by Akhil Sharma
THROUGH AN AGENCY we hired a nurse’s aide to read to Birju and exercise him. This aide came at eight in the morning and left at four. Another came at night, from ten until six. Then, after a week or two, miracle workers who said they could wake Birju began arriving. We were sometimes able to save money by dispensing with the day aide.
Some of the miracle workers were the same ones who had visited us in the nursing home. The first was Mr. Mehta. By profession, he was a petroleum engineer, but Mr. Mehta was unemployed. He would come at nine in the morning. Each of his visits started with him flinging a saffron-colored sheet over Birju, who lay on his exercise bed, a tall wooden platform that spent most of the day beneath the room’s chandelier.
After he straightened and smoothed the sheet, Mr. Mehta would kneel down beside Birju and begin to pray. He would pray for fifteen minutes or so, hands pressed tightly together. Slender, balding, dark-skinned, he always wore gray dress pants and black socks. The saffron sheet was printed with oms and swastikas. When Mr. Mehta finished praying, he would stand and begin to make his way around the bed, pulling out an arm or a leg from beneath the sheet and rubbing it vigorously till the hair stood on end. Once the hair was standing, he would put the limb back under the sheet. When he reached Birju’s head, he would rub his hands together and clap them to Birju’s ears. He’d cry, “Aum namah Shivaya.”
I thought Mr. Mehta was strange, but I had heard my mother listen patiently to many strange things.
At the end of Mr. Mehta’s first day, my mother asked him, “Do you notice any difference?” She was standing in the vestibule that the front door opened onto. Mr. Mehta was sitting on the stairs putting on his shoes.
“Everything takes time,” he said. He smiled as if he were a teacher and my mother a nervous student who needed to be calmed and told to be patient.
“But any difference?”
“Don’t worry, ji. We will return your son to you.”
As she stood looking at him, my mother’s face appeared small and meek. It occurred to me that my mother was taking Mr. Mehta seriously. This surprised me. Until that moment, I had thought that we were allowing him into the house because if a potential cure was free and caused no harm, then why not attempt it?
Once Mr. Mehta was gone, my mother perched on the exercise bed and began feeding Birju pureed bananas with a long spoon. Newspapers were spread over his chest. My mother maneuvered the spoon between Birju’s teeth and said, “Eat, baby, eat. Eat, or Ajay will take your food.”
Looking at her, I remembered that earlier in the day, when Mr. Mehta arrived, my mother had been very excited. She had told him, “If you return Birju to how he was, I will sit at your feet the rest of my life.” I had taken this for politeness, since if someone comes to perform a cure and doesn’t ask for money, the least one can do is pretend to believe.
I watched my mother feed Birju. He drooled clots of gray mush. Periodically she wiped his chin with a hand towel. After several minutes, I said, “Mommy, do you think Birju could get better?”
“God can do anything,” she said, keeping her eyes on Birju.
My father came home at six. He stood in Birju’s room drinking tea, sweating lightly. I went and stood beside him. I pressed my head against his waist.
My thoughts were jumbled. Hearing my mother say that Birju could get better had scared me. It had made me feel all alone.
My father smelled a little of hard alcohol being sweated out, something like nail polish remover evaporating. “Full of love are you?” he asked. He patted my head.
A little later, my father and I swung Birju into his wheelchair and rolled him backward into the kitchen, to the head of the kitchen table. My father began to feed Birju a puree of the roti and lentils that we would be eating a little later. Birju took some of the food into his mouth and spat the rest onto his chest. I had seen this many times before, but on the evening of Mr. Mehta’s first visit, I turned my head away.
Most nights, my mother and I played cards. My father would be upstairs in his room and my mother and I sat on either side of Birju’s bed and dealt for three, placing the discards on Birju’s chest and stomach. The television in the corner would play Jeopardy. As we handled the cards, we cheated. We had Birju throw away his best cards. Sometimes we just stole them. That night especially, I felt the need to act very brave. I spoke loudly. I teased Birju. “Pay attention! Playing with you is no fun.” We played until about ten, when the night aide came.
