According to Time magazine, the five BRICS (Brazil,
Russia, India, China, South Africa) countries account for 40 percent of the
world’s population and more than 25 percent of the world’s land. This week’s
challenge was to read a book set in one of these five.
Family Life by Akhil Sharma opens with its 40-
year-old narrator remembering the circumstances that brought his family from
India to America when he was eight.
Ajay contrasts the perceived riches of life in
America (“On an airplane the stewardess has to give you whatever you ask for. I’m
going to ask for a baby tiger”) with the real ones (carpet, hot water from the
tap, elevators). The best luxury of all turns
out to be the library.
After months of studying, Ajay recalls, his brother Birju
is accepted into the Bronx Highs School of Science. The summer before he’s to
enroll, the boys go to stay with their aunt. While Ajay spends his afternoons
watching Gilligan’s Island, Birju prefers spending his at the neighborhood
pool. A miscalculated dive, however, leaves him severely brain damaged. The rest
of the novel depicts how each of his family members copes with his care.
Sharma evokes the sensory hallmarks of Ajay’s childhood: saying goodbye to his grandparents in shadowy
rooms that smelled of mothballs, drinking milk with rose syrup after afternoon
naps, selling his brother’s bicycle to the barefoot milkman wearing rolled up
pajamas. And he conveys volumes about the characters’ relationships with a carefully
worded retort. When Ajay’s mother wants to get hearing aids, his father
replies, “Why? If by mistake some good news does come for you, I’ll write it
down.”
Although the novel shifts somewhat abruptly from the
day to day to decades, it reminds us that in family life the more things change,
the more they stay the same.
