Family Life Read Free Page A

more real than the ants.
    In school, I started getting into fights. I was in third grade. One afternoon, I was standing in the back of my class, talking with my best friend Hershu and a little Sikh boy whose hair was pulled into a bun under a black cloth. The Sikh boy said, “Americans clean themselves with paper, not water.”
    “I know that,” I said. “Say something that other people don’t know.”
    “In America they say ‘yeah’ not yes. Mrs. Singh told me to let you know.”
    “That’s nothing. On an airplane, the stewardess has to give you whatever you ask for. I’m going to ask for a baby tiger.”
    “When you get on the plane, go to the back,” Hershu said. “Go all the way to the back to sit.” Hershu said this softly. He had a large head, which looked too big for his body. “When an aeroplane falls, it falls with its front down.”
    “Get away, evil-eyed one,” I exclaimed. I put my hands on Hershu’s chest and shoved. He stumbled back. He stared at me for a moment. His eyes got wet.
    “Look,” I called out, “he’s going to cry.”
    Hershu turned away and walked to his seat. I couldn’t understand why I had just done this thing.
    I CONTINUED GOING TO the milk shop every morning. Because I would be emigrating to America, the milkman did not have me wait in the crowd and instead called me to the front. He probably did this because bestowing attention was one of his few powers.
    Once he said, “What will happen to your brother’s bicycle?” The milkman was seventeen or eighteen, and he was in the shop’s entrance, his pajamas rolled up, barefoot because milk inevitably got spilled and it is a sin to step on milk with slippers.
    “I don’t know.”
    “Tell your mother I would like to buy it.”
    As he spoke, I was conscious of all the boys watching. I felt their eyes on the back of my neck like hot sun.
    Relatives started coming to the apartment and asking for the things that might be left behind.
    One warm night, my father’s younger brother visited. He sat on the sofa in the living room glowering, sweat dripping from his mustache. The ceiling fan spun. He drank several cups of tea. Finally he said, “What are you going to do with the television and refrigerator?”
    “Ji, we were planning to sell it,” my mother answered.
    “Why? Don’t you have enough money?”
    Piece by piece, furniture vanished. The easy chairs disappeared, the daybed was taken away, and the sofa faced a blank wall before it, too, was gone. Laborers, thin as mice, came wearing torn shirts, smelling of dried sweat, sheets wrapped around their waists. One laborer tilted the iron armoire that stood in the living room onto another laborer’s back. The burdened man inched out of the room. The dining table was turned onto its side and carried away. Once the table was gone, there were white scuff marks on the cement floor where it had stood. When even the TV was gone, Birju and I stood in a corner of the empty living room and called out “Oh! Oh!” to stir up echoes.
    Near the end of September, Birju convinced me that I was walking and talking in my sleep because I was possessed by a ghost.
    This happened late one afternoon. Birju and I had just woken from our nap, and we were sitting on the bed drinking our daily glass of milk with rose syrup. Birju said, “Ajay, don’t tell Mommy this, but you are possessed. When you talk, it isn’t you talking but the ghost.”
    “You’re lying. You’re always lying.”
    “I talked to the ghost, and he said that he had the gift of prophecy.”
    I had always believed that I might possess supernatural powers, like flying or maybe seeing into the future. “You’re lying,” I said, hoping that he was right.
    “I asked him what was going to happen to me.” Birju said this and stopped. He looked serious.
    “What did the ghost say?”
    “He said I’m going to die.”
    I stared at my brother. He looked down. He had long eyelashes and narrow shoulders and a narrow