THE NEXT DAY and the day after and the day after that, Mr. Mehta worked diligently, moving briskly around the bed, taking out a leg, rubbing it, tucking it under the sheet, moving to the next leg, then up to an arm. Now and then my mother would send me to Birju’s room with a glass of Coke, which Mr. Mehta drank in gulps.
All morning my mother would stay in the kitchen cooking elaborate lunches for him. The steam cooker would huff, and the pot of oil in which she fried puris would send up waves of heat. The sight of my mother in the kitchen caused my chest to hurt. Her belief that Birju could get better made me feel that she didn’t love us, that she valued believing something ridiculous over taking care of us, that she was willing to let us be hurt so she could have her hope.
One night, my father began shouting at my mother. This was in the kitchen. Birju was in the wheelchair. My father was drunk. His face was lax and his lips wet. “You couldn’t try these cures at the nursing home and so you couldn’t accept that Birju is dead.”
“What are you talking about?” my mother demanded. She was standing at the stove. “You are drunk.”
“Why am I drunk? Tell me—why am I drunk?”
My mother didn’t respond.
“I am so unhappy, and you have no pity for me.”
My mother became irritated. “If I lost a diamond earring,” she hissed, “would I not look everywhere?”
As the days passed, I tried to spend more time with my father. In the evening, when he came home and sat on the radiator in the laundry room taking off his shoes, I boiled his tea. When he went to Birju’s room, I followed with the tea and a plate of biscuits.
My father looked indifferent as he took these from me. I felt that his indifference was my fault, that I should have appreciated him more in the past.
At six thirty, we swung Birju into his wheelchair so that he could get his oral feeding. At eight, my father went upstairs to his and my mother’s room to drink. Though we didn’t talk much, it seemed to me that by making tea and being near him, I was sharing in his thoughts. I wanted us to be close, and so I began believing that we were.
When my father stood quietly in Birju’s room, drinking his tea, I imagined that he was thinking about what he could do to make our life better. When he went upstairs to drink, I saw him choosing to be happy. It was, in my eyes, a mark of sophistication to find a way to be happy in a difficult situation.
In July I turned twelve.
Within a week of Mr. Mehta’s first visit, the phone in the kitchen rang regularly with people who wanted to come and watch him at work. Some of the people who visited we knew. Others were strangers. They stood in Birju’s room and watched the cure like tourists visiting a temple to see an exorcism.
“This is true fire sacrifice,” a man said to my mother in Birju’s room.
My mother said, “What choice do I have?” She looked embarrassed. She knew that the visitors saw her as slightly crazy but they found what she was doing noble and very Indian, and so this made them feel good about being Indian themselves, about going to temple, about doing things such as scolding their children when they got bad grades.
I brought the visitors cups of tea as they watched Birju. I was full of anger and shame as I did this. A few of them pressed dollar bills into my hands.
AT SOME POINT during his third week, Mr. Mehta’s pace began to flag. When I brought him a glass of Coke, he sat down and sipped it slowly as if he were drinking something hot.
One afternoon, I was coming down the stairs when Mr. Mehta called out to me. He was standing by the exe
rcise bed, holding one of Birju’s arms in the air. “Do you ever get headaches?” he asked.
I knew Mr. Mehta wanted me to say yes. Speaking the truth automatically, though, I said, “No.”
“Never?”
I was quiet for a moment. “Sometimes,” I said hesitantly.
Mr. Mehta smiled. “Look at grass. If you spend ten minutes each day looking at something green, you’ll never get headaches.”
After this, whenever I came into Birju’s room, Mr. Mehta would try to strike up a conversation. “Sit for a minute,” he’d say. “Let me finish this.”
I’d sit on a low table next to the hospital bed. Once Mr. Mehta had completed his circuit, he would sit on the hospital bed and talk. One time, he told me that on his first weekend in America, he had gone to a museum of oil production in Titusville, Pennsylvania. He had wanted to see this museum ever since he heard about it in college. “Did you know people used to drink oil because they thought it was good for them? Maybe it’s true. In small doses.”
