. He gripped the phone and spoke in a soft tight voice. “Mommy says she is going to stay in bed and drink.” Speaking, he knew his father would find some way of denying what was happening. His father said, “What else does she do anyway?” At his father turning what he had said into a joke, Lakshman got scared. He repeated what was going on, that his mother had gotten into bed and had been drinking for twenty-four hours. He felt detached from himself, like when he was taking a difficult math test and he was frightened but his pencil appeared to move on its own, hopping over the sheet of paper, jotting numbers.

  His father didn’t answer his reiteration. Lakshman knew the silence meant his father could later pretend what he had said had not been said. He repeated himself a third time. “What can be done?” his father answered in irritation.

  For her first day or two in bed, Lakshman’s mother sipped from a wineglass and ate potato chips and smiled confusedly at the TV playing in a corner. When she had to, she got up and stumbled to the bathroom at the end of the hall near his father’s room. After a few days, though, she began shitting and pissing in the bucket.

  Four or five days after she started drinking, Lakshman’s father, forced to come back because of Lakshman’s calls, stood in the bedroom doorway and screamed, “Die! At last there is nothing else.” He shouted this, but he also phoned the county’s central AA office.

  Two women came to the front door of the house and rang the bell. One was blonde and short and looked to be in her early twenties. The other was much older and had very white, dusty-looking skin. Lakshman’s father, unshaven, exhausted from the eleven hours’ flight from Delhi, and so confused that he had a slipper on one foot while the other was bare, asked them to come in. Before entering, the women stood on the cement steps in front of the open door and prayed. They held hands and bowed their heads.

  The older woman walked in first. As she passed Lakshman and his father, she mentioned that she liked Indian food. They went up the stairs. His mother’s room was at the end of the hall and its white wooden door was closed.

  They pushed it open and the room was freezing and full of light. To Lakshman, strained and desperate, the light seemed inhuman, as if they were above the clouds where it wasn’t possible to survive. There was this light and there was the stench. The smell of vomit, urine, and shit was such that it did not seem thinkable that a human being ate there, slept there.

  “You want to go to a detox?” the older woman asked Lakshman’s mother. His mother was half sitting with her head against the headboard. She appeared stupefied. On her chin and down the front of her purple kameez were strings of dried vomit. It was embarrassing to have a stranger see his mother this way. Also, he felt a thin eager hope that these two women could fix her, that they were capable of doing something simple that would suddenly make everything all right.

  The young woman picked up the bucket. Leaning to one side, she passed Lakshman and his father by the doorway and took it down the hall to the bathroom.

  “If you don’t go to a detox, you are going to die,” the older woman said. She was speaking loudly and clearly.

  The two women helped his mother stand. They held her from both sides and walked her down the hall. She was not wearing the pajama bottom of the long shirt and to see her yellow hairy legs was strangely awful. In the bathroom, she stepped into the tub with her kameez still on.

  The women had come in a blue minivan and they drove her in it to the detox. Lakshman and his father followed in the family’s Toyota with Lakshman clutching his mother’s passport and insurance card. He wondered what a detox looked like. He imagined it resembling a grand bank.

  It was a bright Sunday morning. They took surface roads so the two vehicles wouldn’t lose track of each other. The stores they passed were closed and their glass windows fl
ashed sun. Lakshman began to feel relieved. The flashes of light were like blasts of music. The occasional person walking across a road seemed like life going on, like life was always going to go on and so somewhere there was the possibility of things being different and happiness existing.

  IN INDIA, ON FARMS, pretty young women are as common as rabbits. It is easy to have sex with girls who are fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. These girls have nothing to trade other than sex and physical labor and often they are raped. On farms, when a girl goes alone into the fields in the early morning to defecate, there is a strong chance she might get assaulted.

  Lakshman had been going back to India every summer since he came to America. When he did, he would go with his uncles to the farm that his father’s family owned. He liked the farm, throwing rocks into a field and grasshoppers shooting up by the dozens. He liked the stepwell, walking down it to take a bath, the temperature dropping, the air getting sweet, and then squatting at the bottom step, splashing a bucket in the water to clear the tadpoles and weeds and beginning to soap himself.

  On the farm, each uncle had his favorite girl. The girls would bring his uncles tea in the morning and disappear into their rooms for a half hour or more. Almost always only the men from the family went to the farm. A few times a year, for religious events that required visiting particular temples, the women of the family also came. These aunts and daughters screamed at the girls, chased them with sticks, and the farm girls urinated in the buckets of water used to wash the family temples. Lakshman did not think much about this. It seemed to him funny, like a television sitcom.

  One summer evening when he was still fourteen, after his mother had gone to the detox and come back and started drinking again, Lakshman was standing by a sugarcane press near an irrigation channel. A girl who might have been nineteen came up to him. She was tall for a villager and barefoot, with a long skirt that had fingernail-sized, silver bells sewn on. Attaching a ji to his name as though he were the older one, she asked him in their regional dialect what months it rained in America. She asked this almost as if she had already heard the answer and wanted to confirm that she wasn’t being lied to. “Every month,” Lakshman said. “Every month it rains.”

  “Does ice fall too?”

  “In winter.”

  “I had heard that,” the girl said mysteriously, and then stood there for a moment as if she wanted to be remembered. She had a beautiful oval face and small breasts, and she appeared very confident.

  The next day the girl came up to Lakshman again. This time it was early morning and he was in a field and his father’s oldest brother, bald and with a mustache, was standing nearby chewing a tooth-cleaning twig. She thrust a little knotted rag into Lakshman’s hand. “Some sweets,” she said, and stared at him again. “How many air conditioners does your house have?”

