Mother And Son

In my family, nobody was especially mature. My mother, whom I loved very much and who had a kind heart, was a little bit like a child in that she was excitable and talkative and somewhat vain. I remember that when my brother and I were children and we still lived in India, my mother would sit at our dining table on Sunday afternoons and have my brother and me search her head for white hairs. Birju, my brother, was around twelve then and, in the irritated, put-upon way he had, he would warn, 'One day I will pull out your last hair and then you will be bald.'

We left India in 1979, when I was eight. During the days before our departure, my mother, because she couldn't help herself, dressed me and my brother in new clothes so that people would see us and think about our luck.

I liked America immediately. Among the things I liked most was the television show The Love Boat. I had never seen women in bikinis before. I also liked elevators. Elevators were rare in India and to me there was something thrilling about how my pressing a button meant the elevator would shut its doors and pull itself up floor by floor.

My brother Birju also liked America. 'America is so clean,' he said. 'In India if anybody sees a clean spot, he thinks, let me spit there before somebody else gets a chance.' Birju had a long face with a round fat chin and he was someone who could say a bad thing about almost any topic. Like my mother, though, Birju was kind. There was an Indian boy from Trinidad whom Birju got to know and Birju used to worry about him because the boy did not work hard and get good grades. 'He is not from a good family,' he used to explain to my mother. 'He doesn't know that you work now so you can work less hard later.'

In America we lived in Queens, New York. My father had come a year ahead of the rest of us and gotten an apartment and a job. My father was not much of a talker and he was the type of person who believed that no matter what one did, things would end badly. But he too liked America. What he liked most about America was money. 'In India you can work as hard as you want, but it's who you know that matters.' He would say this and sigh in a disappointed way that suggested great satisfaction.

'How do you know?' my mother sometimes asked. 'When did you work hard?'

During our early days in America, many things made no sense. We had never heard of hot dogs before and, after our first day of school, my brother and I came home and told my mother that we had seen children eating dogs. My mother and I and Birju sat at a round table in our kitchen alcove and discussed this. My mother thought eating meat was disgusting and she imagined meat eaters as depraved creatures capable of consuming anything. We three debated what part of a dog a hot dog could be made from. We talked about what a hot dog looked like and eventually decided they must be made from tails.

Birju got good grades in India and he did well in his classes in America. At the end of seventh grade he was ranked first. Near the end of eighth grade he took an exam to get into the Bronx High School of Science. This is very hard to get into and the exam was held in a large school made of brown bricks. My mother, my father and I all went with Birju on the day of the exam. It was a warm spring morning and we waited for him on a sidewalk outside the school. I remember that there was a high chain-link fence that separated the sidewalk from a basketball court that belonged to the school.

Birju got into the Bronx High School of Science and that summer we went to Arlington, Virginia, to spend our vacation with my father's older sister. We had done this the previous summer also and, like last time, we spent our days lying on the sofa watching television or going to the swimming pool of a nearby apartment building. One afternoon, Birju went to the pool and dived in and hit his head on the pool's cement bottom. He became unconscious and he remained underwater for three minutes.