Mr. Mehta had traveled the world. He had been to Rome. “If we had broken buildings like that in Delhi, no whitey would say, ‘Isn’t this wonderful?’” Mr. Mehta had also been to Paris. “Every building there looks like Parliament House. It is the most beautiful city in the world. There is dog shit everywhere, though. What is the point of a city being so beautiful if you have to always be looking down?”
One morning, Mr. Mehta’s small brown hatchback did not pull up in front of our lawn. At ten o’clock, my mother phoned his house. She sat at the kitchen table, the cordless phone to her ear and the phone’s antenna outstretched. From where I stood, I could hear the high complaining voice of Mrs. Mehta. She said Mr. Mehta was sick, and something in her tone suggested that we were stupid to call and inquire. The next day, my mother phoned again. The third day, as I watched my mother punch in the numbers, I felt helplessness that my mother wouldn’t stop calling.
Mrs. Mehta’s voice came sharp over the phone. “Yes, he is still sick,” she said and hung up.
My mother turned toward me. Her face was tight. “Indians are that way. They are cowards. Instead of admitting they made a mistake, they would rather lie and try to blame you.”
THE STRANGENESS OF the miracle workers made the days dreamlike. The next miracle worker was a white-skinned man with green eyes and a square flabby face. This man had been born in Kashmir and lived in Philadelphia. He told us that the drive to our house took two hours. As soon as he said this, I knew he wouldn’t come for long.
On his first day, the man complained about the heat. My mother and I placed three table fans on the floor of Birju’s room, their heads tilted up, turning side to side.
Regularly the man went outside to smoke on our front steps. As he smoked, he looked so angry that it was as if he had just been insulted. “My God,” my mother said, “I feel frightened asking him to stand away from the house.”
On his third day, the man arrived and, within an hour, said he was going out to smoke. Instead he walked down the steps, crossed the lawn to his car, got in, and drove away.
That night, during Birju’s oral feeding, my mother told my father that she had no choice, that she had to try everything to wake Birju. “What kind of mother would I be if I don’t try?”
My father didn’t answer. He looked down at Birju’s food smeared face.
“What kind of mother would I be?”
Again my father didn’t respond.
“I am a mother,” she said. It was as if she wanted a fight and so wouldn’t stop talking.
“If there were a cure, Shuba,” my father said finally, still keeping his eyes on my brother, “wouldn’t it be in all the newspapers?”
After this man there was a woman who tried bathing Birju with turmeric powder. Birju began to look orange.
Then there was an elderly man who walked with a stoop. On his first day, he gave me eleven dollars. I felt embarrassed because I wanted the money but was afraid that by taking it I would give up my right to hate him.
This man’s cure involved sitting by my brother and reading facts about him from a yellow legal pad. He would sit behind Birju’s head and rest his hands on Birju’s temples. This was to allow healing powers to flow from his body into my brother’s. “My name is Birju Mishra. I was born on October 7, 1968. My favorite hobby is making model airplanes. My ambition is to be a surgeon. My best friend is Himanshu. I got into the Bronx High School of Science.”
Eventually, the man grew bored with trying to wake Birju. At some point, he suggested that he teach me exercises for my back.
“My back is fine,” I said.
My mother said, “When you’re older, it won’t be. Learn now.”
The man had me lie on Birju’s floor and raise my feet into the air and try touching my toes.
August fifth was the second anniversary of Birju’s accident. That morning, when I woke up, I lay on my side. I couldn’t believe that everything had changed because of three minutes.
One evening, not long after the anniversary, my father was in Birju’s room drinking tea. I came and stood next to him. I was very unhappy. My father must have sensed this. He patted my head quickly, and in his quickness I knew that there was both an acknowledgment of me and also a desire that I move away and not say anything. After a moment I said, “Daddy, I am so sad.”
“You’re sad?” my father said angrily. “I want to hang myself every day.”