  “Run, girl,” his uncle said quietly. “There is nobody here for you.”

  LATER, LAKSHMAN WOULD think that it was probably falling in love with this girl that caused his father to decide to have Lakshman’s mother murdered. There was no other change to explain the events. His mother was no different from how she had been for years—drunk, quietly drunk sometimes, alarmingly erratic others. Once recently, his father had locked her in the bathroom when she was drunk and she broke all the mirrors. There must have been something about falling in love that made his father think that happiness was possible, that life was short, and that he should not stay with this woman who appeared to care nothing about anyone.

  At the time, though, all Lakshman knew was that something had changed for his father. His father’s room was next to his own. Sometimes Lakshman would wake at two or three in the morning from hearing his father on the phone. His father would be laughing in a happy relaxed way and when he spoke, he used their regional dialect. His uncles gave their girls phones and Lakshman guessed his father had done the same. Now, during the day, his father was more relaxed. The anger that had begun to live beneath his voice vanished. This was a relief, but it also felt like a betrayal. One fall afternoon when everything smelled wet, Lakshman came home from school and had to turn on the kitchen lights despite it being four. The house was quiet except for the soft sound of the TV in his mother’s room where she was probably drinking. He saw that the answering machine light was blinking red. He pressed play and there it was, the young woman’s voice. “Listen,” she said in their dialect, and then there was some splashing. “That is my feet in water.” She laughed and the phone hung up. Lakshman was furious. It was vulgar for her to leave a message. And she was a farm girl. She should know her place. He deleted the message. As soon as he did, he became scared his father would find out.

  THE WAY AN ALCOHOLIC woman’s murder gets arranged is that her husband sends her to her parents and tells them she is a drunk and not to be trusted and that he does not want her back. As long as he does not do this, as long as she is under his protection, she won’t be killed, because she belongs to his family and not her father’s. But once she is returned, her family will kill her, because the shame of having an alcoholic as a daughter or sister is staggering. It is even worse than having a daughter who is promiscuous. With a promiscuous woman you know to kill her right away, while with an alcoholic, the shame lasts longer because you hesitate.

  Lakshman did not understand what was going on other than that his father seemed to be in love with a farm girl and was complaining more than normal. He started calling Lakshman’s grandmother: “What kind of life is this?” he would ask. “What did you do to me when you got me a wife like this?” Afterward, Lakshman came to understand that his grandmother had to be consulted because, since his mother belonged to a family with which his father’s family did business, there would be financial consequences if his mother was killed.

  He sensed that there was a crisis building. His mother rarely went to India. Nobody wanted her there and so she only went if a close relative was getting married and even then only for a week or two. But now his other grandmother, the one on his mother’s side, began calling, too. She wheedled Lakshman’s mother, pressing her to visit even though there was no wedding coming up.

  It was strange to hear his grandmother’s voice on the phone. “Baby boy, go get your mother,” she would say when he picked up. There were so many calls that it was obvious that something was occurring. The fact that his mother did not see it made her seem addled and helpless.

  Talking to her mother, Lakshman’s mother got giddy. Sometimes, after a call, she would stay downstairs and eat regular food instead of going back to her room and drinking wine and eating potato chips. Lakshman would then get nostalgic for the time she used to only drink at parties.

  ABOUT TWO MONTHS after his grandmother began calling, his mother left for India. Three days after she left, barely enough time to land in Delhi, take the plane to Jaipur, and unpack, Lakshman was standing behind the stove making tea when his father came into the kitchen and said, “Your mother has died of dengue. She died in a hospital last night.”

  Lakshman felt he must be dreaming. He didn’t turn off the stove as tradition would require after a death. Instead he continued making tea. His father stared at him. He had a round dark face and he stared at Lakshman nervously, as if waiting to see if he would be believed.

  “Your mother died last night,” his father repeated.

  “In reality?” Lakshman asked.

  “Yes. In reality.” His father opened the refrigerator and got out a carton of eggs.

  Lakshman felt a sense of relief. The sensation was like coming into a room that had been crowded with furniture but is now empty. The space seems smaller and like any other space, but also less stressful. He did not feel sadness, at first, because a part of him did not believe his mother was dead. If she were dead, he thought, they wouldn’t be preparing food. It would be improper to do so.

  He went to school. He did not tell anyone what his father had said. After classes, he attended track practice. Running in the cold moist air, he remembered when his mo
ther had come back from her first detox, the one that the two women from AA had taken her to. She had been gone for four weeks. She had returned home at eleven in the morning and that afternoon she and he and his father had gone for a walk. Their street did not have sidewalks and so they had walked on the road itself, the snow squeaking beneath them, the trees in the yards dark from moisture. “Manuji,” his mother had said to his father with a bashful half smile. “I am not going to drink. I don’t know why, but I am certain.” Her eyes were inwardly focused, as if she was looking at something within that comforted her and gave her confidence. His father listened but did not speak. He walked with his head down and he appeared frustrated, like somebody who knew he was being lied to and yet could not protest the lie.

  He remembered this and remembered when his mother had had two black eyes because she had fallen down the stairs. The black eyes had made her look vulnerable and helpless and young. He remembered also when his mother had taken his father around the house and shown him where she had hidden bottles of alcohol. She had stood watching as his father put the bottles in a trash can and she had held her hands in the air and shaken them as if they were on fire and she was trying to put them out. Lakshman ran and tears slid down his face.