Family Life (12 page)

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.”

T
HE 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.”

B
irju 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 homework. 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.

T
HE 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.”

Once, a boy leaned over my shoulder and demanded to know what I was eating. I said I was eating snake. The boy believed me. He began shouting, “snake”. A crowd gathered around me. I felt boys pressing against my back. Other boys stood on the benches of the long tables.

The vice principal, a short white-haired man, appeared. “What are you eating?” he demanded.

“Okra,” I said.

“Come with me.” He led me through the crowd, pushing the boys out of his way. He took me to detention hall, a room with white cinder block walls.

The recent immigrants at the lunch table found me annoying. They saw me as a troublemaker for responding to the insults. To them, I was a show-off for not keeping quiet. This was true to an extent. Part of my motivation for fighting was that I did not want to be like the recent immigrants and so I was deliberately trying to be different. There were other ways that I was a show-off too. I often reminded the boys I sat with that I was in more advanced-level classes than they were. Sitting with these children, a part of me was surprised that not all Indians were smart.

Often in the evening, my mother and I would leave the house and go for walks. As we went down sidewalks, cars would drive past us and people would shout curses; haji, Gandhi, sand nigger. The first time this happened, I, for some reason, thought my mother would not understand that we were being cursed and so I told her that these were people I knew from school, that they were calling out to me in greeting. My mother nodded as if she believed me.

I began not wanting to go on these evening walks. When we did go, I carried stones in my pocket.

Weeks passed. The weather got colder. The days tipped backward into darkness. Some evenings our house and street appeared dark while the sky was light. In October the trees shed their leaves, and our house stood undefended on its lawn.

T
HE WORST THING
about our new life with Birju was worrying about money. Now that I was going to school and the miracle workers had mostly stopped coming, we needed to hire a full-time nurse’s aide during the day. We decided not to use the agency because the agency charged almost twelve dollars an hour and we thought we could get someone much cheaper. My father put advertisements in the local newspaper. The ads said that pay was based on experience.

A Filipino aide with long black hair came to be interviewed. She stood by the exercise bed. When she learned how much my mother intended to pay, she shouted, “Why not you tell me on the phone? Why you make me drive so long? You do this to a black, she burn your house down.”

My heart jumped when she shouted at us. At the same time, I felt that it was OK to be shouted at as long as we did not spend the extra money.

The cold weather affected our plumbing. Some of our water came from a well. When the white washing machine shook and churned, the dim laundry room filled with a marshy smell.

In the kitchen one night, standing at the stove, my mother yelled, “I don’t care how much it costs.”

“You don’t care because you don’t pay the bills,” my father yelled back.

“What are we going to do now?”

“You were the one to say buy the house. We’ve gotten cheated.” The kitchen was very bright. My father said the new plumbing might cost five thousand dollars. The room hung reflected in the windows. My father started crying. I was stunned. What did it mean to spend five thousand dollars? The house had cost eighty-four thousand. I wondered if, in America, one could return a house the same way that one could return a belt to a store.

We also worried about the insurance. The insurance company said no to everything. They said no to the Isocal formula. They said no to the disposable blue pads that we put under Birju for when he soiled himself. They said no to the nurse’s aides. On Saturday and Sunday afternoons, my father sat at the kitchen table and filled out insurance forms. On the table were rubber-banded stacks of letters, a stapler, his checkbook, and a yellow legal pad on which he wrote letters to the insurance company. My mother and I always kept very quiet while my father did this work.

S
EVENTH GRADE WAS
the first time we were divided into honors-level classes and accelerated levels and track one and track two. This was when I began to think that I was smart enough. I didn’t think I was very smart—only that I had enough intelligence to get by. Even the idea of being smart upset me; it made me angry. I came home with my grades from the first quarter and saw Birju lying on his exercise bed and wondered what the point of all As was. Still, I was glad to be better than other boys.

My classes had mostly Jews, a few Chinese, and one or two Indians. The Indians were not Indian the way I was. They didn’t have accents. They were invited to birthday parties by white children.

I preferred talking to the Jews over the Chinese or the Indians. The Jews were white, and so they seemed more valuable than these others. Also, with the Chinese and the Indians, I sensed they watched me with suspicion the same way I watched them, that since they knew immigrants, they understood that I was untrustworthy, that immigrants are desperate and willing to do almost anything.

O
NE VERY COLD
night in November, our front doorbell rang. We opened the door, and a jowly man was standing outside. Behind him was a tall boy in a long winter coat. We had met the man at temple, but we didn’t know him well. We invited them in.