Birju was lying on his exercise bed. It was the first day of seventh grade and I had just come home. I saw my brother and began screaming. “Hello, fatty! Hello, smelly! Who have you been bothering today?” I was standing in the doorway that my father and I rolled Birju through each morning. I was grinning. “Do you think of anybody but yourself?” I shouted. “In my life I have never met anyone so selfish.” It was a gray day. The chandelier was lit. Birju was wearing thin cotton pajamas. He was puffing spit, his eyes rolled back as if he were trying to remember something. “Smelly! Smelly!” I shouted. I didn’t know why I was screaming. I felt possessed.
I walked up to the exercise bed. I took the washcloth that lay on Birju’s chest and wiped his mouth and chin. The cloth caught on his stubble, and I had the feeling that I was hurting him. “All day you do nothing,” I scolded. “All day you lie here and fart.” A fear like cold seeped into me. “I have to go to school. I have to study and take tests.” The more I talked, the more scared I got. It was as if my own voice was pumping fear into me.
Sitting in a folding chair with my elbows on the bed, I heard my voice growing shrill. “Birju brother, you are lucky not to go to school. In seventh grade, we walk from class to class. It isn’t like elementary school where you stay in one room and teachers come to you.” As I said this, I became aware that while for me, time passing meant new schools and new teachers, for Birju, it meant wearing thin cotton pajamas and then flannel ones. I became so afraid I hopped up.
I climbed into the exercise bed. I lay down next to Birju. I slipped an arm under his shoulders. Birju’s breath smelled of vomit. He smacked his lips. He still looked lost in thought. Till that day, perhaps because Birju had been mostly in the hospital and nursing home and these had seemed temporary, some part of me had seen the difference between our lives as also temporary. Now, going to school and coming back home and seeing him, no part of me could deny how much luckier I was than my brother.
“Brother-life,” I said, using the phrase because it was melodramatic and because by saying something melodramatic, I could make myself sound ridiculous, like a child, and so not to be blamed for my good luck of being OK, “my English teacher wanted us to write a paragraph on what we did during the summer. I didn’t have a pencil. What kind of fool am I?” As I spoke, I had the feeling that I was being watched. I had the sense that some man was looking at me and that this man knew I was not very good and yet I had received so much of my family’s luck. I began speaking in an even more childish voice. “I have homework. It’s the first day of school, and I have homewo
rk. I wish I were back in first grade.” As I spoke, I remembered Arlington. I remembered lying on my mattress and talking to God. The fact that nothing had changed, that Birju was still the way he was, that we still needed him to be OK to be OK ourselves, made me feel like I was being gripped and slowly crushed. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to get good marks without having to work? Brother-life, tomorrow you go to school and I’ll stay home. I took a lunch box to school. In seventh grade, you don’t take lunch boxes. Boys made fun of me.”
Talking, talking, talking, I slowly began to get calmer.
THE NEXT MORNING, as I walked down the street to the corner where the school bus stopped, I pictured Birju the way I had left him, in his quiet, dim room, snoring on his back, his mouth open. I saw my mother, too. She was in the laundry room, stuffing the washing machine with the sheets and pillowcases from last night. Not only was I luckier than my brother, but I was also more fortunate than my mother. I wanted to shriek. While a part of me was glad I wasn’t like my brother, no part of me wished to be more fortunate than my mother. To be luckier than her was to be different from her, it was to be apart from her, it was to have a life that would take me away from her.
At school, the guilt and sadness were like wearing clothes still damp from the wash. Whenever I moved, I felt as though I were touching something icy. In history class, I sat in the first desk of the fourth row. I learned that Andrew Jackson was called “Old Hickory.” My knowing this meant that I had gained something, that I was being made rich while my mother and brother remained poor.
In school, there were twenty Indians among the five hundred or so students. Three or four of them spoke without accents and bought lunch or brought American-style sandwiches. The rest of us sat at the same long table in the cafeteria, the girls at one end and the boys at another. The white and black children abused us. Boys would walk past us and call, “Shit! I smell shit!” In my guilt and shame, I wanted to fight, to be nothing like myself. I shouted insults. “I fucked your mother in the ass. That’s what you’re smelling.”