Family Life (16 page)

M
INAKSHI AND I
kissed every day. Once, it was raining and I didn’t think we could go out, and she said, “I have an umbrella.” When she said this, I thought I had misheard her. The fact that she, too, wanted to kiss was hard to believe.

I had meant to be like Amitabh Bachchan with Minakshi—silent, mysterious. I found, though, that I could not stop talking, that when we were in the woods and I would pull away from her to breathe, I would immediately start speaking, that I wanted to talk as much as I wanted to kiss.

At first I said the sorts of things that would stir up pity or portray me as brave. I told her about how smart Birju had been. I told her how I bathed him in the morning and how, often, after we put him back into his hospital bed, Birju, warm and relaxed, tended to piss on himself. After a little while, though, I began telling her things which were so awful that I had somehow managed not to acknowledge them.

When Birju had gotten pneumonia, he had had a series of convulsions. These had caused more brain damage. Before the convulsions, if there was a loud noise, he would swing his head in the direction of the noise. Now when there was a noise, he wouldn’t react—he’d remain smacking his lips and looking lost in thought. Earlier Birju had been able to sit mostly straight in his wheelchair. Now, when we sat him up, he began slumping. To keep him upright, we had to put his arms through a vest of sorts. The vest was missing a back but had long straps on the sides. We used these to tie Birju to his wheelchair.

I did not normally spend money on the vending machines in school. Spending money made me anxious. After I told Minakshi about this additional brain damage, I went back into the building and bought an ice cream. I think telling her was like releasing some enormous stress and the ice cream was like how one sits down after a shock.

I found myself falling in love. Minakshi seemed kind and wonderful. Her small body, how I could gather it up in my arms like a bouquet, seemed the most extraordinary thing in the world. Loving her, I was scared. There were certain things I didn’t tell her because they were humiliating—my father’s drinking, my mother’s irrationality and meanness. I expected to be judged based on my family, and not telling her about my parents, I felt as if I were pretending to be better than I was.

S
OMETIMES, COMING HOME
from kissing Minakshi, I would see Birju on his exercise bed and get upset. I couldn’t understand why everything wasn’t better. I wanted to hurt someone or something. The only thing I could find to hurt was my relationship with Minakshi.

Priya was taller than I was and very skinny and had a nose like a beak. We were in biology class together, and I had spoken to her only a few times. I knew, though, that her father was a doctor and she was very smart. Also, she sat with Rita and the white girls.

I began telling Priya I loved her. Passing her on the staircase, I whispered this. I slipped little strips of paper into her locker. On the strips I wrote poems. I did this four or five times, and then Priya came up to me in biology class. I was standing in the back alongside the bulletin boards.

“Did you write this?” she asked, holding out one of the strips.

The class had not yet begun, but most of the students were already there. I was conscious of their presence. I thought of Minakshi finding out.

“No,” I said.

Priya laughed. “I heard you told Rita you loved her.”

I didn’t say anything.

S
ometimes on weekends my parents went to temple or a prayer ceremony and were away for the afternoon. Minakshi came over then. First she would stand in Birju’s room and say hello to him. When she did this, she looked serious. Afterward we went upstairs. We would lie on my bed fully clothed. We would kiss and rub against each other. I couldn’t believe I was getting to do something so wonderful.

Minakshi seemed the embodiment of a future. The possibility of escape made me more impatient with my mother instead of less. She and I were now bathing Birju most mornings. Nearly always we fought as we did this. One morning in Birju’s room, perhaps inspired by how eunuchs in India show up at people’s houses and demand money and begin taking off their clothes to show they will do anything unless they are paid, I started stripping. I had just finished bathing my brother, cleaning his ass with a bar of soap, and my mother had been telling me that she knew I hated him, that whatever I did for him I did because of guilt and not because of love.

“Why should I have any shame?” I shouted once I was naked.

My mother was near the foot of the bed, embracing a folded towel. She looked at me stunned. This pleased me. We often sought to show that there was no limit to what we would say or do.

