Akhil Sharma won the 2015 Folio Prize for fiction with his autobiographical novel Family Life. The story below, “A Mistake,” is extracted from that novel. It is narrated by Ajay, an Indian boy who has recently moved with his parents and older brother Birju to America. “In a novel that took 12 and a half years to write,” says Sharma, “these 3,000 words were some of the first and also the easiest. Despite the enormous trauma of what the novel required, I read these pages and I feel the joy I did when writing them.”
For 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 white 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 that 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 the illustration. 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 very 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.
My school was on the way to Birju’s and 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 our parents. When I did not, he told them himself. 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 or threatened me. After this the bullying stopped. I had been angry that Birju had told our parents. I had not thought that what he suggested would make a difference. The fact that it did surprised me.
Birju and I were sent to spend the summer with our father’s older sister, in Arlington, Virginia. She and our uncle lived in a small white house beside a wide road. The houses in Arlington had yards. The damp air there smelled of earth and greenery. Among the most noticeable things about Arlington was that the television networks were on different channels than in Queens.
Part of the reason that I thought Birju was dealing with more complicated things than I was was that during the school year, he had begun studying for the test to get into the Bronx High School of Science. Every evening, he sat and went through study guides. His studying seemed so important that it was as if he were carrying the fate of the family. In Arlington, while I got to go out, he was not allowed to leave the house until he had studied for five hours.
When we returned to Queens, Birju’s studies only increased. Instead of two hours every weeknight, he had to study three. He worked all day on weekends, stopping only when the 8pm shows started. Many nights I fell asleep on my mattress to the sound of his pencil scratching away at our kitchen table.
Still, my mother felt that Birju was not studying hard enough. Often they fought. Once she caught him asleep on the foam mattress in the room that my parents shared. He had claimed that he was going into their room to study. Instead she found him rolled on his side, snoring.
She began shouting, and called him a liar. Birju ran past her into the kitchen and returned with a knife. Standing before her, holding the knife by the handle and pointing it at his stomach, he said, “Kill me. Go ahead, kill me. I know that’s what you want.”
“Do some work instead of showing drama,” my mother said contemptuously.
The day of the exam finally came. On the subway to the test, I sat and Birju stood in front of me. I held one of his test preparation books in my lap and checked his vocabulary. Most of the words I asked him, he did not know. I started to panic. Birju, I began to see, was not going to do well. As I asked my questions and our mother and father listened, my voice grew quieter and quieter. I asked Birju what “rapscallion” meant. He guessed it was a type of onion. When I told him what it was, he looked as if he were going to cry.
“Keep a calm head,” my father scolded.
“Don’t worry, baby,” my mother said. “You will remember when you need to.”
The exam took place in a large white cinderblock building that looked like a parking garage. As the test was going on, my parents and I walked back and forth on a sidewalk by a chain-link fence. The day was cold, grey, damp. Periodically, it drizzled. There were parked cars along the sidewalk with waiting parents inside and the windows of these cars grew foggy as we walked.
My father said, “These tests are for white people. How are we supposed to know what ‘pew’ means?”
“Don’t give me a headache,” my mother said. “I am worried enough.”
“Maybe he’ll do well enough in the math and science portions that it will make up for the English.”
My stomach hurt. My chest was heavy. I had wanted Birju’s test to come so that it would be over. Now that the test was here, I wished Birju had had more time.
Midway through the exam, a break occurred. Birju came out on the sidewalk. He looked frightened. We surrounded him. We began feeding him oranges and almonds, to cool him and to give his brain strength.
“Just do your best,” my father said. “It is too late for anything else.”
Birju turned around and walked back toward the building.
Days went by. It was strange for Birju not to be studying. It was as if something were missing or wrong. Often Birju cried. “Mummy, I know I didn’t pass.”
A warm day came when I could tie my winter coat around my waist during lunch hour, then another one, like birds out of season. In Delhi they would be turning on fountains in the evening and crowds would gather to watch.
Then the results arrived. Because Birju had said it so many times, I knew that an acceptance letter would come in a thick envelope, but the one Birju showed me was thin and white. Tears slid down his cheeks.
“Maybe you got in,” I murmured, trying to be comforting.
“Why do you think that?” Birju demanded angrily. He stared as if I might know something that he did not.
Our mother was at work. She had said not to open the envelope until she arrived, that we would take the envelope to the temple and open it there.
My father arrived home after my mother. As soon as he did, Birju demanded that we go to the temple.
Inside the large chamber, my mother put a dollar in the wooden box before God Shivaji. Then we went to each of the idols in turn. Normally we only pressed our hands together before each idol and bowed our heads. This time we knelt and did a full prayer. After we had prayed before all the idols, we went back and knelt before the family of God Ram. Birju knelt down between our parents.
“You open it, Mummy.”
My mother tore off one side of the envelope. She shook out a sheet of paper. Birju had made it!
“See. I told you we should open it at temple.”
We all leapt to our feet and hugged.
With her arms still around Birju, my mother looked at me over his shoulder. “Tomorrow, we start preparing you.” she said.
