Family Life (2 page)

The messenger took the one rupee coin. He touched it to his forehead.

Once he was gone, Behri said, “Shuba, you are already American.”

Then she pushed herself off the stool. She turned to the children. “Come, come. Go home.”

A
T FIRST
having the tickets thrilled me.

The next morning, I went to the milk shop at the end of our street. The shop was a cement booth about as wide as a ticket counter. It was a hot, bright morning and I was sweating by the time I arrived. The air near the shop smelled of milk and spoilage and the incense that the milkman burned every morning as part of his prayers. There was a crush of boys on the sidewalk, spilling off it onto the road, holding up their milk pails, calling out, “Brother, Brother,” to get the milkman’s attention.

Some of the boys looked at me and glanced away, their heads turning like oscillating table fans. Others glared as if I had taken something from them. To me, both reactions showed jealousy, and they thrilled me.

I came up to a boy and pressed my hands together before me. “Namaste,” I said. The boy looked at me strangely. I knew it was odd to speak so formally to someone my own age, but I felt that being excessively proper would make me even more special; not only was I going to America, but I was polite and humble. “How is your family? Everybody happy? Healthy?” Speaking increased my excitement. I tried not to smile. I took out a luggage tag from the pocket of my short pants. The tag had an elastic loop coming out of a small hole. “Our tickets arrived. We got these also. Do you want to see?” I held out the tag.

The boy was boxed in. If he refused to look, he would be revealing his jealousy and so appear weak. He took the tag. After handling it for a moment, he gave it back in silence.

I spoke again. “I learned that everybody in America has their own speedboat.” Nobody had told me any such thing. As I said this, though, it felt true. “Brother, I can’t swim. I hope I don’t drown.” To be modest and to also be leaving for America made me feel like I was wonderful.

The crowd shuffled. The boy I was talking to moved away. I turned to another boy and pressed my hands together once more.

T
HE
S
UNDAY AFTER
the tickets arrived, my mother took me and Birju to see my grandparents. She shook us awake while it was still dark. We went out onto the roof and bathed using a bucket and a mug. It was strange to bathe with the moon above us. And when the horizon began to brighten that first light felt rare and precious. And then, a little later, as the sky brightened, we walked down the street toward the bus stand. Birju walked beside my mother and I walked in the shadow of the boundary walls. In the shade, the dust was heavier and things smelled different, as if a fragment of the night lingered.

Everything about where my grandparents lived was pleasingly miniature. Their lane was so narrow I could reach out and touch the houses on both sides. In the morning, when we arrived, the gutters ran with soapy water and the lane smelled of soap and also of hot oil and dough from the parathas being fried.

My grandfather, seeing us, straightened up from sweeping his small whitewashed courtyard. “Who are these two princes? Are they saints who have come to bless my house?” He wore white pajamas and a homemade sleeveless undershirt with long shoulder straps. I hurried forward and to show that I was good and knew to display respect, touched his feet.

“We have gotten our airplane tickets, nanaji,” Birju said. Hearing this, I wished I had said it so that then I would be the one bringing the news.

“I’m not letting both of you go. One of you I will keep.”

“We’ll miss you,” Birju said, reaching down to touch our grandfather’s feet. He had long, bony arms.

“I will miss you, too,” I murmured, again feeling jealous that Birju had said something that made him look good.

There were small rooms on two sides of the courtyard. These were cool, shadowy places. They smelled of mothballs, and this was pleasant because it suggested closed trunks and things that would be revealed when the seasons changed.

Around eleven that morning, I fell asleep on a cot in one of the rooms. When I woke, Birju was lying next to me, smelling of the coconut oil that my mother put into his hair because of his dandruff. My mother and grandmother were sitting on the floor near the courtyard. They were talking in whispers and making seemi, rubbing wads of dough between their fingers so that the dough became thin as a thread, then pinching off small pieces so that these fell on the towels spread in their laps. The seemi looked like fingernail clippings.

“You don’t speak English,” my grandmother whispered.

“I will learn.”

“You’re almost forty.”

“I’m going for Birju and Ajay.”

“Isn’t it better for them to be here with their whole family?”

“Their father is there.”

