Free Family Life by Akhil Sharma

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.
    E VERY DAY AT two-thirty, my mother would fetch me from school and bring me to the nursing home. My father arrived at six. At seven, we went back to our apartment.
    Our apartment consisted of one room with a sofa in the middle, facing a kitchenette and a television that sat on a cardboard box. Each night, I flung a sheet over the sofa and slept on it. My parents slept on a sponge mattress behind the sofa. On Friday and Saturday nights, my father stayed up very late watching movies on the VCR. Before the accident, he hadn’t liked movies as much as my mother and I did. Now, he sat right in front of the television with the sound turned very low until two or three in the morning. He liked comedies especially: Gol Maal , Naram Garam , Chhoti Si Baat . Periodically through the night, I would wake and the room would be jumping with blue lights. When I rolled over on my side, I would see my father sitting there, directly in front of the TV. Almost always, he was drunk. His mouth would be open as if he were captivated by what he was seeing. Sometimes on weekends, my father did not come to the nursing home until noon or one o’clock. He would remain lying on the mattress as we ate breakfast. He would remain lying there as my mother and I left and stepped into the hallway.
    Spring came. In the park that we passed on our way to and from the nursing home, the branches of the trees grew mossy with budding leaves. And then summer arrived. School ended, and I spent all day at the home.
    In the morning, when we left the apartment, it would be bright and hot and humid. Our building was near the end of Main Street, a few hundred yards from the large old post office. There were parking meters on the sidewalk, gray metal poles the shape of matchsticks, upright, proper, brave, waiting for a coin so that they could come to life. When I walked past a parking meter, I would reach out and touch it.

W e had sued the apartment building where Birju had had his accident. There had been a lifeguard on duty as Birju lay underwater. The fact that Birju was not spotted quickly was one mistake. When he was dragged out and was lying by the side of the pool, he was not given mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. This was a second mistake.
    My father said that Birju had not gotten mouth-to-mouth resuscitation because he was Indian.
    “Shut up,” my mother shouted.
    This was in Birju’s room. My father was drunk, but he had said the same thing sober many times during the months that we waited for the financial settlement. I knew that what my father was saying was a lie. Hearing him say this was comforting, though, because then Birju’s accident was no longer purely accidental, unconnected to the larger world, lacking all meaning. Also, there was something satisfying about being angry.
    A YEAR HAD GONE by since Birju’s