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Автор Ахил Шарма
Akhil Sharma
Family Life
This book is dedicated to my beloved wife Lisa Swanson; my poor brother Anup Sharma; and my brave and faithful parents Pritam and Jai Narayan Sharma
FAMILY LIFE
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My father has a glum nature. He retired three years ago, and he doesn’t talk much. Left to himself, he can remain silent for days. When this happens, he begins brooding, he begins thinking strange thoughts. Recently he told me that I was selfish, that I had always been selfish, that when I was a baby I would start to cry as soon as he turned on the TV. I am forty and he is seventy-two. When he said this, I began tickling him. I was in my parents’ house in New Jersey, on a sofa in their living room. “Who’s the sad baby?” I said. “Who’s the baby that cries all the time?”
“Get away,” he squeaked, as he fell back and tried to wriggle away. “Stop being a joker. I’m not kidding. ” My father is a sort of golden color. Skin hangs loosely from beneath his chin. He has long thin earlobes the way some old people have.
My mother is more cheerful than my father. “Be like me,” she often tells him. “See how many friends I have? Look how I’m always smiling. ” But my mother gets unhappy too, and when she does, she sighs and says, “I’m bored. What is this life we lead? Where is Ajay? What was the point of having raised him?”
AS FAR BACK as I can remember my parents have bothered each other.
In India we lived in two cement rooms on the roof of a two story house in Delhi. The bathroom stood separate from the living quarters.
It had a sink attached to the outside of one of the walls. Each night my father would stand before the sink, the sky full of stars, and brush his teeth till his gums bled. Then, he would spit the blood into the sink and turn to my mother and say, “Death, Shuba, death. No matter what we do, we will all die. ”“Yes, yes, beat drums,” my mother said once. “Tell the newspapers, too. Make sure everyone knows this thing you have discovered. ” Like many people of her generation, those born before Independence, my mother viewed gloom as unpatriotic. To complain was to show that one was not willing to accept difficulties; that one was not willing to do the hard work that was needed to build the country.
My father is two years older than my mother. Unlike her, he saw dishonesty and selfishness everywhere. Not only did he see these things but he believed that everybody else did, too, and that they were deliberately not acknowledging what they saw.
My mother’s irritation at his spitting blood, he interpreted as hypocrisy.
MY FATHER WAS an accountant. He went to the American consulate and stood in the line that circled around the courtyard. He submitted his paperwork for a visa.
My father had wanted to emigrate to the West ever since he was in his early twenties, ever since America liberalized its immigration policies in 1965. His wish was born out of self-loathing. Often when he walked down a street in India, he would feel that the buildings he passed were indifferent to him, that he mattered so little to them that he might as well not have been born. Because he attributed this feeling to his circumstances and not to the fact that he was the sort of person who sensed buildings having opinions of him, he believed that if he were somewhere else, especially somewhere where he earned in dollars and so was rich, he would be a different person and not feel the way he did.
