Family Life: A Novel

by Akhil Sharma

  There were group counseling sessions for addicts and their families. These were in the main section of Bellevue and not in the Chinese ward. The Chinese ward, I learned, was for the mentally ill. The first session I went to was in a lounge that had maybe thirty people. Most of these were milling around in the back near the coffee pots and the powdered milk. About half of them were in blue paper pajamas. Some of the patients were seated and were so medicated they appeared to be dozing. The family members looked tired, unhappy. Unlike the patients, they didn’t talk to each other. My parents and I sat to the side of the room, our backs to a window. Everybody except for us and one Chinese man and his wife was white or black or Hispanic. I was embarrassed to be the same as these people. The counselor, a short, broad-shouldered black man with a beard and a knit hat, called out, “Brothers, sisters, we’re going to start.”

  He stood in the front of the room and spoke in a lolling accented voice for ten or fifteen minutes about how addiction was a disease. He said that one could not be cured of it, that one could not drink alcohol for thirty years and that if one began doing so again, it would be like the day one had stopped. He said that addiction was a danger against which one had to always be on guard. My father kept nodding. He had said all this and also said that now that he knew these things, he was going to be fine.

  To me, it seemed very American to call drinking a disease and therefore avoid responsibility.

  “Hungry, angry, lonely, tired. HALT. Watch out for these. But an addict will use when he is happy. He’ll use when he is down.”

  The counselor finished speaking. He invited people from the audience to talk.

  Mostly it was the alcoholics who raised their hands. A young woman spoke up. She was almost crying. “I came in on Tuesday and I don’t remember anything till yesterday. I don’t remember. What happened? Nobody will tell me. What happened?” Her voice rose. “I am diabetic. I didn’t have my medicine. I don’t remember, and nobody will tell me.”

  Some of the alcoholics who spoke appeared to like the sound of their own voices. An elderly black man with gray hair said, “Every bottle should come with a warning: ‘This bottle may cause you to lose your job. This bottle may cause you to get a divorce. This bottle may cause you to become homeless.’” He nodded in a pleased way at his own words. “I am sixty-four, and I know what day they serve cauliflower at St. Luke’s, what day Bellevue has apple pie, what day ACI has turkey breast.” The man was wearing paper booties with the front part scissored open, and his toenails, which were thick and black, curved over his toes.

  My mother and I sat quietly watching, my mother holding a brown purse in her lap. To me, the confidence of the alcoholics was like the confidence that my father had shown when he said he would be all right.

  Some of the wives and husbands spoke. They were quieter and more thoughtful than the alcoholics. A white woman said, “I know that I have to look after myself and my children, but what do I do? I don’t want him to die.” The man she was sitting next to, young, black, and gaunt, was leaning forward in his chair and looking down. He had a rubber band on one wrist that he kept snapping.

  MY FATHER WAS released.

  On the train home, my mother and I sat facing him. It was late afternoon. He was bundled in his winter coat with his gray cap pulled over his ears. He looked small and nervous. I felt anxious. At the hospital we had known he wouldn’t drink. Now, I imagined that back home, he would not drink for a little while but then start again. Looking at my father’s face, I had a sudden fantasy of being in Bombay, in an apartment overlooking the sea. I had only seen Bombay in the movies, and I think the fantasy came from wanting a different life.

  We arrived at Metropark Station. My mother drove us home.

  In the car, my father sat up front and peered out the window. The sun was bright, and we drove past houses standing behind lawns in winter light. The houses didn’t look real. They resembled a set on a stage.

  We entered our house through the laundry room. My father said, “I don’t want to see him today. Is that all right?”

  “Of course. Go upstairs. Rest.”

  My father left. My mother and I went to Birju’s room. He was snoring, and the aide was seated beside him knitting a sweater. My mother kissed Birju and spoke to him in a childish voice.

  That evening, my father got ready to go to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, and so did I. My mother wanted me to accompany him so that he would not go somewhere and start drinking.

  The church was around the corner from us, a white, steepled building with a parking lot and a small graveyard. Inside were fifty or sixty men and women standing around talking. Some of them were smoking. There were a half dozen women with infants and toddlers. There were also a few children who were ten or eleven, whose parents, I imagined, had been unable to get babysitters. All of the people were white. They appeared strangely ordinary to me, not like people with problems.

  The meeting began. People sat down in rows of chairs. There was a table near the front of the room. A man sitting at the table asked if anyone was at an AA meeting for the first time. My father raised his hand. We were in the room’s back and there was a stir of excitement. People turned to look at us. I remembered the boys at school who made fun of what I brought for lunch. I hated these people who were staring. I felt that they had no manners.

  A very heavy woman was also sitting at the front table. She was blond and missing teeth, and she had a two-liter bottle of Coca-Cola on the table before her. She was the first to speak. She told her story. She said that she had started drinking when she was in fifth grade. “I would come home and have a shot of whiskey and one of my mother’s Marlboros, and that’s how I took the edge off.” She laughed huskily. Phlegm popped in her lungs.

  My father sat leaning forward, focused.

