by Akhil Sharma
I left my room and came out into the dark hallway. A line of white light shone beneath the bathroom door. I wanted to shout at my father. I knocked. “Who?” my father said in a slurred voice.
“Can I come in?”
I pushed the door. My father was standing by the window. He was wearing gray pajamas. His face was sagging, and his eyes were dilated. The window was open, and a moist spring breeze was blowing in.
There was something about the reality of seeing my father’s loose face that made me stop being angry. “How are you, Daddy?” I asked.
“I am so happy,” he answered. He was smiling.
ANOTHER MORNING I woke to the sound of my mother’s voice shouting with what sounded like alarm, and I hurried to my parents’ room.
“You are going to lose your job,” my mother cried. She was standing at the foot of the bed while my father lay before her.
“They’re all like me, Shuba,” he slurred. “It’s a government office.”
“We won’t have insurance! Birju will be thrown out on the street.”
“I’m union. They say, ‘Come to a meeting.’ I answer, ‘Is there food? I only go to meetings with food.’”
My father was almost always late for work. Sometimes he left the house at noon. Sometimes he missed a day. Coming home from school, I would see his station wagon in the driveway, and my chest would tighten. I would walk into Birju’s room, see my mother sitting by the exercise bed reading to Birju, and her face would be grim. I would keep to myself, then, because I didn’t want her shouting at me. I’d go upstairs to my room and sit at my desk and read Hemingway. Hemingway had been an alcoholic and his characters often drank too much. Their drinking appeared false, though, because there were no consequences. It was like how cartoon characters fall off cliffs without being injured. Spotting this lie in Hemingway made me feel superior to him, and this bit of superiority led me to feel anger and contempt and being angry was pleasurable.
At some point, my father began missing one or two days of work a week. He was put on probation. He told my mother that he sat in an office with his supervisor, his union representative, and a very fat man who was the human resources person. He signed a piece of paper to document that he had been notified of the complaint.
When he had signed the paper, his supervisor said, “I don’t care if you show up drunk. You just have to come to work.”
“That’s not what he means,” the fat man murmured.
My father was not going to be told what to do. “You want to show you have power,” he shouted at his supervisor. “I know you.”
When she heard this, my mother said, “They do have power.”
“I am not going to be a slave, Shuba. Not for you. Not for Birju.”
“Always you find a way to bring in Birju.”
A few days later, I came home from school, and my father was sitting at the kitchen table. He had his back to the window. He was trying to drink tea. His hands were shaking.
My mother stood by the table. “Your father is going to stop drinking.” I wondered if I was expected to pretend to believe this. We went to Birju’s room. Birju had thick acne on his cheeks now as a side effect of one of his medications. The acne was as thick as bubbled paint, but because one was not expecting it, at first glance, he appeared to have rosy cheeks.
My father put a hand on Birju’s head. He swore on Birju’s life that he would not drink. I saw this and thought I was watching some melodrama that my parents had concocted.
“We have to help him,” my mother said to me. She said that my father was able to not drink on his own during the day. At night, though, the desire to drink was too much. He could not sleep without drinking.
That night, after Birju had received his oral feeding, the three of us sat around his hospital bed playing cards until the nurse’s aide came. When my father climbed the stairs, my mother and I followed. My mother carried a thermos of tea, and I held a tray before me. The tray was covered in plates of biscuits and sweets and bowls of nuts and various types of salty fried dough.
In the bedroom, my mother flipped on the light switch by the door. She turned on the lamps that stood on the nightstands. The room became bright. There was a mirror on top of the dresser, and our reflection in this and the reflections in the windows made the room seem crowded. Pointing the remote control, she flicked on the TV. The noise added to the sense of busyness.
We sat on my parents’ bed and played cards with the plates spread around us. My father sat cross-legged, head bowed, looking hopeless.
My mother asked me about school.
“It will be harder to be ranked first this year than last,” I said, angry that I was being asked to engage in this foolishness.
“Already making excuses.”
“It will be harder. Each year, it’s harder.”
The hours passed. Around two that night, my mother got tired. She turned to my father. “Do you feel sleepy?”
“No.”
She put a videotape in the VCR. I cleared the bed of plates and cups. We turned off the lights and lay stretched on the bed, my father in the middle. The television shook its light over us.
My father didn’t drink that night. The next evening, around five, he called to say that he was leaving work and should be home by six. The fact that my father made sure he told us this seemed to indicate that he was trying not to drink.
This second night, too, I sat with my mother and father by Birju’s bed. And then at ten, we marched up the stairs with the tea and snacks.
Two days passed without drinking and then three. I began feeling a strange exhilaration. At school I would picture us going up the stairs with my father. I would look forward to this.
FOR SEVERAL MONTHS, my father did not drink. In my memory, this period is wonderful. Tenth grade ended, and I was again ranked first. Summer started. I turned sixteen. During those months, I was so happy that at night I had a hard time sleeping. I would be asleep, yet I would be aware of my happiness the way that, when you sleep in a room full of sun, you are aware of the light.
