Family Life (7 page)

O
N MY FIRST
day in the nursing home, I sat by Birju’s bed and read to him from an old issue of
Chandamama
. It was raining and drops clicked off the windows. The room was about the size of the one in the hospital. Even with the ceiling lights on, it was dim. My mother kept walking in and out of the room. She was busy doing paperwork. When she entered, I continued reading without looking up. I had the sense that I was being watched, that we were providing evidence to the nursing home. I needed to show that my family was admirable and that we cared about Birju. I felt that if I did this, it would shame the people at the home to take good care of my brother.

I began to ache from sitting on the hard chair. My voice got hoarse. At the hospital, I would have said, “Birju, let’s watch some TV.” More hours passed. I was conscious of how quiet the nursing home was. The door behind me was open. When a cart went by, I could hear its wheels hissing along the linoleum. At the hospital, there were always nurses and doctors hurrying about. The PA system regularly came on. The quietness made me feel that the home was not as good as the hospital, that the nursing home was where the world put people who were not important, people who could be put away someplace and forgotten. I began to feel that we had let Birju down, that by letting him be moved here, we had not taken care of him.

The nursing home stood on one side of a road and opposite it was a hospital. The two were connected by a bridge that looked like a plastic straw. At five o’clock, my mother and I lifted Birju from his bed. My mother slipped her arms through his underarms, and I held him around the knees. We swung him into a wheelchair and rolled him through the hallways onto the bridge. There, facing out, our image reflected back at us, we waited for my father to come from the train station. He worked in New York, and each morning he took a train into the city. That evening, when my father arrived, he said that he had seen us hovering above the road, snow falling past us.

That first day, he wasn’t drunk. But almost every day after this, he was. Sometimes he would smell of beer and other times of scotch. “Another bastard day,” he would say bitterly in Birju’s room.

In the beginning, my mother remained silent about my father’s drinking. She looked shocked. I could tell she wasn’t speaking because she didn’t want to say anything in front of me. I knew that this meant I, too, was supposed to pretend not to see, and yet I wasn’t sure whether this meant I should act busy and energetic so that it would appear that I was too frantic to be able to see anything or whether I should act as I always had.

Later, after perhaps ten days, my mother began to acknowledge that my father was drinking. First she was sarcastic. She muttered under her breath. “You are going to kill someone driving this way.” My father ignored her.

Then she became openly angry. Wet-eyed, she shouted at him. “You have a son like this, and what do you do? Drown yourself.”

M
Y PARENTS HAD
moved to Metuchen because it was one of the few towns in New Jersey that had a temple. A month or so after we arrived, my mother combed my hair and took me with her to see the pundit. It was a Tuesday night, one of three evenings when he sat at the temple, another converted church with the musty American smell and a large idol-lined chamber with a refrigerator in the back for the ceremonial milk and bananas.

My mother explained our situation to the pundit. “Birju is in a coma,” she said, though Birju’s eyes were open and he was not in a coma, but was brain damaged. “The doctors say that they don’t know what can happen. He could wake tomorrow.” I wondered why she was saying this. I guessed that it must be because people are more likely to help if they think there is hope. If there isn’t any, they might try to avoid us, because who wants to be around someone depressing? “I go every morning to the nursing home. His father comes in the evening. I am so glad there is a temple in town.”

The pundit stood before us, leaning slightly forward. He was a handsome man in his thirties, tall, broad shouldered, with a thick mustache. It was strange to come to a pundit for help. This was not what one would have done in India. In India, pundits are not counselors or spiritual leaders, but functionaries, performers of rituals, the equivalent of low level government clerks who put stamps on papers and who always have their hands out for a bribe. My mother used to speak of pundits with disgust. “Nobody has ever seen the back of a pundit’s hands,” she would say. Once, she told a joke about a pundit who fell into a deep hole. People reached down into it and said, “Give us your hand.” When they said this, the pundit crossed his arms and began pouting. An old man then pushed his way to the front of the crowd. He said, “Is this any way to talk to a pundit?” He reached into the hole and said, “Take my hand.” Immediately, the pundit grabbed it.

