Family Life: A Novel

by Akhil Sharma

  “All your hard work has borne fruit,” I blurted to my mother. “What you said you would do, you have done.” I wanted no credit for what had occurred. To receive credit for getting into Princeton was to be responsible for having a life that would take me away from my family.

  We went downstairs to tell Birju the news. My heart was racing. He was lying on his exercise bed. His stomach beneath his pajamas was swollen as if full of gas. The tube from his urinary catheter ran over his thigh to a bag that hung from the side of the bed. “We have fooled them,” I said, taking hold of Birju’s feet. “Brother mine, Mommy has done what she said she would. Get up, brother. How much longer can you keep lying here?”

  THAT SPRING I was continuously aware that if the accident had not occurred, Birju would be graduating from college, that he would be applying to medical schools. The awareness was like a physical sensitivity, like when your back is hurting and you are careful all the time how you take a step.

  Mrs. Sethi had been one of my mother’s best friends. She had abandoned us. After my father’s drinking became known, she had stopped talking to my mother, stopped visiting us or calling or returning my mother’s phone calls. A part of me recognized that this made sense. Why spend time with strange, troubled, embarrassing people? Why seek problems? But the very fact that this made sense made my embarrassment worse.

  Once I got into Princeton, people phoned and asked my mother to bring me to their homes. One of the ones who did this was Mrs. Sethi. She invited us to her house for dinner.

  “Hello, sly one,” she said, opening the door when we arrived. Because her husband was a dentist and they were prosperous, she could be a little more American than most people and she was wearing white pants and a blue silk blouse. I saw her and thought, Now you’re not ashamed to acknowledge us.

  Dinner was in a room that had an oval wooden table and cupboards with crockery along the walls. There was a chandelier above the table. My mother and I sat on one side of the table and Mr. and Mrs. Sethi on the other. Mr. Sethi was seated opposite my mother. He began the meal by saying, “Thank you for coming. We know it is difficult to leave Birju. We are flattered.”

  “If we wouldn’t bother ourselves for you,” my mother said, “who would we bother ourselves for?” My mother smiled broadly, angrily. She turned toward me. Her smile was fixed and was obviously false. “See what good manners Sethi uncle has, to thank someone for coming and eating at his house?”

  There was a moment of silence.

  Mrs. Sethi broke it by reaching to the center of the table where there were three steel pots. She lifted the lid off one and ladled chickpeas into a ceramic bowl. “Your mother said chickpeas are your favorite.”

  “Thank you,” I murmured.

  “See how good Sethi auntie is?” my mother said loudly and smiled her wide, angry, false smile.

  Nobody spoke. We were all still for a moment and then slowly, arms and hands began reaching across the table. Bowls were filled, and a foil-wrapped stack of rotis was unpeeled, the bread passed around. We started eating. In the quiet, even the way my mother ate, tearing off pieces of roti and jabbing at the subji, seemed angry.

  After several minutes, my mother turned to Mr. Sethi. She smiled and nodded as if agreeing with something he had just said. “Give him advice,” she requested. “You know things about America that his father and I don’t know.”

  Mr. Sethi looked embarrassed. He had a kind, meek face. “Ajay should keep doing what he’s doing. He should help his parents and his brother.”

  “No. No. Give him guidance. Tell him what he needs to know if he is to get a good job.” My mother leaned forward.

  Mr. Sethi glanced at his wife as if asking what to do.

  “Elder sister,” Mrs. Sethi said, “We should turn to you for guidance. You have raised a boy who has gotten into Princeton.”

  “What are you saying? We are lucky to be invited to a house like yours. After what Ajay’s father did, I had no expectations.” My mother’s voice rose. Her anger was now in the open. We stopped eating.

  “Sethiji, please give Ajay advice.” My mother’s voice was high and pathetic. “Please give him guidance.”

  Mr. Sethi glanced at me.

  “Please,” my mother said.

  He nodded. “I didn’t know this, Ajay, but in America the color of your belt is supposed to match the color of your shoes.”

