Free Family Life by Akhil Sharma Page A

accident. My father began shaving him. The first time he did this was one afternoon. My mother and I stood and watched as he put shaving cream on Birju’s cheeks. “Take your time,” my mother said. “Be careful.”
    Birju lay there calmly as my father lathered him. It seemed unfair that something like this could happen and the world go on.
    One Friday night in December, my father came home late. My mother was cooking dinner. He entered the apartment and leaned back against the gray metal door. He was smiling. He crossed a foot over a knee and began unlacing a boot.
    “Do you have news?” my mother asked.
    “Yes,” my father said. He kept smiling.
    “Don’t say anything.”
    My mother took a spoon, dug it into the sugar bowl that was on the counter, and passed it to him. My father put the heaped spoon in his mouth. The handle stuck out like a thermometer.
    My mother said, “Now you can speak.”
    My father removed the spoon. “Six hundred and eighteen thousand dollars.”
    I didn’t know what this meant. I had thought we might get a hundred million dollars or maybe a billion. Six hundred and eighteen thousand dollars was so small that it hardly seemed to count. It seemed a very ordinary thing, like a cup or a pair of shoes.
    I began to feel I had not heard correctly. I was lying on the sofa, a hardcover science fiction book standing upright on my stomach.
    My mother stared at my father. She was yellowy in the apartment’s fluorescent light, and the skin beneath her eyes looked singed. “You said it would be one million.”
    “A third goes to the lawyer.”
    “That means six hundred and sixty-six thousand.”
    “There were expenses.”
    “Fifty thousand dollars to mail letters, to xerox,” she said angrily.
    “Shuba, Shuba.”
    “What did he do for three hundred thousand dollars?” My mother said this and looked away from my father. She was silent. After a moment, she turned back to him. “I don’t care about money. As long as we can afford medicine, that’s all that matters.”
    She spread newspaper on the floor, and we sat down to eat. My mouth was dry as I chewed, and when I swallowed, the roti felt sharp.
    After dinner we walked to the temple to give thanks. It was snowing. The snowflakes, as they drifted through the glow of the streetlights, resembled moths. I thought about the amount of the settlement.
    My father had said that financial settlements were based on how much the person injured could earn. As I walked, I thought of how much the money meant in terms of hourly pay. I reasoned that my mother went to the nursing home every day. She was there from eight thirty to seven. This meant she worked about ten hours a day, seven days a week. I was there from three to seven every weekday and both days on the weekend. I was not working all the time, though, when I was at the home. My father was also there on weeknights and weekends. If I were to undercount, my father and I each spent twenty hours a week at the nursing home. Birju was damaged all the time, and so this could count as a hundred hours of work a week. Two hundred and ten hours a week times fifty weeks was about ten thousand hours a year. If Birju remained alive for ten years, that was a hundred thousand hours of work. Six hundred and eighteen divided by a hundred was six dollars and eighteen cents.
    I had been hoping for a ridiculously low sum, like a dollar. When I got the six dollars and eighteen cents, I was startled. My mother, I knew, had gotten paid five and a half dollars an hour when she worked at the sewing factory. Six dollars and eighteen cents did not seem unfair for a boy.
    The next day in Birju’s room, my mother proposed that my father take me to a movie. It was as if we had decided to pretend that we had received good news and should celebrate. My mother said I should see Gandhi . “Go see it and learn something.” I didn’t want to see a movie. I felt shame at the thought of spending money. If I were going to see a