  The woman talked about dropping out of school, getting married, having abortions. When she mentioned abortions, a part of me flinched. I was surprised that she would say something like this out loud.

  The woman talked about her husband beating her, about how one night, he sat at the kitchen table of their house with a revolver and waited for the police to enter so he could start shooting. “I knew that was bad.” The crowd laughed. I thought, Why are you laughing at this misery? You have created trouble for everyone and now you are laughing. “I went out the back door to tell the police my husband had a gun and was waiting inside.” Then she spoke of waking up passed out in front of her son, and this, for some reason, changed things. “My life in sobriety hasn’t been good. I am morbidly obese. I don’t have any money. My son would like a guitar for his fourteenth birthday, and I can’t buy him one. Maybe I’ll ask his grandmother. She’s willing to give me money now.”

  After this, many other people spoke. Most talked for a shorter time than the woman with the Coke. Another woman said she had recently begun drinking mouthwash. “My son is getting married, and I’m a fat pig.” A man spoke about being separated from his wife and when he wanted to send his son a birthday card, he had to write the card in front of his probation officer because he wasn’t allowed to have any contact with his children. I couldn’t understand what most of this had to do with drinking.

  I also got angrier and angrier at the thought that white people behaved in such ways and yet they were the ones who were important.

  The meeting started at seven and ended at eight. When it finished, people stood around the room and held hands and said the Lord’s Prayer. My father and I joined in the hand-holding and tried repeating the words as they were spoken. Saying them, I felt that we were trying to pass as whites.

  Immediately after this, we were surrounded by men who began giving my father scraps of paper with their phone numbers. I wondered what these people wanted from us. At the hospital, a nurse had brought us tubes of hand lotion and bottles of talcum powder and tried to get us to convert to Christianity. She had said that if we believed in Jesus Christ, Birju would get better in a minute. When she realized we were not going to conve
rt, she took the hand lotion and talcum powder away.

  Outside the church, I became giddy with relief. The wind was wet and cold. Walking across the parking lot, I laughed. “My God, I didn’t know white people had such problems.”

  “Who are these people?” I said. “Who does things like that? Where are they from? Do they live in Edison? When they were talking, I kept thinking, Why do you have problems? You’re white. Even more terrible things should happen to you. You should suffer like Indians, like black people. That’ll teach you.” I said all this because I felt it. I also said it because I wanted my father to say he was nothing like the people in the meeting.

  IN THE DAYS that followed, my father and I went to AA meetings every night. The meetings occurred in small rooms in churches and in big ones. Some took place in a very large, glass-walled party space that was next to a fire department. During the AA meeting, people drew curtains over these walls.

  At first my father was regularly surrounded by men giving him their phone numbers. Some also gave him books and mimeographed sheets with lists of where the AA meetings took place. Surrounded by these people, I would feel scared, feel that we would have to say yes we wanted help, when in reality we wanted to be left alone.

  I began to recognize some of the people from the meetings. Many of them appeared not just alcoholic but also crazy. There was a man who talked regularly about a religious radio station that he listened to. Another man, who carried a cane, would interrupt people as they spoke and offer his opinions. There was a very skinny woman who would say that she knew that the people in the meeting did not like her and then start crying.

  Often as I sat in these meetings I was disgusted. Even the people who said sensible things, the men and women who shouted down the man who began passing out anti-abortion pamphlets, irritated me. They had created problems for themselves and their families with their drinking and now had to come up with such an elaborate solution that their families also had to be involved.

  MY FATHER, WHEN he got out of Bellevue, was nervous, timid. He would not look people in the eye.

  In many ways, I don’t think my mother and I realized how scared he was. A few weeks after he came home, he began telling people that we knew, people he saw on the train going to work, that he was an alcoholic, that he had been in a hospital because he couldn’t stop drinking. Later, he told me and my mother that he did this because he hoped these people would somehow keep him from drinking.

  My mother learned what my father was doing from her friend Mrs. Sethi. “Mr. Mishra must have been joking,” Mrs. Sethi said apologetically. She was standing in the kitchen wearing jeans and a white shirt. “But you know, Shuba sister, what people are like. They gossip. They say bad things.”

  When I learned that my father had been telling people about his drinking, I understood that he must have decided that how we were affected mattered less than whatever benefit he might gain. This filled me with shame.

  The evening Mrs. Sethi visited us with the news, my mother shouted at my father in the kitchen. “You should have stayed in the hospital.”

  He stared at her without speaking, his eyes wet.

  “People wouldn’t spit on you if it weren’t for me,” she said.

  A few days later, a financial planner visited. The man was somebody my father had told about being in Bellevue. Immediately this man had suggested that my father buy more insurance. “I couldn’t say no,” my father said to my mother.

  “This is what happens. You showed him you were weak and so he thought, Why not take advantage? He’s an alcoholic. What somebody does to him doesn’t matter.”

  The financial planner visited on a Sunday afternoon. He had floppy hair and wore a green suit that seemed large on him. My father brought him into Birju’s room, where the nurse’s aide was holding a bit of onion to Birju’s nose as part of his sensory stimulation.