After a moment, my mother wagged her head from side to side. “If Birju were all right, I would tell you to get out. I’d tell you to leave right now. Go with your stupid grades and die.”

I was not going to let her have the last word. “How can they be stupid when they’re so high?”

W
HILE MY FATHER’S
drinking was getting so bad that he hardly helped and my mother and I were fighting every day, my family was also becoming more and more famous. This was not only because my good grades had brought another level of attention to us, but also because the community was growing and so there were simply more people to give attention.

A large apartment complex, a row of brown brick buildings called Hilltop Apartments, had opened along a wide, busy road about a mile away. Almost all of the people who lived in Hilltop were Indians, new arrivals. Riding on the school bus, I often saw them walking along the sides of roads because they didn’t have cars. At temple, the women from Hilltop, women who worked at Kmart and grocery stores, carried see-through plastic purses. These people began visiting us. Many of them spoke neither Hindi nor English. When they came, they brought coconuts and bananas as if they were visiting an actual temple. Usually they said nothing or only the few words of Hindi that they knew: namaste, beta, khush. Some of the women came into Birju’s room, gripped his feet with both hands, and bowed and touched their foreheads to his feet.

My father was now drinking all night long. Many nights, I woke at three or four in the morning from hearing him coming down the hallway. The upstairs bathroom was next to my room. My father kept a bottle of scotch beneath the bathroom sink. If the creaking of the hallway floor didn’t wake me, the buzz of the fluorescent tube light turning on did.

The wood of the bathroom door was swollen. One night, I heard the door being pulled close. I lay in bed and, unable to go back to sleep, became enraged.

I left my room and came out into the dark hallway. A line of white light shone beneath the bathroom door. I wanted to shout at my father. I knocked. “Who?” my father said in a slurred voice.

“Can I come in?”

I pushed the door. My father was standing by the window. He was wearing gray pajamas. His face was sagging, and his eyes were dilated. The window was open, and a moist spring breeze was blowing in.

There was something about the reality of seeing my father’s loose face that made me stop being angry. “How are you, Daddy?” I asked.

“I am so happy,” he answered. He was smiling.

A
NOTHER MORNING I
woke to the sound of my mother’s voice shouting with what sounded like alarm, and I hurried to my parents’ room.

“You are going to lose your job,” my mother cried. She was standing at the foot of the bed while my father lay before her.

“They’re all like me, Shuba,” he slurred. “It’s a government office.”

“We won’t have insurance! Birju will be thrown out on the street.”

“I’m union. They say, ‘Come to a meeting.’ I answer, ‘Is there food? I only go to meetings with food.’”

My father was almost always late for work. Sometimes he left the house at noon. Sometimes he missed a day. Coming home from school, I would see his station wagon in the driveway, and my chest would tighten. I would walk into Birju’s room, see my mother sitting by the exercise bed reading to Birju, and her face would be grim. I would keep to myself, then, because I didn’t want her shouting at me. I’d go upstairs to my room and sit at my desk and read Hemingway. Hemingway had been an alcoholic and his characters often drank too much. Their drinking appeared false, though, because there were no consequences. It was like how cartoon characters fall off cliffs without being injured. Spotting this lie in Hemingway made me feel superior to him, and this bit of superiority led me to feel anger and contempt and being angry was pleasurable.

At some point, my father began missing one or two days of work a week. He was put on probation. He told my mother that he sat in an office with his supervisor, his union representative, and a very fat man who was the human resources person. He signed a piece of paper to document that he had been notified of the complaint.

When he had signed the paper, his supervisor said, “I don’t care if you show up drunk. You just have to come to work.”

“That’s not what he means,” the fat man murmured.

My father was not going to be told what to do. “You want to show you have power,” he shouted at his supervisor. “I know you.”

When she heard this, my mother said, “They do have power.”

“I am not going to be a slave, Shuba. Not for you. Not for Birju.”

“Always you find a way to bring in Birju.”

