Family Life Read Free

Birju walked beside my mother and I walked in the shadow of the boundary walls. In the shade, the dust was heavier and things smelled different, as if a fragment of the night lingered.
    Everything about where my grandparents lived was pleasingly miniature. Their lane was so narrow I could reach out and touch the houses on both sides. In the morning, when we arrived, the gutters ran with soapy water and the lane smelled of soap and also of hot oil and dough from the parathas being fried.
    My grandfather, seeing us, straightened up from sweeping his small whitewashed courtyard. “Who are these two princes? Are they saints who have come to bless my house?” He wore white pajamas and a homemade sleeveless undershirt with long shoulder straps. I hurried forward and to show that I was good and knew to display respect, touched his feet.
    “We have gotten our airplane tickets, nanaji,” Birju said. Hearing this, I wished I had said it so that then I would be the one bringing the news.
    “I’m not letting both of you go. One of you I will keep.”
    “We’ll miss you,” Birju said, reaching down to touch our grandfather’s feet. He had long, bony arms.
    “I will miss you, too,” I murmured, again feeling jealous that Birju had said something that made him look good.
    There were small rooms on two sides of the courtyard. These were cool, shadowy places. They smelled of mothballs, and this was pleasant because it suggested closed trunks and things that would be revealed when the seasons changed.
    Around eleven that morning, I fell asleep on a cot in one of the rooms. When I woke, Birju was lying next to me, smelling of the coconut oil that my mother put into his hair because of his dandruff. My mother and grandmother were sitting on the floor near the courtyard. They were talking in whispers and making seemi, rubbing wads of dough between their fingers so that the dough became thin as a thread, then pinching off small pieces so that these fell on the towels spread in their laps. The seemi looked like fingernail clippings.
    “You don’t speak English,” my grandmother whispered.
    “I will learn.”
    “You’re almost forty.”
    “I’m going for Birju and Ajay.”
    “Isn’t it better for them to be here with their whole family?”
    “Their father is there.”
    “Here you have a job.”
    “What is here? Thieves? That Indira woman will eat us.”
    I lay on my side and watched and listened. Usually, naps left me melancholy. Lying there, I began to think that when I was in America, I wouldn’t be able to see my grandparents every Sunday. Till then, I had not fully understood that going to America meant leaving India. I had somehow imagined that I would get to have the jet packs and chewing gum that people in America had and also be able to show these things off to my friends.
    Soon it was time for lunch. I sat on the floor beside Birju. I broke off pieces of roti and leaned forward so that whatever dripped would fall onto the steel plate before me. The melancholy wouldn’t go away. I couldn’t quite believe that when I left India, my grandparents’ house would continue to exist, that the gutters along the sides of the lane would still run with soapy water.
    W E WERE SUPPOSED to leave in early October. In August, this seemed far away. Then September arrived. Every evening I had the sense that the day had rushed by, that I had not done enough and the day had been wasted.
    I started to talk in my sleep. Most afternoons when I got home from school, Birju and my mother and I napped on a wide bed in the bedroom. The thick curtains would be pulled shut, the ceiling fan spinning. There would be trays of water on the floor to soften the air. One afternoon, I lay on the bed with my eyes open. I couldn’t move my arms and legs. I was hot, sweating, panicked. I saw ants carrying our television up a wall. I said, “The red ants are carrying away the TV.” Birju was sitting beside me looking down, appearing amused. He seemed