Family Life by Akhil Sharma Read Free Book Online Page A

discuss brain damage with someone who was blue and was holding a flute and had a peacock feather in his hair.
    “You’re not angry with me for touching the tree?”
    “No, I’m flexible.”
    There was a large oak tree on the way to school. It stood half on the sidewalk and half off it. Because the tree looked very old, I thought it might know God from when there were fewer things in the world. Usually as I passed it, I would touch the tree and bring my hand to my forehead the way I did when I had touched my grandfather’s feet.
    “I respect you. The tree is just a way of showing respect to my elders.”
    God laughed. “I am not too caught up in formalities.”
    I became quiet. I was convinced that I had been marked as special by Birju’s accident. To me it appeared obvious that the beginnings of all heroes contained misfortune. Both God Krishna and Superman had been separated from their parents at birth. Batman, too, had been orphaned. God Ram had to spend fourteen years in the forest, and it was only then that he did things that made him famous. I waited until it would not seem improper to talk about myself.
    “How famous will I be?” I finally asked.
    “I can’t tell you the future,” God said.
    “Why not?”
    “Even if I told you something, I might change my mind.”
    “But it would be harder for you to change your mind after you have said something will happen.”
    God laughed again. “You’ll be so famous that fame will be a problem.”
    I sighed and wiggled into the foam strip.
    “I want Birju’s accident to lead to something.” Saying this felt noble.
    “He won’t be forgotten.”
    “I can’t just be famous, though. I need money, too. I need to take care of Mommy and Daddy.”
    “First you grab the finger, and then you grab the wrist.”
    “I’m just being practical.”
    “Don’t worry. You can hardly imagine the life ahead.”
    This last statement made me happy.
    I T SEEMED OBVIOUS that God was more likely to help people who were good than those who were ordinary. This is why it felt very important that we behaved impeccably. My parents refused to do this, however.
    My father was strange as always. Right after the accident, when he had first visited Birju, he had stood by the hospital bed, his face swollen and dark, his voice choked, and said, “Don’t think I don’t blame you. Don’t think I don’t know this is all your fault. What was in the pool? What was in there that you had to jump before anybody else got to it? Was there gold? Was there treasure?”
    Since then, he had continued to say embarrassing things. Recently he had said that perhaps Birju had dived into the pool because of all the comic books he read, that Birju had thought he might gain superpowers by doing something like this.
    “Shut up,” my mother had replied.
    But my mother was not behaving well, either. She picked fights when she could have just been quiet.
    Every Friday night my father arrived on a Greyhound bus. He left on Sunday evenings to go back to New York. All weekend my parents would fight.
    One Saturday afternoon in October, a nurse’s aide, a large black woman in a white uniform, came into Birju’s room to replace his catheter. As she walked out, my father accompanied her to the door. “Thank you,” he said in the doorway.
    When he came back to the hospital bed, my mother glared at him. “Don’t say, ‘Thank you, thank you.’ Don’t say, ‘You are so good. You are so kind.’ If you do, they will think you’re weak.” Recently, the hospital had told us that Birju needed to be moved, that now that his condition was stable, he needed to be put in a nursing home. The problem was that the insurance company was saying it wouldn’t pay for a nursing home and so over the last few weeks, my mother had been getting into screaming matches with the hospital administrators who wanted us to leave.
    “That’s how you think,” my father said, flaring up. “To you everybody is an enemy. If I smile, I