by Akhil Sharma
My father had his hands behind his back, as if we were in an expensive store and he didn’t want anyone to think he might steal something. In the car, he had said to my mother that there was no point in going to a place we could not afford.
My father asked the woman, “Do you use those pads that let the nurses know if the patient has soiled himself?”
“Yes.”
My mother told the woman about how Birju didn’t get his food on time and then he vomited his medicines. “That shouldn’t happen,” the woman said. “That is unacceptable.” Perhaps because my mother looked distressed, the woman said, “Beclamide is quickly absorbed. He probably doesn’t lose too much.”
Everything about the home was wonderful. Around every corner was a nurses’ station with women in white uniforms. Everywhere we went, there was the smell of potpourri instead of the sour odor of recently cleaned shit. The hallway walls had black streaks at the height of wheelchair wheels and chipped paint at the height of gurneys, but these were minor things.
I thought about the three hundred thousand that the lawyers had taken. I thought that if Birju had not had his accident, he would have become a surgeon, and we would have been able to afford the home.
At some point I fell behind my parents. I started walking with my eyes closed. I swung my head from side to side and twirled in circles as I walked.
“Go outside,” my mother scolded. “Don’t leave the porch.”
The porch was covered in black rubber matting. I left it and went onto the lawn. I found a branch and began dragging it around the house. The house flashed its windows at me and I felt as if it knew we could not afford to bring Birju there and yet were wasting people’s time.
We went to other homes. Going to a home was like being on holiday. We were not at the nursing home with Birju but we were also doing our duty, and so there wasn’t the guilt that came from being away from him.
Once, we went to a home in Boston. The home was a series of row houses along a wide road. Inside one, a young man with a blond mustache took us on a tour. On a stairway landing that had blue Wet Paint signs on the walls, we met a nurse, a very fat woman with a port-wine stain on her cheek. The young man introduced her. The nurse said, “I wouldn’t put anybody from my family here. They say they give stimulation therapy every day. All they do is put patients in a room together and turn on the TV. Animal shelters do the same.” While the nurse was speaking, the young man smiled and stared blankly at the wall behind my parents and the woman.
The nicest trip we ever took was to New Hope, Pennsylvania. New Hope was a tourist town, with little houses that spread up one side of a river valley. The nursing home was like most nursing homes: it had a sunny cafeteria where old people damaged from strokes sat in wheelchairs spitting food, and hallways that had closed doors with signs that the person within had pneumonia.
Once we had seen the home, we went for a walk around the town. There were ice cream shops and shops selling tee shirts. I saw something called an invisible dog leash. The waves against the river embankment sounded like window blinds lifting and falling in the wind, and the water, disturbing the reflections of the clouds, resembled waves slipping over ice floes.
MY PARENTS BEGAN to speak of buying a house where they could take care of Birju themselves.
“Even if we found a good nursing home, I would have to go there every day,” my mother said.
Mr. Narayan sat by Birju’s bed. It was a weekend afternoon. “Living with him sounds very hard,” he said meekly.
“It isn’t fair for Birju’s mother to have to come every day,” my father said. He was standing and drinking tea. “How long can she do this? She has to have a life, too.”
Mr. Narayan didn’t answer. He was quiet for a moment, and he looked like he was concentrating earnestly, trying to comprehend something that was beyond him. When he spoke, he sounded hesitant. “Still, it sounds very hard.”
“If we don’t come every day,” my mother said, “he will get bed sores, he will get infections, he’ll die. We have no choice. Either we do everything, or we do nothing.”
A few days later, after prayers at temple, Mr. Narayan introduced us to a real estate agent. Mr. Gupta was tall, muscular, handsome. He had a ring on every finger, and to me, because I assumed they were worn for luck, he looked superstitious, as business people tend to be. Mr. Narayan said that Mr. Gupta would help us and not charge a commission. Mr. Gupta said, “It would be a blessing for me if I can be of help.”
