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one side of a road and opposite it was a hospital. The two were connected by a bridge that looked like a plastic straw. At five o’clock, my mother and I lifted Birju from his bed. My mother slipped her arms through his underarms, and I held him around the knees. We swung him into a wheelchair and rolled him through the hallways onto the bridge. There, facing out, our image reflected back at us, we waited for my father to come from the train station. He worked in New York, and each morning he took a train into the city. That evening, when my father arrived, he said that he had seen us hovering above the road, snow falling past us.
    That first day, he wasn’t drunk. But almost every day after this, he was. Sometimes he would smell of beer and other times of scotch. “Another bastard day,” he would say bitterly in Birju’s room.
    In the beginning, my mother remained silent about my father’s drinking. She looked shocked. I could tell she wasn’t speaking because she didn’t want to say anything in front of me. I knew that this meant I, too, was supposed to pretend not to see, and yet I wasn’t sure whether this meant I should act busy and energetic so that it would appear that I was too frantic to be able to see anything or whether I should act as I always had.
    Later, after perhaps ten days, my mother began to acknowledge that my father was drinking. First she was sarcastic. She muttered under her breath. “You are going to kill someone driving this way.” My father ignored her.
    Then she became openly angry. Wet-eyed, she shouted at him. “You have a son like this, and what do you do? Drown yourself.”
    M Y PARENTS HAD moved to Metuchen because it was one of the few towns in New Jersey that had a temple. A month or so after we arrived, my mother combed my hair and took me with her to see the pundit. It was a Tuesday night, one of three evenings when he sat at the temple, another converted church with the musty American smell and a large idol-lined chamber with a refrigerator in the back for the ceremonial milk and bananas.
    My mother explained our situation to the pundit. “Birju is in a coma,” she said, though Birju’s eyes were open and he was not in a coma, but was brain damaged. “The doctors say that they don’t know what can happen. He could wake tomorrow.” I wondered why she was saying this. I guessed that it must be because people are more likely to help if they think there is hope. If there isn’t any, they might try to avoid us, because who wants to be around someone depressing? “I go every morning to the nursing home. His father comes in the evening. I am so glad there is a temple in town.”
    The pundit stood before us, leaning slightly forward. He was a handsome man in his thirties, tall, broad shouldered, with a thick mustache. It was strange to come to a pundit for help. This was not what one would have done in India. In India, pundits are not counselors or spiritual leaders, but functionaries, performers of rituals, the equivalent of low level government clerks who put stamps on papers and who always have their hands out for a bribe. My mother used to speak of pundits with disgust. “Nobody has ever seen the back of a pundit’s hands,” she would say. Once, she told a joke about a pundit who fell into a deep hole. People reached down into it and said, “Give us your hand.” When they said this, the pundit crossed his arms and began pouting. An old man then pushed his way to the front of the crowd. He said, “Is this any way to talk to a pundit?” He reached into the hole and said, “Take my hand.” Immediately, the pundit grabbed it.
    I felt contempt for the pundit because he was a pundit. I also felt contempt for him because he was not a real one. Mr. Narayan was an engineer who volunteered at the temple. In the seventies through the mideighties, when most of us prayed in one another’s homes, even communities that had managed to buy or build a temple could not afford to pay