“Here you have a job.”

“What is here? Thieves? That Indira woman will eat us.”

I lay on my side and watched and listened. Usually, naps left me melancholy. Lying there, I began to think that when I was in America, I wouldn’t be able to see my grandparents every Sunday. Till then, I had not fully understood that going to America meant leaving India. I had somehow imagined that I would get to have the jet packs and chewing gum that people in America had and also be able to show these things off to my friends.

Soon it was time for lunch. I sat on the floor beside Birju. I broke off pieces of roti and leaned forward so that whatever dripped would fall onto the steel plate before me. The melancholy wouldn’t go away. I couldn’t quite believe that when I left India, my grandparents’ house would continue to exist, that the gutters along the sides of the lane would still run with soapy water.

W
E WERE SUPPOSED
to leave in early October. In August, this seemed far away. Then September arrived. Every evening I had the sense that the day had rushed by, that I had not done enough and the day had been wasted.

I started to talk in my sleep. Most afternoons when I got home from school, Birju and my mother and I napped on a wide bed in the bedroom. The thick curtains would be pulled shut, the ceiling fan spinning. There would be trays of water on the floor to soften the air. One afternoon, I lay on the bed with my eyes open. I couldn’t move my arms and legs. I was hot, sweating, panicked. I saw ants carrying our television up a wall. I said, “The red ants are carrying away the TV.” Birju was sitting beside me looking down, appearing amused. He seemed more real than the ants.

In school, I started getting into fights. I was in third grade. One afternoon, I was standing in the back of my class, talking with my best friend Hershu and a little Sikh boy whose hair was pulled into a bun under a black cloth. The Sikh boy said, “Americans clean themselves with paper, not water.”

“I know that,” I said. “Say something that other people don’t know.”

“In America they say ‘yeah’ not yes. Mrs. Singh told me to let you know.”

“That’s nothing. On an airplane, the stewardess has to give you whatever you ask for. I’m going to ask for a baby tiger.”

“When you get on the plane, go to the back,” Hershu said. “Go all the way to the back to sit.” Hershu said this softly. He had a large head, which looked too big for his body. “When an aeroplane falls, it falls with its front down.”

“Get away, evil-eyed one,” I exclaimed. I put my hands on Hershu’s chest and shoved. He stumbled back. He stared at me for a moment. His eyes got wet.

“Look,” I called out, “he’s going to cry.”

Hershu turned away and walked to his seat. I couldn’t understand why I had just done this thing.

I
CONTINUED GOING TO
the milk shop every morning. Because I would be emigrating to America, the milkman did not have me wait in the crowd and instead called me to the front. He probably did this because bestowing attention was one of his few powers.

Once he said, “What will happen to your brother’s bicycle?” The milkman was seventeen or eighteen, and he was in the shop’s entrance, his pajamas rolled up, barefoot because milk inevitably got spilled and it is a sin to step on milk with slippers.

“I don’t know.”

“Tell your mother I would like to buy it.”

As he spoke, I was conscious of all the boys watching. I felt their eyes on the back of my neck like hot sun.

Relatives started coming to the apartment and asking for the things that might be left behind.

One warm night, my father’s younger brother visited. He sat on the sofa in the living room glowering, sweat dripping from his mustache. The ceiling fan spun. He drank several cups of tea. Finally he said, “What are you going to do with the television and refrigerator?”

“Ji, we were planning to sell it,” my mother answered.

“Why? Don’t you have enough money?”

Piece by piece, furniture vanished. The easy chairs disappeared, the daybed was taken away, and the sofa faced a blank wall before it, too, was gone. Laborers, thin as mice, came wearing torn shirts, smelling of dried sweat, sheets wrapped around their waists. One laborer tilted the iron armoire that stood in the living room onto another laborer’s back. The burdened man inched out of the room. The dining table was turned onto its side and carried away. Once the table was gone, there were white scuff marks on the cement floor where it had stood. When even the TV was gone, Birju and I stood in a corner of the empty living room and called out “Oh! Oh!” to stir up echoes.

Near the end of September, Birju convinced me that I was walking and talking in my sleep because I was possessed by a ghost.

