Family Life by Akhil Sharma Read Free Book Online Page B

have committed a sin.” It seemed obvious that my father felt caught and so was trying to distract from his mistake.
    “If I weren’t willing to fight,” my mother shouted, “if I weren’t willing to scream, they would put Birju on the street. They would say it is time to go and here is your bill and there is the door. The only reason they haven’t forced Birju out is because they are frightened, because they don’t want to fight with someone who’s crazy.”
    “Yes, you are crazy. I have always said you’re crazy.”
    “And you’re a coward. You don’t want to do the hard things. You want to flatter and be nice and hope that these nurses and doctors will do everything Birju needs on their own. They won’t. They will do the ordinary things but not the hard things. For the hard things you have to fight. These doctors and nurses just want you to be silent. They don’t care what happens as long as you don’t cause trouble.”
    My parents fought, and I was becoming lazy. Now when I came to the hospital after school, I no longer wanted to sit by Birju’s bed and sing prayers. Singing prayers bored me. Often when I got to his room, I would tell my mother that I had homework and would go to the children’s lounge down the hall.
    The lounge had blue walls and yellow bookcases with picture books. There was a yellow beanbag and a large television. I liked to sit on the beanbag before the TV with a book in my lap and read while the TV played. Whenever commercials started, I would look down at the book and read. I liked books where the hero was a young man, preferably under twenty-five, who had a magical power that he discovered over the course of the book. Riddle of Stars , The Chronicles of Amber , A Wizard of Earthsea —I read these over and over. Reading a book a second time was more comforting than reading it the first because during the second reading everything was in its place. I read and watched TV so much that sometimes when I closed my eyes, images flickered before me.
    I felt that there was something bad about being lost in my imagination. Occasionally, there were fall days that were so beautiful that I thought I would never see a day so lovely again. I would think this and then go back to reading or watching TV.
    One evening when I was in the lounge, I saw a rock star being interviewed on Entertainment Tonight . The musician, dressed in a sleeveless undershirt that revealed a swarm of tattoos on his arms and shoulders, looked past the interviewer and began shouting at the camera. “Don’t watch me! Live your life! I’m not you.” I was filled with a sudden desire. I hurried out of the lounge and went down the hall and left the hospital. I stood outside the main entrance.
    Now that I was outside, I didn’t know what to do. It was cold and dark and there was an enormous moon. Cars leaving the parking lot stopped one by one at the edge of the road. I watched as they waited for an opening in the traffic, their brake lights glowing.
    “ A RE THINGS GETTING worse?” I asked God. November had just begun. Soon it would be Thanksgiving and then Christmas, and after this there would be a new year and in that year there would not have been a single day in which Birju had walked or talked.
    “What do you think?”
    “They seem to be.”
    “At least Birju’s hospital hasn’t forced him out.”
    “At least Birju isn’t dead. At least Daddy’s bus has never fallen off a bridge.”
    God was silent.
    “I’m ashamed,” I said.
    “About what?”
    “That after the accident, I was glad I might become an only child.”
    “Everybody thinks strange thoughts,” God said. “It doesn’t matter if you think something.”
    “When I was walking around in the schoolyard and you asked if I would switch places with Birju, I thought, No .”
    “That, too, is normal.”
    “Why don’t you make Birju like he was?”
    As soon as I asked the question, God stopped feeling real. I knew then that I was alone, lying