At this generosity, my mother began telling him how terrible our life was. “I get so scared every morning,” she said. “When I walk into the nursing home, I think, What am I going to discover today?” My mother did not normally complain to strangers, but perhaps she assumed that somebody willing to do us such a favor must feel a great deal of sympathy and so she could be honest.
Mr. Gupta stood silently, politely before us.
“Thank you,” my father said.
A few days later, we went with Mr. Gupta to look at houses. Mr. Gupta owned a blue Mercedes sedan. None of us had ever sat in a Mercedes before. This was exciting.
My father got into the front passenger seat, and my mother and I got in the back. It was a Saturday afternoon in spring.
As we drove, apropos of nothing, my father said, “Mr. Gupta, the tastiest food I’ve ever eaten was cooked over dung fire.”
Mr. Gupta didn’t say anything. He stared ahead as he drove slowly, his hands near the top of the steering wheel.
“I think there is something about dung that makes flavors sweet.”
My father looked at Mr. Gupta as if he wanted a reaction. There was an eagerness to his face, and I could tell that he felt important because he was riding in a Mercedes and was going to spend thousands of dollars.
“I think so, too,” Mr. Gupta finally said, switching on the turn signal. “I’ve told my children this. ‘Dung!’ they say. ‘Eeew!’”
“I like simple things. Simple things are sufficient. A roti, some pickle, maybe a dry subji. That is enough.”
“The best things are simple,” Mr. Gupta agreed. “I don’t like rich things with cheese. You have to stay up half the night digesting.”
“Happiness can only be found inside oneself. It can’t be found on the outside in expensive things. You hear that, Ajay?”
My mother stared out the window.
“Did you hear?”
“Yes, Daddy.”
“I worry about India,” my father said to Mr. Gupta.
“Why is that, Mr. Mishra?”
“Even the smallest things people don’t do. Mahatma Gandhi advised, after you relieve yourself, just cover it with a little dirt so the flies don’t spread disease. Does anybody do that? That’s the kind of people India has.”
“I hate to say it, but it’s true.” Mr. Gupta said this without emotion. To me he appeared to be agreeing because this was the polite thing to do.
My father kept talking. “It’s not so much that we are better than whites, but that the people who come from India to America are the best Indians.”
We visited several houses that day. It was strange to go into bathrooms and to think that a white man had stood in the tub, that the dirt and smell of meat that had covered the white man had been rinsed into the tub. It was strange to walk on carpets and to think that the bare feet of white people had walked over them. I kept expecting to find a Playboy magazine on a coffee table.
After that first Saturday, we began visiting houses for sale every weekend. One afternoon, we were in a house whose owner had already moved away. He had left behind his furniture. I stood in the kitchen. It had a sliding glass door. My parents were outside on the small back lawn. I could see them talking to Mr. Gupta but couldn’t hear them. The kitchen was completely furnished. There was a table, a toaster oven, a coffeemaker, a wooden block with knives in it. Standing there I had the sudden realization that probably we would never go back to India, that probably we would live in America forever. The realization di
sturbed me. I saw that one day I would be nothing like who I was right then. I felt all alone.
I had not told anyone at school about Birju. I had been afraid that if I did, they would misunderstand in the same way that the women at the Ramayan Path had misunderstood, and then their confusion would remind me that what had happened to Birju did not matter for most of the world.
One morning, while the teacher was taking attendance, I leaned over my desk toward Jeff, the boy who sat in front of me. “Hey,” I hissed. “I have a brother. When I said I didn’t have a brother, I was lying.” Jeff turned around. He had a pale oval face, sandy hair, and a nose that came to a point. “My brother’s name is Birju. Birju. My brother is fifteen, almost sixteen. He had an accident in a swimming pool. He jumped into a pool and bumped his head on the bottom and was underwater for three minutes. He became brain damaged. He’s in a nursing home near Menlo Park Mall. This happened nearly two years ago. It happened in August. Not last August, the August before.” I said all of this in a rush, feeling scared, feeling almost like I was watching myself from the outside. “I’m sorry I lied to you.”