This happened late one afternoon. Birju and I had just woken from our nap, and we were sitting on the bed drinking our daily glass of milk with rose syrup. Birju said, “Ajay, don’t tell Mommy this, but you are possessed. When you talk, it isn’t you talking but the ghost.”

“You’re lying. You’re always lying.”

“I talked to the ghost, and he said that he had the gift of prophecy.”

I had always believed that I might possess supernatural powers, like flying or maybe seeing into the future. “You’re lying,” I said, hoping that he was right.

“I asked him what was going to happen to me.” Birju said this and stopped. He looked serious.

“What did the ghost say?”

“He said I’m going to die.”

I stared at my brother. He looked down. He had long eyelashes and narrow shoulders and a narrow chest.

“I didn’t believe him. I said, ‘If you’re a ghost, why do you sound like Ajay?’ He said, ‘Since I haven’t been born again, I haven’t committed any sins, and so I have a child’s innocence.’”

“Maybe the ghost was lying.”

“Why would he lie?”

I was quiet for a moment. Birju appeared to have the truth on his side. I asked, “Did the ghost say anything about me?”

“Why should I ask about you? I have my own problems.”

B
IRJU SOBBED WHEN
his bicycle was taken away. He refused to go downstairs to watch it being put into the back of a truck. Instead, he sat on the living room floor with the heels of his hands pressed into his eyes.

Among the things that remained was my plastic bucket of toys. My mother said that I could just leave it behind in the apartment. The thought of the yellow bucket standing alone in the empty living room, the apartment locked, made me feel guilty, like I would be abandoning it. I decided to give away my toys.

On our last morning in India, I took the bucket with me to the milk shop. When I saw the crowd of boys, shoving and pushing on the sidewalk, I felt embarrassed. I wanted the boys to remember me, and yet in the past, I had tried to make them feel bad.

“Will you take something?” I said, standing on the sidewalk and speaking to a boy whose head was covered in stubble. I took a little car from the bucket and held it out. My voice trembled. “I’m going away and perhaps you would like to have it.”

The boy’s hand struck my palm. As soon as it did, I wanted my car back.

“Would you like something else?” I said, my voice shaking. I put the bucket down and stepped away. The boy bent and hurriedly searched through it. He took out two plastic soldiers, a horse, and a large see-through plastic gun that made a noise and flashed light when the trigger was pulled.

I moved to another boy. I knew this boy was poor since, instead of bringing a milk pail to the shop, he brought a cup.

Soon the bucket was empty. I didn’t know what to do with the bucket. “Will you take it?” I asked the poor boy. He nodded shyly. As I was leaving, the milk man cried, “Remember me in America.”

That night, my mother’s younger brother arrived to take us to the airport.

I
used to think that my father had been assigned to us by the government. This was because he appeared to serve no purpose. When he got home in the evening, all he did was sit in his chair in the living room, drink tea, and read the paper. Often he looked angry. By the time we left for America, I knew that the government had not sent him to live with us. Still, I continued to think he served no purpose. Also, I found him frightening.

My father was waiting for us in the arrivals hall at the airport. He was leaning against a metal railing and he appeared angry. I saw him and got anxious.

The apartment my father had rented had one bedroom. It was in a tall, brown-brick building in Queens. The apartment’s gray metal front door swung open into a foyer with a wooden floor. Beyond this was a living room with a reddish brown carpet that went from wall to wall. Other than in the movies, I had never seen a carpet. Birju and my parents walked across the foyer and into the living room. I went to the carpet’s edge and stopped. A brass metal strip held it to the floor. I took a step forward. I felt as if I were stepping onto a painting. I tried not to bring my weight down.

My father took us to the bathroom to show us toilet paper and hot water. While my mother was interested in status, being better educated than others or being considered more proper, my father was just interested in being rich. I think this was because although both of my parents had grown up poor, my father’s childhood had been much more desperate. At some point my grandfather, my father’s father, had begun to believe that thorns were growing out of his palms. He had taken a razor and picked at them till they were shaggy with scraps of skin. Because of my grandfather’s problems, my father had grown up feeling that no matter what he did, people would look down on him. As a result, he cared less about convincing people of his merits and more about just owning things.