When he came home from work, my father was quiet, glum. Sometimes he would go upstairs to change his clothes and not come down. I would go get him, and he would be sitting at the edge of his bed looking overwhelmed. The only time my father was his old self was when he was fighting with my mother. “You don’t care. You think you know what’s right and that everybody else is a fool.” Still, the fighting was much less than it used to be, and in my view, my mother was very patient. When my father shouted at her, she listened and did not reply. Once, she told him that what he was doing was very difficult and that every day she prayed he had strength.
I was glad for our changed life. In the morning, my father descended the stairs to bathe Birju. At night, my parents no longer shouted so loudly that the nurse’s aide had to come and stand at the bottom of the stairs and call out, “Mrs. Mishra, Mrs. Mishra,” in a high, put-upon voice.
I continued worrying that my father would drink. When he got home and went up the stairs, I watched to see if he put his hand on the railing, because he used to do this for support when he was drunk. At night, if I heard the swollen bathroom door shoved shut, I would wake and lie there, even though I had checked and there was no bottle of scotch under the sink.
One evening in the fall, 6:00 p.m. arrived and my father’s silver station wagon did not swing into the driveway. My mother and I went to Birju’s room and hefted him into his wheelchair. I rolled him into the kitchen. I stood the wheelchair at the head of the table and began feeding him pureed roti and lentils.
Seven passed. “What’s happened to him?” my mother asked nervously, wiping down the counters with tight looping motions.
We rolled Birju back to his bed. The television was on. We laid him down and sat on either side of him and played cards. Birju puffed spit and rolled his blind eyes.
My father came home around nine. My mother and I stood by the living room window and watched the car enter our driveway. She
, always worried about my father being drunk in public, said, “Thank God the aide isn’t here.”
In the kitchen a little later, my mother pleaded with my father. “This happens. Nobody can be perfect forever. Once or twice you make mistakes.”
My father was standing by the sink, his face dark and flushed. “Stop bothering me,” he murmured.
“Will you eat? Eat something.”
“Leave me alone.”
For a week, my father kept away from alcohol. He restrained himself without our having to stay awake beside him through the night.
He started drinking after this week and then, everything was exactly as it had been: him lying on the side of his bed, his foot on the floor; my mother standing by him and shouting; me grabbing him and yanking him and demanding he stand. Sometimes I couldn’t believe that there had been a time when he had not been drinking. In my memory, the summer that had just passed seemed long gone.
IN ELEVENTH GRADE, I took the PSAT. I met with my guidance counselor for help on deciding between various colleges.
Periodically Minakshi and I went to the movies. We would arrive separately, telling our parents that we were meeting friends. Being happy, I looked down on my parents for their unhappiness. I blamed them for it the way the rich cannot help but think that poor people must bring their poverty on themselves.
At home there were endless new humiliations: my father in Birju’s room late at night, drunk and sitting at the edge of the small circle of light cast by a table lamp, a Haitian aide looking at him as he talked about how happy he was.
My father loved drinking. Later he would tell me that drinking was freedom, peace of mind, that he felt like he was surrounded by problems and when he drank, it was as if the alcohol plucked him out from among them. He once said that he would get angry that he didn’t weigh more, because if he were heavier he would be able to drink larger quantities before passing out. Also, he told me that it was around when he started drinking again that he realized that he could not stop drinking, that he had no choice in his drinking, that when he brought the bottle of scotch to his mouth, his hand would keep pressing it to his lips even after he wanted to stop drinking. He said that he would feel as if the hand belonged to someone else.
To be hungover all the time was awful. He said that in the morning he would be in his car driving to the train station and, when he heard people on the radio, it was as if they were broadcasting from another country, that he was in a country where there was a war going on and these people were broadcasting from a nation that was at peace.
One night, while drinking in the bathroom, my father suddenly became captivated by the romance of standing outside in the snow in the backyard. He went downstairs, walked outside, and stood under the quiet stars. There was a two-inch layer of snow, and he was wearing rubber slippers. The snow did not bother him, he later told us. He felt very proud standing there. He thought about how far he had come. In India he had never seen snow and neither had his father or grandfather, and now he was living in a country where it snowed every year.
After standing in the snow for a little while, my father decided to sit down. He did so. His buttocks felt cold for a moment, and then they were OK.
THE NURSE’S AIDE woke us. “Mrs. Mishra,” she called from the bottom of the stairs. I woke and lay on my side and heard a mumble of voices as my mother and the woman talked.
My father had left the back door open. The aide had gone into the kitchen to get a half-full open can of Isocal formula from the fridge.
“You could have died,” my mother said, rubbing my father’s back with a towel as he sat on their bed in his underwear, his feet in a pail of warm water.
A month went by. My father kept drinking. One night, he did not come home.
“He could have fallen asleep on the train,” I said. My mother and I were in the living room looking out at the empty driveway.
“What kind of life is this?”