I felt contempt for the pundit because he was a pundit. I also felt contempt for him because he was not a real one. Mr. Narayan was an engineer who volunteered at the temple. In the seventies through the mideighties, when most of us prayed in one another’s homes, even communities that had managed to buy or build a temple could not afford to pay a pundit, and so the pundits tended to be volunteers, usually especially pious men who, because of their piety and because of a reputation for virtue, were asked if they would be willing to lead ceremonies and sit in the temple on certain nights. In India, it was unheard of for a pundit to visit parishioners who were sick, or to offer help to families in trouble. These volunteer pundits, though, perhaps because they were just very decent people, behaved like the Christian pastors in the hospital.

A few days later, Mr. Narayan came to visit us in Birju’s room. It was a cold and sunny Saturday afternoon. It had been important to get him to come during the day so that my father would not be drunk. Mr. Narayan sat in a chair along the side of the hospital bed. He did not seem to care that Birju had his eyes open and so was not in a coma—perhaps the word coma did not mean something specific to him? Mr. Narayan sat up straight with his hands in his lap. It was strange to have him there. I had grown so used to our being alone with Birju that I had begun to feel that my brother was no longer real to the outside world. Yet Mr. Narayan’s presence made Birju feel less important—the fact that seeing Birju did not cause everything to change for Mr. Narayan made it seem like what had happened was not as important as I thought it was.

Mr. Narayan had a bright, modest smile. He appeared eager to please and nodded at everything my parents said. His friendliness irritated me. “Why should I be proud of what I am doing?” my father said. “I am not glad to be doing it. I hate doing it.” Mr. Narayan nodded, as if this frankness showed virtue and he was agreeing not with the statement but with the honesty.

My mother, who was standing behind my father’s chair, would not let him say this unchallenged. “Whatever you say, I am happy I’m here to take care of my son. What if I were dead and there was nobody to care for Birju? Thank God I have breath in me so I can love him.”

The pundit had us invited to a Ramayan Path in somebody’s house. The steps leading up to the front door were covered in slippers and sandals and sneakers. Inside, too, the foyer was swimming in shoes and sandals. To our left was the living room. It was empty of furniture. White sheets were spread over the floor, and a man sat near the altar at the front and read from a
Ramayana
in his lap.

It had been a long time since we were around so many people.

“What are we going to do?” my father murmured, looking down as he stepped on the back of his loafers to pop them off.

“We’re going to meet people,” my mother hissed.

We went into the room to our right. This was jammed with guests and also sofas standing on their ends. There were so many people that I could only mostly see stomachs and waists. Walking through the crowd, nervous, I felt that the men and women around me were not living real lives, that my family, because it was suffering so intensely, was living a life that was more real than these people’s, whose lives were silly like a TV show.

My mother and I and my father ended up in the kitchen. Here the light was diffuse because of the steam from the pots boiling on the stove. Our hostess, a large Punjabi woman, came up to us. She had a ponytail and was wearing the baggy shirt and pantaloons of a
salwar kameez
.

“Ah, Mrs. Mishra,” she said, taking my mother’s small hands in her large ones, “your story is like a fairy tale.”

I liked this flattery. Still, I felt that our torment was being diminished by being compared to something unreal.

“Brother-in-law, thank you for coming. When I tell people your story, they are amazed.” Mrs. Kohli pressed her hands together before her. My father stammered a
namaste
.

Mrs. Kohli introduced us to a woman standing nearby. The woman was in pants and a shiny silk blouse. This meant either that she was lower class, since she was not dressed appropriately for a religious ceremony, or she was very educated and did not have to be like other people. “Her son is in a nursing home,” Mrs. Kohli told the woman.

“My son had an accident in a swimming pool,” my mother said. “He’s in a coma.” She said this shyly, as if she were sharing something precious. I became irritated. I thought,
No. Birju is not in a coma. He is brain damaged. He is destroyed.