  My mother leaned forward. “Tell him more,” she said. “This is exactly the sort of thing he needs to know.”

  Mrs. Sethi said, “Shuba sister, all the important things you are already teaching him. These are the least important things.”

  My mother kept smiling and staring at Mr. Sethi. I felt bad for my mother.

  “Learning to eat with a knife and fork is important,” he said. “Before you get a job in America, before you get a good job, the person you will be working for often takes you to lunch or dinner, and then you need to know how to eat with a knife and fork.”

  “Wonderful. Wonderful,” my mother said. “I would teach him such things, but I stay in the house all day.”

  “That’s enough education for one night,” Mrs. Sethi said.

  My mother looked at her. “Please. The poor boy knows so little.” She turned back to Mr. Sethi.

  “Mrs. Mishra,” Mrs. Sethi said, sounding irritated.

  “I wish I could give him as good advice as your husband,” my mother said, “but what can I do? My head is full of rubbish. I’m nobody.”

  “Why did you come if you wanted to fight?”

  “How can you expect manners from me, Mrs. Sethi? My husband is a drunk.”

  Without finishing dinner, we left the house.

  It was dark outside. A half moon that was a scrubbed white hung low over the rooftops. We stood for a minute in Mrs. Sethi’s driveway. We had walked to the Sethis’. My mother opened her purse and took out a slender flashlight. She gave it to me. We started home. As we went down the sidewalk, my mother talked excitedly, angrily. “Even a cow has horns,” she said.

  Walking, I remembered that when we lived in India, the electricity would frequently go out at night, and my mother and I and Birju would be going someplace or coming back from someplace. My mother would then take a flashlight out of her purse and give it to Birju. Birju would walk ahead of us. He would guide us. He would wave the flashlight’s beam over the ground. “Follow me,” he would say.

  Even when I left for college, shops had begun to open on the ground floors of the old houses that used to line Oak Tree Road where it enters Iselin. People ran businesses from their living rooms. The houses were pressed together and had narrow, fragile front porches that vibrated when you stepped onto them. The old white men and women who lived next door would pull aside their curtains to look at you when you arrived. Inside, there was usually a freezer that contained fish that someone had smuggled from Bengal. The shops carried packets of seeds for bitter gourd and the deep red carrots one finds in India and which are illegal to import. There would be old women in the back who didn’t speak English and who prepared food for parties. Occasionally there was a child watching TV or doing homework.

  In my first two years of college, some of the houses were gutted and made into ordinary stores. Others were torn down. I saw all this. I came home perhaps twice a month, bringing laundry and taking back food. I returned so often because my mother would phone crying. She would tell me that there had been no nurse’s aides for seventy-two hours, that she was dizzy and vomiting from exhaustion. She would say, “Birju is bleeding out of his ass. Your father shouts at me when I say we should go to the hospital. He says that he won’t put Birju on a respirator. I say, ‘What does this have to do with a respirator?’”

  My father continued not drinking. He was gloomier than ever, though. On weekends, he would shower and shave in the morning, put on fresh clothes, and then sit all day on the sofa in the living room, his arms crossed, his brow furrowed.

  DIFFERENT PEOPLE IMMIGRATED now. Now one saw Indians
working outdoors. There was a white-haired man who worked as a gas station attendant near my parents’ house. Whenever I pulled in to his station and asked him how he was doing, he would start speaking quickly, eagerly about how much he hated America and every white person. I had the sense that if I told him that things were not so bad, he would hate me, too, and would think I only looked Indian but was as ignorant as a white.

  These new immigrants were from chaotic backgrounds. I once saw two large, fat women punching each other in the mall.

  The new immigrants went to temple, of course. They learned about us there and at the grocery stores. Some of them began to visit my mother. When I came home, women would bring their children to look at me. I would sit at the kitchen table doing homework. Their children would sit around me, looking shy.

  My mother was happy to tell these women what to do. One woman’s husband had a girlfriend. My mother wanted her to leave the man.

