by Akhil Sharma
“Here you have a job.”
“What is here? Thieves? That Indira woman will eat us.”
I lay on my side and watched and listened. Usually, naps left me melancholy. Lying there, I began to think that when I was in America, I wouldn’t be able to see my grandparents every Sunday. Till then, I had not fully understood that going to America meant leaving India. I had somehow imagined that I would get to have the jet packs and chewing gum that people in America had and also be able to show these things off to my friends.
Soon it was time for lunch. I sat on the floor beside Birju. I broke off pieces of roti and leaned forward so that whatever dripped would fall onto the steel plate before me. The melancholy wouldn’t go away. I couldn’t quite believe that when I left India, my grandparents’ house would continue to exist, that the gutters along the sides of the lane would still run with soapy water.
WE WERE SUPPOSED to leave in early October. In August, this seemed far away. Then September arrived. Every evening I had the sense that the day had rushed by, that I had not done enough and the day had been wasted.
I started to talk in my sleep. Most afternoons when I got home from school, Birju and my mother and I napped on a wide bed in the bedroom. The thick curtains would be pulled shut, the ceiling fan spinning. There would be trays of water on the floor to soften the air. One afternoon, I lay on the bed with my eyes open. I couldn’t move my arms and legs. I was hot, sweating, panicked. I saw ants carrying our television up a wall. I said, “The red ants are carrying away the TV.” Birju was sitting beside me looking down, appearing amused. He seemed more real than the ants.
In school, I started getting into fights. I was in third grade. One afternoon, I was standing in the back of my class, talking with my best friend Hershu and a little Sikh boy whose hair was pulled into a bun under a black cloth. The Sikh boy said, “Americans clean themselves with paper, not water.”
“I know that,” I said. “Say something that other people don’t know.”
“In America they say ‘yeah’ not yes. Mrs. Singh told me to let you know.”
“That’s nothing. On an airplane, the stewardess has to give you whatever you ask for. I’m going to ask for a baby tiger.”
“When you get on the plane, go to the back,” Hershu said. “Go all the way to the back to sit.” Hershu said this softly. He had a large head, which looked too big for his body. “When an aeroplane falls, it falls with its front down.”
“Get away, evil-eyed one,” I exclaimed. I put my hands on Hershu’s chest and shoved. He stumbled back. He stared at me for a moment. His eyes got wet.
“Look,” I called out, “he’s going to cry.”
Hershu turned away and walked to his seat. I couldn’t understand why I had just done this thing.
I CONTINUED GOING TO the milk shop every morning. Because I would be emigrating to America, the milkman did not have me wait in the crowd and instead called me to the front. He probably did this because bestowing attention was one of his few powers.
Once he said, “What will happen to your brother’s bicycle?” The milkman was seventeen or eighteen, and he was in the shop’s entrance, his pajamas rolled up, barefoot because milk inevitably got spilled and it is a sin to step on milk with slippers.
“I don’t know.”
“Tell your mother I would like to buy it.”
As he spoke, I was conscious of all the boys watching. I felt their eyes on the back of my neck like hot sun.
Relatives started coming to the apartment and asking for the things that might be left behind.
One warm night, my father’s younger brother visited. He sat on the sofa in the living room glowering, sweat dripping from his mustache. The ceiling fan spun. He drank several cups of tea. Finally he said, “What are you going to do with the television and refrigerator?”
“Ji, we were planning to sell it,” my mother answered.
“Why? Don’t you have enough money?”
Piece by piece, furniture vanished. The easy chairs disappeared, the daybed was taken away, and the sofa faced a blank wall before it, too, was gone. Laborers, thin as mice, came wearing torn shirts, smelling of dried sweat, sheets wrapped around their waists. One laborer tilted the iron armoire that stood in the living room onto another laborer’s back. The burdened man inched out of the room. The dining table was turned onto its side and carried away. Once the table was gone, there were white scuff marks on the cement floor where it had stood. When even the TV was gone, Birju and I stood in a corner of the empty living room and called out “Oh! Oh!” to stir up echoes.
