Sharma Akhil - Family Life

My father continued not drinking. He was gloomier than ever, though. On weekends, he would shower and shave in the morning, put on fresh clothes, and then sit all day on the sofa in the living room, his arms crossed, his brow furrowed.

DIFFERENT PEOPLE IMMIGRATED now. Now one saw Indians working outdoors. There was a white-haired man who worked as a gas station attendant near my parents’ house. Whenever I pulled in to his station and asked him how he was doing, he would start speaking quickly, eagerly about how much he hated America and every white person. I had the sense that if I told him that things were not so bad, he would hate me, too, and would think I only looked Indian but was as ignorant as a white.

These new immigrants were from chaotic backgrounds. I once saw two large, fat women punching each other in the mall.

The new immigrants went to temple, of course. They learned about us there and at the grocery stores. Some of them began to visit my mother. When I came home, women would bring their children to look at me. I would sit at the kitchen table doing homework. Their children would sit around me, looking shy.

My mother was happy to tell these women what to do. One woman’s husband had a girlfriend. My mother wanted her to leave the man.

“Don’t you think it makes her feel bad,” my father said once, “when you tell her that if you were her, you’d pour gasoline over yourself and your children?”

PRINCETON IS FORTY-FIVE MINUTES from Edison. No matter how often I visited my parents, I felt that I was now in another country.

The Gothic buildings and the stone steps that were slick and beveled in the center from the generations walking on them made me feel that I was now a part of history. I had the feeling that if I was smart and behaved carefully, all good things would happen for me.

I had seven suitemates. Two were football players, one played ice hockey, and a fourth, golf. I tried fitting in. I bought Escher posters and one of Jimi Hendrix and put these on my walls.

I had been nervous about not doing well in college. During my first class, I looked at the notes the boy next to me was taking. His supply and demand curves seemed more neatly drawn than mine. Nearly everyone appeared to have gone to preparatory schools and already knew such odd things as the fact that there was no inflation during the Middle Ages. Very few, however, were willing to work the way I did.

When I would come out of Firestone Library at two in the morning, walk past the strange statues scattered around campus, and then sit at my desk in my room till the trees in the yard appeared out of the darkness, I felt that I was achieving something, that every hour I worked was generating almost physical value, as if I could touch the knowledge I was gaining through my work. One weekend, I came home to my parents and worked all Saturday night. In the morning, my mother saw me at my desk and brought me a glass of milk. Later, in Birju’s room, she said to him, “Your brother can eat pain. He can sit all day at his desk and eat pain.”

My first semester, I took a course on Shakespeare. Reading

When he shall die,

Take him and cut him out in little stars,

And he will make the face of heaven so fine

That all the world will be in love with night

And pay no worship to the garish sun,

I wished I loved Birju this way. Most of the course was devoted to strange, useless things, however — things like reading dreams that people of Shakespeare’s time had written down in their diaries or letters. I majored in economics, focusing on econometrics.

MINAKSHI WAS IN college in Virginia. A phone call cost ten cents a minute if made after nine o’clock at night. To save money, we spoke every other day. On the days we didn’t, I would call her room at nine and hang up after one ring. She would then do the same, and this was how we said we loved each other.

At the end of my freshman year, she told me that she had begun seeing another boy. I behaved the way people do in these cases. I would call her and cry and ask if she did the same things with the new boyfriend that she had with me. Sometimes at two or three in the morning, I would imagine she was with her boyfriend, and I would phone her to disturb their sleep.

Minakshi lives in Texas now. She is an accountant. This surprises me because you always expect people who matter a great deal to you to end up leading glamorous lives.

Near the end of my sophomore year, I began going out with a German girl. Back then, I automatically discounted anything a white person said. How could a white know what was true or real? I also felt jealous of white people. Diana sang in a chorus, and watching her sing made me angry. I would stand before her and sing in a mocking way. Diana started avoiding me after a few months. Finally she told me, “Stop calling.” I was so embarrassed by this that when she took a semester off, I was relieved to not have her around campus.

AFTER I GRADUATED, I became an investment banker. I had thought I was used to hard work. Now, I would leave the office every morning when the coffee carts were being set up on the sidewalk. I would return a few hours later during rush hour. So little time would have passed since I left that when I reentered the building, it would feel like the previous day was continuing and, even though I had just showered and shaved, I would have the strange feeling that I had put on new clothes without having bathed.

In my first year as a vice president, I made seven hundred thousand dollars. I found it very hard to spend money, however. One winter I needed to buy gloves, and because I didn’t want to pay what I thought was the premium that stores charge for having to rent a building, I looked for somebody selling gloves from a table on the sidewalk. I didn’t see any sidewalk vendors for several days, and so for those days I kept my hands in my pockets.

Almost as soon as I started working, I began sending my mother monthly checks. As I earned more, I sent her more. My mother hoarded the money instead of spending it. “What happens if you stop?” she said.

Periodically my parents came to see me in New York. I took them to places that I had started visiting, that I felt proud for visiting. Once, I took them to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Most times, though, we went to fancy grocery stores. As we strolled through them, I remembered how when we first got to America, my mother used to take Birju and me through grocery stores, and we would stop to read the labels of the different types of canned food.

Birju had some white hair now. Often, after I had visited my parents and seen him, for days I would feel like I had been shouted at.

My mother started losing her hearing. She wanted to buy a hearing aid. “Why?” said my father. “If by mistake some good news does come for you, I’ll write it down.”

On my mother’s sixtieth birthday, I gave her a check for a quarter of a million dollars. For a few days, she didn’t cash it. She showed it to her friends. Then my parents began to have a nurse and a nurse’s aide twenty-four hours a day. One afternoon when I came to their house, I found them sitting in lawn chairs in the backyard. I stood in the kitchen and watched them from a window.

FOR ABOUT SEVEN years I didn’t date in any sort of regular way. The stress of work was so enormous that I lost my temper easily. If I had dinner with a woman at a restaurant and she went to the bathroom, I became panicked. I felt that I had almost no time and the little I had was being wasted. Once, a woman took so long in the bathroom that I paid the bill and walked out. Another time, a woman I was at a movie with wouldn’t leave when I didn’t like the movie. I said, “I can’t stay,” and left.