Family Life by Akhil Sharma Page A

his window.
    A ROUND T HANKSGIVING, THE insurance company said that it would pay for a nursing home. No one was happier to hear this than my aunt. “There is no point in denying what has happened, Shuba. We have to keep trusting God. We can’t just trust God when he’s doing what we want. We have to trust him even when things are not as we would like them.”
    In December, my aunt’s only grandson turned one. She had a birthday party for him and didn’t tell us. When we came home from the hospital the night of the party and saw people sitting in the living room eating cake from paper plates, my aunt led us back into the kitchen. She said, “I thought it would depress you, seeing other people’s happiness.”
    “Are you other people?” my mother said. “Is your happiness not my happiness?”
    “Have some cake,” she said. “What is there to be angry about? I made a mistake.” As my aunt walked out of the kitchen, she said, loud enough to be heard by the guests, “I feel like I’m in court. Every word I have to watch.”
    Two weeks later, my mother told me that we were moving to a new home in New Jersey.
    A S C HRISTMAS DREW near, a Christmas tree appeared in the hospital’s lobby, and the hallways began to have cutouts of Santa on his sleigh taped to the walls. I began praying whenever I thought of it—at my locker, during lunch, even in the middle of a quiz. I prayed more than I had ever prayed before, but I found it harder and harder to drift into the rhythm of sung prayers or into the nightly conversations with God. How could chanting and burning incense undo three minutes of a sunny August afternoon? It was like trying to move a sheet of blank paper from one end of a table to the other by blinking so fast that you started a breeze.
    On Christmas Eve, my mother asked the hospital chaplain to come to Birju’s room and pray. She and I knelt with the priest beside Birju’s bed. Afterward, the chaplain asked my mother whether she would be attending Christmas services the next morning. “Of course, Father,” she said.
    “I’m coming, too,” I said.
    That night, I watched It’s a Wonderful Life on television in the living room. To me, the movie meant that if you become unhappy enough, almost anything can pass as happiness. Later, when I lay down near my parents and closed my eyes, God appeared.
    A part of me felt that God would have to grant whatever request was made of him on his son’s birthday. “Will Birju be better in the morning?”
    “No,” God answered.
    “Why not?”
    “When you asked for the hundred percent on the math test, you could have asked for your brother.”
    The next morning, when I arrived at the hospital with my mother and father, Birju was asleep, breathing through his mouth while a nurse’s aide stood by the hospital bed, pouring a can of Isocal formula into his G-tube, the yellowish rubber hose that went into his stomach. I hadn’t expected Birju to be better; still, seeing him this way made my chest very heavy.
    All day, I sat in a corner of Birju’s room. My mother sat by the hospital bed and read women’s magazines to Birju while she shelled peanuts into her lap. My father was reading a thick red book in preparation for a civil-service exam. The day wore on. The sky outside grew dark. At some point, the lights were turned on, and at the idea of the day being over and nothing having changed, I started crying. I tried to be quiet. I did not want my parents to notice my tears and think that I was crying for Birju, because in reality I was crying for myself, for having to spend so much time in the hospital, for now having to move to a town I didn’t know.
    My father noticed first. “What’s the matter, hero?”
    My mother shouted, “What happened?” She jumped up. She looked so alarmed that it was as if I were bleeding.
    “I didn’t get any Christmas presents. I need a Christmas present,” I said. “You didn’t buy me a Christmas present.” And then, because I