Near the end of September, Birju convinced me that I was walking and talking in my sleep because I was possessed by a ghost.
This happened late one afternoon. Birju and I had just woken from our nap, and we were sitting on the bed drinking our daily glass of milk with rose syrup. Birju said, “Ajay, don’t tell Mommy this, but you are possessed. When you talk, it isn’t you talking but the ghost.”
“You’re lying. You’re always lying.”
“I talked to the ghost, and he said that he had the gift of prophecy.”
I had always believed that I might possess supernatural powers, like flying or maybe seeing into the future. “You’re lying,” I said, hoping that he was right.
“I asked him what was going to happen to me.” Birju said this and stopped. He looked serious.
“What did the ghost say?”
“He said I’m going to die.”
I stared at my brother. He looked down. He had long eyelashes and narrow shoulders and a narrow chest.
“I didn’t believe him. I said, ‘If you’re a ghost, why do you sound like Ajay?’ He said, ‘Since I haven’t been born again, I haven’t committed any sins, and so I have a child’s innocence.’”
“Maybe the ghost was lying.”
“Why would he lie?”
I was quiet for a moment. Birju appeared to have the truth on his side. I asked, “Did the ghost say anything about me?”
“Why should I ask about you? I have my own problems.”
BIRJU SOBBED WHEN his bicycle was taken away. He refused to go downstairs to watch it being put into the back of a truck. Instead, he sat on the living room floor with the heels of his hands pressed into his eyes.
Among the things that remained was my plastic bucket of toys. My mother said that I could just leave it behind in the apartment. The thought of the yellow bucket standing alone in the empty living room, the apartment locked, made me feel guilty, like I would be abandoning it. I decided to give away my toys.
On our last morning in India, I took the bucket with me to the milk shop. When I saw the crowd of boys, shoving and pushing on the sidewalk, I felt embarrassed. I wanted the boys to remember me, and yet in the past, I had tried to make them feel bad.
“Will you take something?” I said, standing on the sidewalk and speaking to a boy whose head was covered in stubble. I took a little car from the bucket and held it out. My voice trembled. “I’m going away and perhaps you would like to have it.”
The boy’s hand struck my palm. As soon as it did, I wanted my car back.
“Would you like something else?” I said, my voice shaking. I put the bucket down and stepped away. The boy bent and hurriedly searched through it. He took out two plastic soldiers, a horse, and a large see-through plastic gun that made a noise and flashed light when the trigger was pulled.
I moved to another boy. I knew this boy was poor since, instead of bringing a milk pail to the shop, he brought a cup.
Soon the bucket was empty. I didn’t know what to do with the bucket. “Will you take it?” I asked the poor boy. He nodded shyly. As I was leaving, the milk man cried, “Remember me in America.”
That night, my mother’s younger brother arrived to take us to the airport.
I used to think that my father had been assigned to us by the government. This was because he appeared to serve no purpose. When he got home in the evening, all he did was sit in his ch
air in the living room, drink tea, and read the paper. Often he looked angry. By the time we left for America, I knew that the government had not sent him to live with us. Still, I continued to think he served no purpose. Also, I found him frightening.
My father was waiting for us in the arrivals hall at the airport. He was leaning against a metal railing and he appeared angry. I saw him and got anxious.
The apartment my father had rented had one bedroom. It was in a tall, brown-brick building in Queens. The apartment’s gray metal front door swung open into a foyer with a wooden floor. Beyond this was a living room with a reddish brown carpet that went from wall to wall. Other than in the movies, I had never seen a carpet. Birju and my parents walked across the foyer and into the living room. I went to the carpet’s edge and stopped. A brass metal strip held it to the floor. I took a step forward. I felt as if I were stepping onto a painting. I tried not to bring my weight down.