For a moment Jeff looked at me silently. Then he nodded. “That’s all right,” he said. “Just don’t do it again.” He turned away to face the front of the class.
Mr. Esposito called Jeff’s name. Jeff raised his arm and said, “Here.” Mr. Esposito then called my name and I too raised my arm.
As attendance continued, I looked at the back of Jeff’s head. Beneath his light brown hair was very white skin. My heart was racing. I wanted Jeff to turn around and express pity. Attendance ended. Mr. Esposito asked us to take out our social studies textbook. The children around me began doing so. I leaned over my desk once more. “My brother was very smart,” I said. “He had gotten into the Bronx High School of Science. The Bronx High School of Science is one of the best schools in the country.”
Jeff nodded. The back of his head went up and down.
Above the blackboard was a banner with capital and lowercase letters side-by-side: AaBbCc. Big brother, little brother.
I sat back in my chair. I had decided to tell Jeff because I was so unhappy, because everything was terrible, and because I had thought that if I told him about Birju, he would pity me and become my friend. Now I had the feeling that I had wasted something.
After school, I stood on the sidewalk and waited for my mother. She picked me up in our station wagon. At the nursing home, the door to Birju’s room was open with the blinds raised and the lights on. We left Birju’s room this way so that Birju would be easier to see from the corridor, in case something went wrong.
My mother entered Birju’s room. She yelled, “Hello, lazy! Hello, smelly!”
Birju jerked in place. The springs of the bed squeaked.
“Fatso!” I shouted as I walked in behind her, and Birju jerked once more.
“Look at what your brother calls you,” my mother said. She pulled Birju up by the shoulders and slid a second pillow under his head.
“Fatty! Fatty!” I cried.
“Tell him, ‘I’m no fatty.’”
Birju was chewing his mustache. His face was swollen and almost square from medication. “Fatty, fatty,” I said. I smiled and wagged my head. Pretending to be younger than I was, too young to notice Birju’s gruesomeness, always seemed the proper way to behave.
My mother spread a newspaper over Birju’s chest. Sitting sidesaddle on the bed, she began feeding him pureed bananas using a long spoon that was coated in rubber. “Yum, yum,” she said as she pressed the spoon to Birju’s mouth. Birju smacked his lips, took the mush into his mouth, and then puffed it onto the newspaper.
I saw this and thought, Even a baby swallows what it likes. Immediately, cool guilt slid over me like a cloud’s shadow.
I WAS AT THE school playground the next morning, waiting for the starting bell, when Jeff came up to me. He had a book bag dangling from one shoulder and both hands in his back pockets. He said, “Have you ever asked your brother to blink once for yes and twice for no?”
One of the reasons I had not told anyone was because I was afraid of questions like this. “I have. It doesn’t work.” Even as I had tried this in the hospital, with nobody else around, I had known that it would have no effect.
“Have you ever shouted ‘Fire!’ and run away and then seen if he would get up?”
“No,” I murmured.
Jeff stared. “That might work.”
“I’ll try.” I was quiet for a little while. Jeff remained standing before me. I said, “My brother was a genius. He took French for two weeks and after that he could speak it perfectly.”
Jeff nodded. He looked serious, like he was being given a secret mission.
The school doors opened. Jeff and I went inside together.
At lunch I sat down across from him and his best friend, Michael Bu, a Chinese boy with a round face and sharp little teeth like a fish. “Can your brother not talk at all,” Michael asked, “or does he sound retarded?”
My face became hot. I had considered asking Jeff not to tell anyone about Birju, but it had seemed too much to ask. “Not at all.”
“What does he look like?” Michael asked.
I put a tater tot in my mouth and pointed a finger at my lips.
“What’s wrong with your brother?” Mario asked. Mario was sitting next to Michael. Mario was very tall and wide. He had fuzz on his upper lip. Once, when the class sang, “You Are My Sunshine,” he had cried. The children sometimes mocked him by singing the song.