Ten came, and the car that pulled into the driveway was the aide’s. By eleven, I knew that something was very wrong. I sat in my room, my back to the wall, and wrote about a man who is waiting at home for his alcoholic wife and who hates himself because he is scared and feels he can’t be as angry as he wants to be. As I wrote, I felt proud at my toughness for taking whatever was happening to me and turning it into something else.
Around one, my mother came into my room. I was still writing. “Ajay, let’s go to the train station.” I got out of bed without saying anything. I thought I could include this trip to the station in my story.
The train station parking lot was vast and mostly empty. Every twelve parking spaces there stood a tall light. My mother and I drove up and down the rows. Sitting by my mother, I felt such overwhelming shame that when cars passed by on a nearby road, I worried that the drivers of these cars might see us and wonder what we were doing. I thought this response would be a good detail to put in my story.
The station wagon was parked facing the road. We pulled up behind it. My mother got out and walked around the car. Periodically she brought her face to one of the windows and peered inside.
AROUND NOON THE next day, the phone rang. It was my father. He had checked himself into Bellevue Hospital, on the East Side of Manhattan.
After we signed ourselves in at the hospital’s front desk, my mother and I used a photocopied map to guide ourselves through the long halls, across the lobbies of what had once been separate buildings. The lobbies resembled empty marble lagoons or, if there were chairs there, waiting areas in airports.
We came to a white metal door. Next to this, on the wall, was a small button with a sign beside it: Press for Admittance. My mother pushed it.
A moment later, through a window in the door, we saw a Chinese woman in a nurse’s uniform approach. The door swung open, and the nurse, who was my mother’s height, was smiling and cheerful. She led us in.
As we walked past offices, she said, “Your husband is very excited to see you. Did you bring any soda?”
“No,” my mother answered.
“Some of the patients are diabetic, and so we don’t let soda in.”
At the end of the corridor was a banner of colorful Chinese characters. As we reached the banner, I saw a man in blue pajamas walking toward us. There was something funny about the pajamas. They were stiff. The man had on an undershirt beneath the blue pajama top. I suddenly realized that the pajamas were made of paper. I was examining them when I realized the man was my father. He was smiling. I became frightened at not having recognized him. To not have recognized him made me feel like I had lost him.
“I’m glad you came,” he said. “Do you want coffee?” He kept smiling. His eyes were warm and he looked excited.
My mother began crying.
My father started leading us away from the hall that we had come down. The nurse stayed behind. “I’ll explain. The news is good. I’m so glad you came.”
We arrived at a doorway on the right. My father pushed open the door. He kept talking and smiling. “I checked myself in yesterday. I need help, Shuba. My insurance is wonderful. I could be here for a month and it would cost only four hundred and fifty dollars.”
The door opened into a lounge that smelled of burnt coffee. It had three round tables with chairs around them. One of the tables was occupied by a young Chinese woman arguing loudly in Chinese with a small gray-haired couple that looked like her parents. There was a TV bolted to the corner of the ceiling playing Soul Train.
My father led us to an empty table. We seated ourselves. Once we were sitting, my father turned toward me. “Most of the people here are Chinese. This is the Chinese ward.”
As he spoke, I had the sense that one day I would look back on this moment and think that until then, everything was fine.
“Is there an Indian ward?”
“No.”
“Why do they have a Chinese ward?”
“There are a lot of Chinese in New York.”
My father glanced at my mother.
“Do you want coffee?”
Looking at her lap, holding a handkerchief to her nose, she shook her head no.
My father turned back to me. “I have to stay here for a month,” he said. “This is good. The longer I stay, the better.” I understood that he was saying these things for my mother to hear.
“There are good doctors here,” he said. “The nurses are very good. This is a common problem, this drinking thing.” He was smiling and speaking confidently, and to me, this confidence made him seem delusional, like someone confidently saying things that are obviously untrue. “All the time people come into this hospital and stop drinking.”
I looked at my father’s eager face and felt full of love. I wanted to kiss him. He had a hand on one of his knees, and I wanted to take it and kiss it.
“In one month I will be better,” he said.
My mother kept her head down, her hands over her face.
My father said, “I have doctors. I have psychologists. These Americans are experts. They know A to Z.”
I examined his face. He was smiling. The more he spoke, the more I had the sense that I was losing him, that he was somehow fading away right before me.
My mother and I took the train to New York several times a week. Passing through the marshes covered in snow, I would have an aching sense of nostalgia. I was convinced that things would get worse and that one day I would look back on this period with longing.
My father’s room had green walls and smelled of sweat and unwashed clothes. On the floor, inside the doorway and leading into the room, was a wide dark streak. When we visited him, I liked the door to be closed, for us to be hidden. My mother appeared to feel the same way. We would close the door and still speak softly, shyly.
During these days, I realized how much my mother cared for my father. Once, as he lay in bed, she sat beside him, her chin on her fist, and looked at him so intently that she seemed to be memorizing him. This image of love stayed with me for days. It flickered inside me like a shiny bit of glass flashing from the bottom of a stream.