Authors: Akhil Sharma

Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #Family Life, #Asian American, #Travel, #Middle East, #General

Family Life (20 page)

BOOK: Family Life

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A
FTER
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.

F
OR 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.

I became sick with longing for women I barely knew. If a woman dressed well, I took this to signify that she could behave gracefully in every situation. I imagined not having much money and her still being kind.

Hema was a lawyer. I met her at a gathering of young Indian professionals. She was short and slightly stocky. She had wide hips, and she resembled one of those clay fertility goddesses one sees in museums. I had discovered that I liked what most women of my generation looked like, and whenever I saw her I became aroused.

I didn’t know Hema well, but I took her to a resort in Mexico. On our first afternoon there, she went to the pool while I napped in our room. I came down around evening and went looking for her. The pool was enormous and softly blue. There was a white beach in the distance, and a red seaplane bobbing on the water. The pool area was noisy. People were talking, music was playing, and tables scraped against the cement patio as workers set up for dinner. It was the end of a beautiful day, warm and breezy.

I saw Hema and, standing by the side of the pool, waved to her. I was wearing shorts and a linen shirt. She kicked her way to me. She was wearing a blue swimsuit. I reached down and pulled her out of the water. She had a strong, solid body.

She leaned against me. “I’m tipsy,” she slurred. Her pupils were dilated.

I walked her to a nearby table. She leaned heavily against me. “I got up too early this morning,” she said.

Hema sat down on a wicker chair. She stretched her legs out and tilted her head back. She stared up at the darkening sky, her eyes wide and white. She looked beautiful. I began to get happy. I had a strange sense of everything being in its place. I turned away.

The last children were climbing out of the pool. People were laughing. In the distance a man and his family were walking off the beach. Dragonflies hung in the breeze. I felt sad, happy, content. The sun was setting. The wind was picking up. The fronds of the palm trees shivered in delight. I could feel the weight of Hema’s body on the inside of my arm. I got happier and happier. In the distance was the beach and the breaking waves and the red seaplane bobbing in the water. The happiness was almost heavy.

That was when I knew I had a problem.

This book would not have been written without the help of numerous institutions and individuals.

The Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation provided me with financial support when I was beginning to give up on the novel. The American Academy in Rome allowed me to stay in an apartment in their beautiful building when I was feeling especially wretched.

John Henderson, Ray Isle, and Nancy Packer read this manuscript numerous times. Bill Clegg was much more than an agent. Lorin Stein regularly suggested that I abandon this project and then, at the very end, helped drag the book over the finish line.

Most of all, I want to thank my editor Jill Bialosky and my publishing house W. W. Norton. When I handed it in, this book was nine years overdue. Each year, on the anniversary of the novel’s due date, Jill would email me and invite me to lunch. I felt so ashamed for not having handed in the book that I would take weeks replying. Her patience and the patience of Norton make me feel that for years I have been in the company of extraordinarily kind people.

ALSO BY AKHIL SHARMA

An Obedient Father

First Edition

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sharma, Akhil, 1971-

Family life : a novel / Akhil Sharma. — First Edition.

pages cm

ISBN 978-0-393-06005-8 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-0-393-24231-7 (e-book)

1. Fathers and sons—Fiction. 2. Families—Fiction. 3. Domestic fiction. I. Title.

PS3569.H34287F36 2014

813’.54—dc23