“Can he not talk at all?” the woman asked.

“No,” my mother said and looked embarrassed.

“If you are in a room with him and sitting next to him, will he not know it?”

“There is no coma,” my father said. “He is not asleep. Our son has his eyes open. He can’t walk or talk. My wife says this coma thing because she thinks this sounds better.”

Mrs. Kohli smiled. She nodded her head proudly. “See? A parent’s love knows no shore.”

My father said, “I’m going to go sit down.”

Mrs. Kohli took us to meet other women. Again, my mother said that Birju was in a coma. These women, too, kept asking whether Birju really could not talk at all.

About an hour or so after we arrived, the reading of the
Ramayana
was nearing its end. Women sat cross-legged with their heads covered as if they were in temple. My mother and I sat together. My father sat nearby, his head bowed, looking down at the white sheet.

Usually, the host or hostess is the one who reads the end of the
Ramayana
. Mrs. Kohli came walking through the crowd, stepping carefully past knees. She reached my mother and me. Looking at my mother, she said, “Please come. Read the last verses.”

“Ji, that is for you to do.” My mother appeared at a loss, like someone trying to refuse an expensive gift from someone she hardly knew.

W
E BEGAN RECEIVING
invitations to people’s houses, usually in connection with some religious ceremony. When we went, we were treated very respectfully, especially my mother. As soon as she entered a house, she was surrounded by women. It was as if we represented something—love of family, sacrificing for others. I, too, began to say that Birju was in a coma. This seemed what people wanted to hear. Once I told a man that Birju was brain damaged, that there was no hope, and he looked down at me and smiled and nodded like I was saying something other than what I actually was.

People visited us at the nursing home. Mostly these were couples with children. Often, it appeared, they hoped to teach their children a lesson. Once a man scolded his five-year-old daughter in front of us. “See what we do for you? Would an American do what Auntie and Uncle are doing? An American would say, ‘You have to stand on your own two feet. You live your life, and I will live mine.’ This is what we Indians do. We love our children too much. Go touch Birju brother’s feet.” The girl went slowly, hesitantly, to the hospital bed. Birju was wearing white socks. His feet were lying on a sheepskin, and because their tendons had shrunk, they turned inwards and almost met.

We also had men visit who said they could make Birju normal. These were men who worked as travel agents, candy-shop owners, engineers. A few came with their wives. Most came alone. Once, a mathematician who taught at a university visited. He had a horseshoe of hair around his scalp and a little narrow mustache. He sat by Birju with his hands on his stomach, his legs stretched before him, and he began quietly to lecture on Hindu scripture. He chuckled as he spoke, as if he were surprised by his own intelligence. Some of the words he used were English, and he used these when he wanted to show that he recognized science. “Ji, this
akashvani
, obviously this is a radio.” He said “obviously” in English. “Many things,” he said in English, “which Westerners say they invented, we had thousands of years ago. Aeroplanes. Television.” Then he switched to Hindi. “There is proof. It is not like I am just saying this.” He said this and laughed. He picked his nose, examined the snot, and flicked it beneath Birju’s bed.

I was used to people saying Indians had invented most things. I had heard such claims many times before. A few men that visited said God had appeared to them in a dream and told them how to wake Birju. Others said that they had learned a cure from a saint in India.

I did not like these “miracle workers.” It seemed to me that they wanted to try their so-called cures on Birju because doing so would make them feel that they were at the center of important things. Still, there was comfort in having visitors. I dreaded the moment of their departure, when my parents and I would be alone again with Birju. When people left, the loneliness came so quickly that it was as if a window had been opened and cold air had rushed in. Sometimes this loneliness was so great that I almost wished that they had not visited.

Ordinary people, people who were calm, cheerful, and polite, also came. They invited us to their homes for dinner. In some ways my mother liked them more. With her suspicious nature, she saw melodrama as a way of covering things up. But the melodramatic people said more extreme things. They gave us more attention.