My father took us to the bathroom to show us toilet paper and hot water. While my mother was interested in status, being better educated than others or being considered more proper, my father was just interested in being rich. I think this was because although both of my parents had grown up poor, my father’s childhood had been much more desperate. At some point my grandfather, my father’s father, had begun to believe that thorns were growing out of his palms. He had taken a razor and picked at them till they were shaggy with scraps of skin. Because of my grandfather’s problems, my father had grown up feeling that no matter what he did, people would look down on him. As a result, he cared less about convincing people of his merits and more about just owning things.
The bathroom was narrow. It had a tub, sink, and toilet in a row along one wall. My father reached between Birju and me to turn on the tap. Hot water came shaking and steaming from the faucet. He stepped back and looked at us to gauge our reaction.
I had never seen hot water coming from a tap before. In India, during winter, my mother used to get up early to heat pots of water on the stove so we could bathe. Watching the hot water spill as if water being hot meant nothing, as if there was an endless supply, I had the sense of being in a fairy tale, one of those stories with a jug that is always full of milk or a bag that never empties of food.
During the coming days, the wealth of America kept astonishing me. The television had programming from morning till night. I had never been in an elevator before and when I pressed a button in the elevator and the elevator started moving, I felt powerful that it had to obey me. In our shiny brass mailbox in the lobby, we received ads on colored paper. In India colored paper could be sold to the recycler for more money than newsprint. The sliding glass doors of our apartment building would open when we approached. Each time this happened, I felt that we had been mistaken for somebody important.
Outside our building was a four-lane road. This was usually full of cars, and every few blocks there were traffic lights. In India, the only traffic light I had ever seen was near India Gate. My parents had taken me and Birju for picnics near there, and when they did, we would go look at the light. People were so unused to being directed by a light that a traffic guard in a white uniform and white pith helmet stood underneath, repeating its directions with his hands.
My father, who had seemed pointless in India, had brought us to America, and made us rich. What he had done was undeniable. He now seemed mysterious, like he was a different person, someone who looked like my father but was not the same man.
All the time now my father said things that revealed him as knowledgeable, as someone who could not just be ignored. My mother, Birju, and I had decided that a hot dog was made from dog meat. We had even discussed what part of a dog a hot dog must be made of. We had agreed that it had to be a tail. Then my father came home and heard us and started laughing.
Until we arrived in America, my mother had been the one who made all the decisions about Birju and me. Now I realized that my father, too, had plans for us. This felt both surprising and intrusive, like having my cheeks pinched by a relative I did not know.
He took Birju and me to a library. I had been in two libraries till then. One had had newspapers but not books and was used primarily by people searching employment ads. This had been a small, noisy room next to a barbershop. The other had been on the second floor of a temple, and one had to pay to join. This had had books, but these were kept locked in glass-fronted cabinets.
The library in Queens was bigger than either of the two I had seen. It had several rooms, and they were long, with many metal shelves. The library had thousands of books, and the librarian said we could check out as many as we wanted. At first, I did not believe her.
My father told Birju and me that he would give us fifty cents for each book we read. This bribing struck me as un-Indian and wrong. My mother had told us that Americans were afraid of demanding things from their children. She said this was because American parents did not care about their children and were unwilling to do the hard thing of disciplining them. If my father wanted us to read, what he should have done was threaten to beat us. I wondered whether my father might have become too American during the year that he was living alone. It seemed typical of him to choose to identify with wealthy Americans instead of the propriety of India.
I wanted to take out ten picture books.
My father said, “You think I’m going to give you money for such small books?”
Along with Birju and me reading, the other thing my father wanted was for Birju to get into a school called the Bronx High School of Science, where the son of one of his colleagues had been accepted.