“He had an accident in a swimming pool and became brain damaged.”
“Does he open his eyes?” Mario asked.
“Yes.”
Jeff said, “I saw a television show where a woman sees a murder and goes unconscious.”
I pursed my lips to appear serious. “That happens.”
“How does he eat?” Jeff asked.
I began to feel attacked.
“There is a tube in his stomach.” I told them about the Isocal formula and the gastrointestinal tube. I said, “My brother was a great basketball player. He played two games and immediately got so good that he began beating people. When he played, people came to watch.” By lying, I felt that I had placed a finger on a balance that was tilting too far to one side.
Within a few days, everybody in class had heard about Birju. Still, boys and girls came up to me during recess and asked eagerly whether I had a brother, as if the secret could be revealed once more.
Whenever I told someone about Birju, I felt compelled to lie about his wonderfulness. Because we had received so little money in the settlement, which meant that Birju was an ordinary boy, lying seemed the only way to explain that what had happened to him was awful, was the worst thing in the world. Birju, I said, had rescued a woman trapped in a burning car. Birju had had a great talent for music and a photographic memory.
Sometimes I didn’t tell these lies, but only imagined them. I concocted an ideal brother. I took the fact that Birju had told our parents that I was being bullied and turned this into him being a karate expert who had protected me by beating up various boys. These fantasies felt real. They excited me. They made me love Birju and when I was in his room kiss his hands and cheeks. They also cultivated rage at the loss, the way my father’s claims of racism cultivated it for him.
A part of me was anxious about the lies I told. I was afraid of being caught or doubted. Also, making up these stories seemed to serve as evidence that Birju had not been good enough for what happened to him to count as terrible. Each morning I woke on the sofa thinking of the lies I had told. Often I didn’t want to go to school.
At some point, I became aware that Jeff no longer believed my lies. Yet when I came up to him on the playground before school, loyalty demanded that I keep lying. “Birju solved a math problem that professors hadn’t been able to solve for years,” or, “My brother was a very fast runner. Once, he threw a ball straight ahead of him, and he chased it and caught it before it hit the
ground.” One morning, when I stood outside school and told Jeff a lie, he stepped back and rolled his eyes.
IN MAY, WE put down our deposit on a house and told the nursing home that we were taking Birju away. The evening of that day, once we had finished dinner, my father put on his shoes to leave.
“You don’t need to go,” my mother said, still sitting on the floor. She said it quietly, looking up at him.
“Stop bothering me.”
After he was gone, I put the dishes in the sink, threw the newspaper in the trash can, and sat down on the sofa with a stack of Time magazines I had borrowed from the school library. I read Time as training, because it was boring and because I needed to be able to do boring things now that we would be caring for Birju. I read an article about the sound quality of LP records compared to that of CDs. I read a book review of a rich person’s biography. Supposedly the rich man was so cheap that he wouldn’t order desserts at restaurants because restaurants provided sweets for free at the ends of dinners. I wondered what kinds of restaurants these were.
My mother came and sat down at the other end of the sofa with her bag of sewing. Around ten, there was scratching at the door, metal on metal. We had heard this once before. That time my father had turned on the lights and stood by the door. He had shouted, “Who is it?” and kicked the door until the burglar went away.
Now, my mother stood by the door. “Who’s there?” she demanded.
There was a chuckle in the hallway. It sounded like my father. My mother yanked the door open. He was crouched in the hallway, trying to fit his key into the keyhole.
He came into the apartment. He walked toward the sofa and half fell onto it.
“Get me some water,” my father said. I went to the sink and poured him a glass.
My mother said, “Come lie down.” She helped him up and led him to the mattress behind the sofa. I brought the glass and handed it to my mother.
A few days later, on Friday night at temple, many different people came and tried to touch my parents’ feet. The news had spread that we were taking Birju out of the nursing home.