  “Don’t you think it makes her feel bad,” my father said once, “when you tell her that if you were her, you’d pour gasoline over yourself and your children?”

  PRINCETON IS FORTY-FIVE MINUTES from Edison. No matter how often I visited my parents, I felt that I was now in another country.

  The Gothic buildings and the stone steps that were slick and beveled in the center from the generations walking on them made me feel that I was now a part of history. I had the feeling that if I was smart and behaved carefully, all good things would happen for me.

  I had seven suitemates. Two were football players, one played ice hockey, and a fourth, golf. I tried fitting in. I bought Escher posters and one of Jimi Hendrix and put these on my walls.

  I had been nervous about not doing well in college. During my first class, I looked at the notes the boy next to me was taking. His supply and demand curves seemed more neatly drawn than mine. Nearly everyone appeared to have gone to preparatory schools and already knew such odd things as the fact that there was no inflation during the Middle Ages. Very few, however, were willing to work the way I did.

  When I would come out of Firestone Library at two in the morning, walk past the strange statues scattered around campus, and then sit at my desk in my room till the trees in the yard appeared out of the darkness, I felt that I was achieving something, that every hour I worked was generating almost physical value, as if I could touch the knowledge I was gaining through my work. One weekend, I came home to my parents and worked all Saturday night. In the morning, my mother saw me at my desk and brought me a glass of milk. Later, in Birju’s room, she said to him, “Your brother can eat pain. He can sit all day at his desk and eat pain.”

  My first semester, I took a course on Shakespeare. Reading

  When he shall die,

  Take him and cut him out in little stars,

  And he will make the face of heaven so fine

  That all the world will be in love with night

  And pay no worship to the garish sun,

  I wished I loved Birju this way. Most of the course was devoted to strange, useless things, however—things like reading dreams that people of Shakespeare’s time had written down in their diaries or letters. I majored in economics, focusing on econometrics.

  MINAKSHI WAS IN college in Virginia. A phone call cost ten cents a minute if made after nine o’clock at night. To save money, we spoke every other day. On the days we didn’t, I would call her room at nine and hang up after one ring. She would then do the same, and this was how we said we loved each other.

  At the end of my freshman year, she told me that she had begun seeing another boy. I behaved the way people do in these cases. I would call her and cry and ask if she did the same things with the new boyfriend that she had with me. Sometimes at two or three in the morning, I would imagine she was with her boyfriend, and I would phone her to disturb their sleep.

  Minakshi lives in Texas now. She is an accountant. This surprises me because you always expect people who matter a great deal to you to end up leading glamorous lives.

  Near the end of my sophomore year, I began going out with a German girl. Back then, I automatically discounted anything a white person said. How could a white know what was true or real? I also felt jealous of white people. Diana sang in a chorus, and watching her sing made me angry. I would stand before her and sing in a mocking way. Diana started avoiding me after a few months. Finally she told me, “Stop calling.” I was so embarrassed by this that when she took a semester off, I was relieved to not have her around campus.

  AFTER I GRADUATED, I became an investment banker. I had thought I was used to hard work. Now, I would leave the office every morning when the coffee carts were being set up on the sidewalk. I would return a few hours later during rush hour. So little time would have passed since I left that when I reentered the building, it would feel like the previous day was continuing and, even though I had just showered and shaved, I would have the strange feeling that I had put on new clothes without having bathed.

  In my first year as a vice president, I made seven hundred thousand dollars. I found it very hard to spend money, however. One winter I needed to buy gloves, and because I didn’t want to pay what I thought was the premium that stores charge for having to rent a building, I looked for somebody selling gloves from a table on the sidewalk. I didn’t see any sidewalk vendors for several days, and so for those days I kept my hands in my pockets.

  Almost as soon as I started working, I began sending my mother monthly checks. As I earned more, I sent her more. My mother hoarded the money instead of spending it. “What happens if you stop?” she said.