MY MOTHER, BIRJU, and I had taken everything we could from the airplane: red Air India blankets, pillows with paper pillowcases, headsets, sachets of ketchup, packets of salt and pepper, air-sickness bags. Birju and I slept on mattresses on the living room floor, and we used the blankets until they frayed and tore. Around the time that they did, we started going to school.
At school I sat at the very back of the class, in the row closest to the door. Often I couldn’t understand what my teacher was saying. I had studied English in India, but either my teacher spoke too quickly and used words I didn’t know, or I was so afraid that her words sounded garbled to my ears.
It was strange to be among so many whites. They all looked alike. When a boy came up to me between periods and asked a question, it took me a moment to realize I had spoken to him before.
We had lunch in an asphalt yard surrounded by a high chain-link fence. Wheeled garbage cans were spread around the yard. I was often bullied. Sometimes a little boy would come up to me and tell me that I smelled bad. Then, if I said anything, a bigger boy would appear so suddenly that I couldn’t tell where he had come from. He would knock me down. He’d stand over me, fists clenched, and demand, “You want to fight? You want to fight?”
Sometimes boys surrounded me and shoved me back and forth, keeping me upright as a kind of game.
Often, standing in a corner of the asphalt yard, I would think, There has been a mistake. I am not the sort of boy who is pushed around. I am good at cricket. I am good at marbles.
On Diwali, it was odd to go to school, odd and painful to stand outside the brown brick building waiting for its doors to open. In India, everything would be closed for the festival. All of us children would be home dressed in good clothes—clothes that were too nice to play in, and yet by the afternoon, we would be outside doing just that. Now, in America, standing on the sidewalk, I imagined India, with everyone home for the new year. At that moment, I felt the life I was living in America was not important, that no matter how rich America was, how wonderful it was to have cartoons on TV, only life in India mattered.
One day a blue aerogramme came from one of Birju’s friends, a boy who had not been smart or especially popular. I read the letter and couldn’t understand why this boy got to be in India while I was here.
At school I was so confused that everything felt jumbled. The school was three stories tall, with hallways that
looped on themselves and stairways connecting the floors like a giant game of Snakes and Ladders. Not only could I not tell white people apart, but I often got lost trying to find my classroom. I worried how, at the end of the day, I would find the stairway to take me down to the door from which I knew the way home. Within a few months, I became so afraid of getting lost in the vastness of the school that I wouldn’t leave the classroom when I had to use the toilet. I imagined that if I left, I might end up wandering the hallways and not be able to get back to my class. I imagined I would have to stay in the building after school ended, that I would have to spend the night in school.
QUEENS WAS A port of entry for Indians. Indian stores were not specialized then. The same store that sold Red Fort rice also carried saris, also had calculators, blood pressure cuffs, and the sorts of things that people took back to India as gifts. Back then, even in Queens, there were not yet enough Indians for the stores to carry produce. To get bitter gourds and papayas and anything that might spoil, my father went to Chinatown.
In India, to earn blessings, my mother used to prepare extra rotis at every meal to feed the cows that wandered our neighborhood. In America, we went to temple on Fridays to, as my mother said, begin the weekend with a clean mind. Our temple was one of just a few on the Eastern Seaboard. Until recently it had been a church. Inside the large, dim chamber there were idols along three walls and the air smelled of incense, like the incense in temples in India. In India, though, temples also smelled of flowers, of sweat from the crowds, of spoilage from the milk used to bathe the idols. Here, along with the smell of incense, there was only a faint odor of mildew. Because the temple smelled so simple, it seemed fake.
ONE NIGHT, SNOW drifted down from a night sky. I felt like I was in a book or TV show.
FOR ME, THE two best things about America were television and the library. Every Saturday night I watched The Love Boat. I looked at the women in their one-piece bathing suits and their high heels and imagined what it would be like when I was married. I decided that when I was married, I would be very serious, and my silence would lead to misunderstandings between me and my wife. We would have a fight and later make up and kiss. She would be wearing a blue swimsuit as we kissed.