Family Life Read Online Free Page B

enough Indians for the stores to carry produce. To get bitter gourds and papayas and anything that might spoil, my father went to Chinatown.
    In India, to earn blessings, my mother used to prepare extra rotis at every meal to feed the cows that wandered our neighborhood. In America, we went to temple on Fridays to, as my mother said, begin the weekend with a clean mind. Our temple was one of just a few on the Eastern Seaboard. Until recently it had been a church. Inside the large, dim chamber there were idols along three walls and the air smelled of incense, like the incense in temples in India. In India, though, temples also smelled of flowers, of sweat from the crowds, of spoilage from the milk used to bathe the idols. Here, along with the smell of incense, there was only a faint odor of mildew. Because the temple smelled so simple, it seemed fake.
    O NE NIGHT, SNOW drifted down from a night sky. I felt like I was in a book or TV show.
    F OR ME, THE two best things about America were television and the library. Every Saturday night I watched The Love Boat . I looked at the women in their one-piece bathing suits and their high heels and imagined what it would be like when I was married. I decided that when I was married, I would be very serious, and my silence would lead to misunderstandings between me and my wife. We would have a fight and later make up and kiss. She would be wearing a blue swimsuit as we kissed.
    Before we came to America, I had never read a book just to read it. When I began doing so, at first, whatever I read seemed obviously a lie. If a book said a boy walked into a room, I was aware that there was no boy and there was no room. Still, I read so much that often I imagined myself in the book. I imagined being Pinocchio, swallowed by a whale. I wished to be inside a whale with a candle burning on a wooden crate, as in an illustration I had seen. Vanishing into books, I felt held. While at school and walking down the street, there seemed no end to the world, when I read a book or watched The Love Boat , the world felt simple and understandable.
    Birju liked America much more than I did. In India, he had not been popular. Here he made friends quickly. He was in seventh grade and his English was better than mine. Also, he was kinder than he used to be in India. In India there had been such competition, so many people offering bribes for their children to get slightly better grades, that he was always on edge. Here doing well seemed as simple as studying.
    One of the boys that Birju befriended was an Indian from Trinidad. My mother and Birju talked about him often. My mother wanted Birju to avoid him because the boy did not get good grades. I think she also looked down on him because he was not from India and so was seen as out of caste.
    “He thinks a sanitation engineer is an engineer, Mommy,” Birju said, sounding upset, as if his friend’s misunderstanding hurt him. “I told him it was a garbage man.”
    My mother was boiling rice at the stove. Birju, I remember, was standing beside her in a tee shirt with brown and yellow horizontal stripes that made him look like a bumblebee.
    “Why is that your problem? Why are you going around educating him?”
    “He doesn’t have good parents. His mother and father aren’t married. Neither one of them went to college.”
    “He’ll drag you down before you save him.”
    My school was on the way to Birju’s, so Birju used to walk me there every morning. One morning I started crying and told him about the bullying. He suggested that I talk to the teacher. When I didn’t, he told our parents. My father came to school with me. I had to stand at the front of the class and point at all the boys who had shoved me and threatened me. After this, the bullying stopped. I had been upset that Birju told our parents. I hadn’t thought that what he suggested would make a difference. The fact that it did surprised me.
    In India, Birju had collected stamps, and he would sit