  Periodically my parents came to see me in New York. I took them to places that I had started visiting, that I felt proud for visiting. Once, I took them to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Most times, though, we went to fancy grocery stores. As we strolled through them, I remembered how when we first got to America, my mother used to take Birju and me through grocery stores, and we would stop to read the labels of the different types of canned food.

  Birju had some white hair now. Often, after I had visited my parents and seen him, for days I would feel like I had been shouted at.

  My mother started losing her hearing. She wanted to buy a hearing aid. “Why?” said my father. “If by mistake some good news does come for you, I’ll write it down.”

  On my mother’s sixtieth birthday, I gave her a check for a quarter of a million dollars. For a few days, she didn’t cash it. She showed it to her friends. Then my parents began to have a nurse and a nurse’s aide twenty-four hours a day. One afternoon when I came to their house, I found them sitting in lawn chairs in the backyard. I stood in the kitchen and watched them from a window.

  FOR ABOUT SEVEN years I didn’t date in any sort of regular way. The stress of work was so enormous that I lost my temper easily. If I had dinner with a woman at a restaurant and she went to the bathroom, I became panicked. I felt that I had almost no time and the little I had was being wasted. Once, a woman took so long in the bathroom that I paid the bill and walked out. Another time, a woman I was at a movie with wouldn’t leave when I didn’t like the movie. I said, “I can’t stay,” and left.

  I became sick with longing for women I barely knew. If a woman dressed well, I took this to signify that she could behave gracefully in every situation. I imagined not having much money and her still being kind.

  Hema was a lawyer. I met her at a gathering of young Indian professionals. She was short and slightly stocky. She had wide hips, and she resembled one of those clay fertility goddesses one sees in museums. I had discovered that I liked what most women of my generation looked like, and whenever I saw her I became aroused.

  I didn’t know Hema well, but I took her to a resort in Mexico. On our first afternoon there, she went to the pool while I napped in our room. I came down around evening and went looking for her. The pool was enormous and softly blue. There was a white beach in the distance, and a red seaplane bobbing on the water. The pool area was noisy. People were talking, music wa
s playing, and tables scraped against the cement patio as workers set up for dinner. It was the end of a beautiful day, warm and breezy.

  I saw Hema and, standing by the side of the pool, waved to her. I was wearing shorts and a linen shirt. She kicked her way to me. She was wearing a blue swimsuit. I reached down and pulled her out of the water. She had a strong, solid body.

  She leaned against me. “I’m tipsy,” she slurred. Her pupils were dilated.

  I walked her to a nearby table. She leaned heavily against me. “I got up too early this morning,” she said.

  Hema sat down on a wicker chair. She stretched her legs out and tilted her head back. She stared up at the darkening sky, her eyes wide and white. She looked beautiful. I began to get happy. I had a strange sense of everything being in its place. I turned away.

  The last children were climbing out of the pool. People were laughing. In the distance a man and his family were walking off the beach. Dragonflies hung in the breeze. I felt sad, happy, content. The sun was setting. The wind was picking up. The fronds of the palm trees shivered in delight. I could feel the weight of Hema’s body on the inside of my arm. I got happier and happier. In the distance was the beach and the breaking waves and the red seaplane bobbing in the water. The happiness was almost heavy.

  That was when I knew I had a problem.

  This book would not have been written without the help of numerous institutions and individuals.

  The Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation provided me with financial support when I was beginning to give up on the novel. The American Academy in Rome allowed me to stay in an apartment in their beautiful building when I was feeling especially wretched.

  John Henderson, Ray Isle, and Nancy Packer read this manuscript numerous times. Bill Clegg was much more than an agent. Lorin Stein regularly suggested that I abandon this project and then, at the very end, helped drag the book over the finish line.

  Most of all, I want to thank my editor Jill Bialosky and my publishing house W. W. Norton. When I handed it in, this book was nine years overdue. Each year, on the anniversary of the novel’s due date, Jill would email me and invite me to lunch. I felt so ashamed for not having handed in the book that I would take weeks replying. Her patience and the patience of Norton make me feel that for years I have been in the company of extraordinarily kind people.