Family Life (11 page)

I stood at the foot of the bed. Birju’s pubic hair was shaved to stubble. His stomach was a dome, and his G-tube, bound in a figure eight, resembled a ribbon on the side of a girl’s head. “Brother,” I said, “I have never met anyone as lazy as you. Making people bathe you.”

My mother, finishing with the towel, straightened herself. “Tell him, ‘I’m not lazy. I’m a king.’”

My father slipped his arms through Birju’s underarms. He pulled him up until Birju was half sitting. My father grinned. He leaned down and said into Birju’s ear. “Why are you so heavy? Are you getting up at night and eating? You are, aren’t you? Admit it. I see crumbs on your chin.”

I laughed. I grabbed Birju’s legs below the knees. My mother rolled the wheelchair next to the bed, and my father and I counted to three. We swung him into it. My father began pulling the wheelchair backward through the room. He pulled it out a doorway and across a narrow hall, into the bathroom.

The bathroom had a tub with a small bathing chair inside. My father put one leg into the tub and kept one leg out. He put his arms through Birju’s underarms. Again, we counted. “One, two, three.” My father yanked and twisted, and I lifted. We hefted and slid Birju onto the chair.

My father held an arm across Birju’s chest to keep him from toppling forward. I took a red mug and poured warm water over Birju’s head. He began to relax. His legs, which had been sticking out toward the tap, eased down. I poured water over his shoulders and arms. My father rubbed Birju’s neck with soap. He lathered his shoulders. Birju started urinating, a thick, strong-smelling, yellow stream. When Birju finished peeing, my father bent him forward. He shoved a bar of soap in the split between Birju’s buttocks. Gray water and flecks of shit dropped into the tub.

I chattered. “I dreamt I was fighting twenty people. I hit one. He fell over. I hit another. He fell over. It was fun.” I kept talking and talking. I was smiling, for I wished it to appear that I wasn’t seeing what was occurring before me.

Around noon, my father and I went to the pharmacy. This intimidated me. I had seen my father scream at my mother about how much things would cost. I was scared of spending money. I felt that once money was spent, it would be gone forever and couldn’t be replaced.

The pharmacy was on Main Street, a few shops from the train station. The store had a glass front. In the back was a high counter where one submitted one’s prescriptions and where the store owner sat.

I stood with outstretched arms near the counter. My father put a case of Isocal formula in my arms. Then he placed another on top of this.

“How do you want to pay?” the store owner said.

“Put it on my tab,” my father answered and to me, in Hindi, said, “Move.”

I turned around and began hurrying.

“No,” the store owner, a slender white-haired man with a goatee, called. I stopped and turned back around.

My father signed a receipt. He signed it with his left hand, the pen moving awkwardly and not making full contact with the paper. I believed he was signing with his left hand so that perhaps he could deny that it was his signature.

When we came back to the house, we had lunch. It was strange to eat on a plate at a table instead of, as at the nursing home, on a sheet of aluminum foil balanced on our pressed-together knees. All day that day, walking around the house barefoot, I noticed the feeling of the kitchen linoleum or the soft carpet of the living room and suddenly remembered that at the home I would be wearing shoes. Each time, the feeling of freedom was like the beginning of summer vacation, when one looks at a clock and is amazed, all over again, not to be in school.

I kept going to look at Birju, but I couldn’t get used to seeing him in an ordinary room in an ordinary house. Every time, I was startled.

Birju was restless. He ground his teeth, and his eyes darted around.

At some point in the late afternoon, I decided to go outside and throw a ball. This seemed like something any ordinary boy might do.

Outside, it was bright and humid. I stood in the center of our front lawn and flung a fluorescent green tennis ball straight into the air. It went higher than our brown shingle roof, and came down more slowly than it rose. The sky was so pretty and blue that it was like something from a cartoon. I caught the ball and spun in place. I threw it again and bent my knees catching it. I threw it one more time and tried catching the ball behind my back. I missed. The ball went bounding away.

I threw the ball over and over, sometimes with my left hand. When I did this, the ball went up at a slant.

Throwing the ball, I didn’t feel any better. I kept seeing Birju lying on his bed, his head tilted up, the white curtain on the window beside him rising and falling.

My tee shirt grew damp and stuck to my skin. Before long I wanted to go back inside, but to go inside felt like giving up. I stayed on the lawn and threw the ball.

T
HROUGH 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.

T
HE 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.

A
T 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 exercise 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?”