  “If I drink and get into an accident, I need to protect him,” my father said.

  It sounded as if he was trying to win pity.

  The financial planner had brought a large black binder with different booklets about insurance and investment funds. He spread these out for my father on the living room table. My mother, to express her suspicion and disgust, periodically came and stood in the doorway and stared disapprovingly.

  As he talked, the financial planner kept touching my father’s arm and knee. At the end of his visit, when he was about to leave, he said that the next step was for my father to give him power of attorney over his various accounts.

  “No,” my father said.

  “Why not?” The man looked offended.

  “Ji, I don’t know you.” The “ji” was a level of formality and politeness that showed how timid my father was at the time.

  “What do you need to know? I can give you my phone number. I can give you my address. You’re an alcoholic. You think you know more than me?”

  WITHIN A FEW weeks of my father starting to tell people that he was an alcoholic, the news spread everywhere. One day at temple, Mr. Narayan came up to us and said to my mother, “Ji, you have to stop Mr. Mishra from saying these things. People get happy knowing that others are unfortunate.”

  First the doctors and engineers stopped visiting, then the middle-class people—the accountants and the shop owners. The last to stop were the people who lived in Hilltop Apartments, the ones who spoke neither Hindi nor English.

  As the news spread and people stopped visiting, I began to feel shy around Birju. When I came into his room, I would feel like we had failed him. I would remember how on my first day at the nursing home I had sat by Birju and noticed how quiet the home was compared to the hospital.

  I KNEW THAT MINAKSHI would find out about my father. I was scared of this. I had lied to her about him. I had said that my father was cheerful, that he was a wall around the family. He fought the insurance companies who didn’t want to pay. He managed the nurse’s aides who were unreliable. I had said this because doing so made me look good. Back then we Indian children, at least with each other, felt that our value was to some extent based on our parents. If our parents had gone to college, then we were a certain type of child and were more valuable than someone whose parents had not gone to college. It made sense, therefore, to praise our parents. Also, we felt endangered by the world we lived in, and so to speak ill of our protectors was to make the danger more frightening.

  Perhaps six weeks after my father began telling people on the train that he was an alcoholic, the news finally reached school. Minakshi came up to me at my locker. I was kneeling. I looked up at her and my mouth went dry. I felt like I had stolen from her. I was not from a good family but had convinced her I was, and she had come to my house and we had lain in bed and she had let me rub against her.

  I stood. Minakshi and I stared at each other.

  “I don’t like my father,” she whispered.

  Later that afternoon, as we stood among the trees and kissed, I was certain that there could be no better person than her.

  Many of the boys at school disliked me. I was arrogant and annoying. I would boast about my grades while simultaneously whining about having to work. Vijay was very handsome. He was tall, which I envied, and he didn’t have an accent. Vijay was smart and got good grades, but I was smarter and got better ones.

  One morning, I was walking down a hallway and Vijay was walking toward me. He saw me and began to lurch from side to side. When he got to me, he reached out and dropped his hands on my shoulders. My heart jumped. Staring into my face, he slurred, “I am so drunk.”

  I pushed him away and, feeling blood pulsing behind my eyes, hurried off.

  Vijay usually sat with the whites at lunch because he was on the cross-country team. Later that same day, he came to the Indian table at the cafeteria. He stood at one end, seven or eight chairs from me. He called out, “How is your dad? Is he feeling any better?”

  I looked at my food. The table became silent.

  “I hope he’s feeling better.”
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br />   Nobody spoke. After a moment, Vijay left. The table remained quiet. There was a minute or two of this silence and then when the boys and girls began talking again, they did not touch upon what had just occurred. I think this was because Vijay had embarrassed all of us. We were all a little shy about the lives we lived at home. At home we didn’t eat the food that white kids ate. At home our mothers and sometimes our fathers dressed in odd clothes. Our holidays were not the same as white people’s. Our parents worshipped gods who rode on mice. To attack someone based on his or her family brought up so much of our own shame that we didn’t have the heart to be mean.

  Before we opened any of the letters, we prayed. My mother and I took whatever envelope had arrived that day and put it on the altar in my parents’ room. The first response was from Brown University. The answer was no. We were kneeling before the altar. “It’s OK,” my mother said. She sighed and pushed herself off the floor. A part of me was ashamed to not have done something nice for my mother by getting into this famous university.

  I stood. I also felt that I had been found out. I had the sense that Brown University knew all the wretched things about me, that I was not so smart, that in eighth grade, for a report on evolution, I had copied from an encyclopedia.

  This and the other rejections came in March. I was now seventeen. We opened the envelopes when I got home from school. The air would be hard to breathe because my mother did her afternoon prayers around then and the incense smoke lingered.

  Later, I learned that I was accepted into Princeton because the short story I had submitted as part of my application was read by someone whose older brother had drowned.

  My mother opened the letter. She tore off the side of the envelope and shook out the sheet of paper.

  “Congratulations!” the acceptance began. I remembered kneeling at the temple in Queens and my mother opening the letter from the Bronx High School of Science.