Free Family Life by Akhil Sharma Page B

movie, though, I wanted to see E.T. “What rubbish,” my mother said. “Monsters from the moon.”
    T HE AGREEMENT CAME in the mail. It was actually several contracts printed on legal-sized paper. Because we didn’t have a table in our apartment, my father spread the contracts on the sofa. He and my mother kneeled and signed. I wondered if I, too, would be asked to sign. I hadn’t signed many things in my life. I imagined refusing and demanding more money. I asked my mother if I had to sign.
    She laughed. She kissed me. “Why should you sign?”
    It seemed to me that the judge who had decided how much Birju was worth must have also decided that I didn’t matter very much. I might talk about loving my brother, but he probably hadn’t believed that I actually did.
    T HE NURSING HOME that Birju was in was not good. We had known this for a while. One morning my mother and I walked into Birju’s room. The lights were off and the window shades down. Birju was on his bed, on his side, behind the raised railings. He was panting.
    My mother turned on the lights. Tears were streaming down Birju’s face. He was propped up by pillows. Every two hours an aide was supposed to enter Birju’s room and turn him from one side to the other. The night aide must have forgotten to do so.
    “Every night when I leave him, I feel like I’m leaving him in a stairwell,” my mother said. She hurried around the bed so that she was between the bed and the wall. She told me to come hold Birju so that he remained on his side. I put my hands on his arm and hip. He was so wet from sweat it was as if someone had poured water over him. My mother removed the pillows, and I slowly lowered my brother onto his back.
    Regularly, we found things lying beneath Birju, things that the night aides had dropped: thermometers, latex gloves, cookies, once even a pair of scissors. What scared us most was when he was not fed on time. Birju was supposed to be given half a can of Isocal formula every three hours. Often the aide forgot or got too busy to do so, then came and gave him a full can. The full can was too much food. Birju’s face turned purple when this happened. We cranked up the top of his bed in case he vomited. Often he did. He’d open his mouth as if to burp. The Isocal, white and smelling of medicine and without the vinegar of gastric juices, would gush out along with whatever medications he had been given, including his beclamide, which kept him from having convulsions.
    This was frightening because convulsions could cause more brain damage. My mother screamed at an aide once. The aide had given Birju a whole can and was still standing by the side of the bed as Birju vomited. “What does this mean?” she screamed. “What about the beclamide? Do we have to give him the beclamide again?” My mother’s fists were clenched, and she was leaning forward. “Do you know? Do you think we’ll be able to get a doctor to tell us? How long will it take to find out?”
    Often I imagined being a gangster. I imagined looking like Amitabh Bachchan and beating the nurse’s aides and having them spend all night sitting trembling in Birju’s room.
    After the settlement, we began visiting other nursing homes to see if we could move Birju to one of them. The first home we went to was in Connecticut. It cost $160,000 a year, but we went so we could see what such a home was like. We drove there on a January afternoon, crossing bridges and driving on wide, sunny highways.
    The nursing home was up a long private road lined with trees. The road led to a vast lawn. A large yellow house surrounded by a porch looked out over the lawn.
    The house was bigger inside than it appeared from the outside. There were hallways that seemed to run the length of a football field.
    We were shown around by a woman in her fifties. She had blond hair and wore a wool suit buttoned with large buttons to the neck. As we walked down the hall on either side of her, the woman explained the