A few days later, I came home from school, and my father was sitting at the kitchen table. He had his back to the window. He was trying to drink tea. His hands were shaking.

My mother stood by the table. “Your father is going to stop drinking.” I wondered if I was expected to pretend to believe this. We went to Birju’s room. Birju had thick acne on his cheeks now as a side effect of one of his medications. The acne was as thick as bubbled paint, but because one was not expecting it, at first glance, he appeared to have rosy cheeks.

My father put a hand on Birju’s head. He swore on Birju’s life that he would not drink. I saw this and thought I was watching some melodrama that my parents had concocted.

“We have to help him,” my mother said to me. She said that my father was able to not drink on his own during the day. At night, though, the desire to drink was too much. He could not sleep without drinking.

That night, after Birju had received his oral feeding, the three of us sat around his hospital bed playing cards until the nurse’s aide came. When my father climbed the stairs, my mother and I followed. My mother carried a thermos of tea, and I held a tray before me. The tray was covered in plates of biscuits and sweets and bowls of nuts and various types of salty fried dough.

In the bedroom, my mother flipped on the light switch by the door. She turned on the lamps that stood on the nightstands. The room became bright. There was a mirror on top of the dresser, and our reflection in this and the reflections in the windows made the room seem crowded. Pointing the remote control, she flicked on the TV. The noise added to the sense of busyness.

We sat on my parents’ bed and played cards with the plates spread around us. My father sat cross-legged, head bowed, looking hopeless.

My mother asked me about school.

“It will be harder to be ranked first this year than last,” I said, angry that I was being asked to engage in this foolishness.

“Already making excuses.”

“It will be harder. Each year, it’s harder.”

The hours passed. Around two that night, my mother got tired. She turned to my father. “Do you feel sleepy?”

“No.”

She put a videotape in the VCR. I cleared the bed of plates and cups. We turned off the lights and lay stretched on the bed, my father in the middle. The television shook its light over us.

My father didn’t drink that night. The next evening, around five, he called to say that he was leaving work and should be home by six. The fact that my father made sure he told us this seemed to indicate that he was trying not to drink.

This second night, too, I sat with my mother and father by Birju’s bed. And then at ten, we marched up the stairs with the tea and snacks.

Two days passed without drinking and then three. I began feeling a strange exhilaration. At school I would picture us going up the stairs with my father. I would look forward to this.

F
OR SEVERAL MONTHS,
my father did not drink. In my memory, this period is wonderful. Tenth grade ended, and I was again ranked first. Summer started. I turned sixteen. During those months, I was so happy that at night I had a hard time sleeping. I would be asleep, yet I would be aware of my happiness the way that, when you sleep in a room full of sun, you are aware of the light.

When he came home from work, my father was quiet, glum. Sometimes he would go upstairs to change his clothes and not come down. I would go get him, and he would be sitting at the edge of his bed looking overwhelmed. The only time my father was his old self was when he was fighting with my mother. “You don’t care. You think you know what’s right and that everybody else is a fool.” Still, the fighting was much less than it used to be, and in my view, my mother was very patient. When my father shouted at her, she listened and did not reply. Once, she told him that what he was doing was very difficult and that every day she prayed he had strength.

I was glad for our changed life. In the morning, my father descended the stairs to bathe Birju. At night, my parents no longer shouted so loudly that the nurse’s aide had to come and stand at the bottom of the stairs and call out, “Mrs. Mishra, Mrs. Mishra,” in a high, put-upon voice.

I continued worrying that my father would drink. When he got home and went up the stairs, I watched to see if he put his hand on the railing, because he used to do this for support when he was drunk. At night, if I heard the swollen bathroom door shoved shut, I would wake and lie there, even though I had checked and there was no bottle of scotch under the sink.

One evening in the fall, 6:00 p.m. arrived and my father’s silver station wagon did not swing into the driveway. My mother and I went to Birju’s room and hefted him into his wheelchair. I rolled him into the kitchen. I stood the wheelchair at the head of the table and began feeding him pureed roti and lentils.