We went to Arlington again in the summer. By now, after two years in America, I had grown chubby. I could grip my stomach and squeeze it. Birju was tall and thin. He had a little mustache and tendrils of hair on the sides of his cheeks.
Once more I lay on my aunt’s sofa and watched TV. Once more the TV shows were different from the ones in Queens and they made me feel that I was living far from home.
Most days, Birju went to a swimming pool in a nearby apartment building. One afternoon in August, I was stretched out on my aunt’s sofa watching Gilligan’s Island when the telephone rang. The shades were drawn and the room was dim. After she hung up, my aunt came into the doorway. “Birju has had an accident,” she said. “Get up.” She motioned with a hand for me to rise. I didn’t want to. By the time we got back from the pool where Birju was swimming Gilligan’s Island would be over.
The apartment building that had the pool was tall and brown. There was a small parking lot by the pool and an ambulance was standing there, with a crowd of white people surrounding it. Being near so many whites made me nervous. Perhaps they would be angry at us for causing trouble. Birju should not have done whatever he had done.
My aunt said, “You wait.” She moved forward. She had arthritis in one hip and she pushed into the crowd with a lurching peg-leg gait.
I remained at the edge of the crowd and now, alone, I felt even more embarrassed. A minute passed and then two. My aunt came back through the crowd. She was hobbling quickly and her face looked scared.
“Go home,” she said. “I have to go to the hospital.”
I walked head down along the sidewalk. I was irritated. Birju had gotten into the Bronx High School of Science and now he was going to be in the hospital and our mother would feel bad for him and give him a gift.
As I walked, I wondered whether Birju had stepped on a nail. I wondered if he was dead. This was thrilling. If he was dead, I would get to be the only son.
The sun pressed itself from above and also, its heat reflecting off the sidewalk, from below. I thought I should probably cry. It seemed like the right thing to do.
I imagined myself alone in the house. I imagined Birju in the hospital and my aunt there. I imagined next year with Birju in the Bronx High School of Science and me going to my ordinary school. Then the tears came.
Just as I had expected, Gilligan’s Island was over.
I lay back down on the sofa. I watched TV until five, when the news started. I picked up a book and propped it on my stomach. I read for a while, but I was aware that my aunt was gone. Something exciting was occurring. I felt as if I were not getting to participate in an adventure.
Around eight my uncle arrived in his dark pants and short-sleeved shirt, with his triangle of wispy white hair. He stood by the sink drinking water from a glass. He still had his shoes on. For him to be wearing shoes in the kitchen was so strange that it made the kitchen feel like not a real kitchen but a display in a furniture store.
“What’s happened?” I asked.
He patted my head. “We don’t know.”
About 10.30, my uncle drove us to the bus station. We were going to pick up my mother. The fact that my mother was coming made what had occurred seem very serious. I began to be scared.
When my mother walked through the bus station’s automatic doors, her hair was loose, her face flattened with fear. She was wearing a yellow sari and carrying a black duffel bag.
Seeing my mother, I worried that she might think I was bad for not crying. I walked up to her. She looked down. It was as if she didn’t recognise me. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ve cried already.”
The hospital room was bright and white and noisy. There was the whir of the machines. There were beeps. There was a loud motorised rumble, almost like that of a generator.
Birju was lying on a bed with railings. The railings reminded me of a crib. There were poles on wheels all around the bed. Bags hung from the poles and there were also machines bolted to the poles. It was as if Birju lay in the midst of many clotheslines. He had a plastic mask over his mouth and nose. It looked like what fighter pilots wear in thin air. His eyes were wide open, as if in panic. He appeared to be staring up at some invisible thing, and that thing was pressing down on his chest.
Birju had dived into the swimming pool. He had struck his head on the pool’s cement bottom and lain there stunned for three minutes. Water had surged down his throat and into his lungs. His lungs had peeled away from the insides of his chest.
My uncle carried a large cardboard box into the room that Birju and I had shared, and he placed it against a wall. My aunt and mother draped a white sheet over the box. They taped postcards of various gods on the wall so that these appeared to be gazing at the altar. On the altar itself, they placed a spoon and in the bowl of the spoon, a wick soaked in clarified butter. They put a wad of dough on the altar and stuck incense sticks into the dough. They did all this quickly and quietly. When they spoke, it was in a whisper.
The ceiling lights were turned off. The flame in the spoon and the smoke rising from it sent shadows shaking over the walls. I lay down on a strip of foam beneath one of the windows. My aunt and mother stretched themselves face down before the altar. They sang prayers. I kept being woken by their singing. I understood that it was proper to pray in moments like this. Still, I knew that Birju was going to be all right and wouldn’t it be better for everyone to get some sleep?
Around five, the ceiling lights were turned on. I sat up. The air was thick with incense. My mother was standing before the altar, her hands pressed together. She was wearing a blue silk sari and a gold necklace and she looked as if she were going to a wedding.
A little later, about to leave for the hospital, we stood in the driveway in the dark. I looked up at the stars. There were thousands of them, some of them bright, some of them dim. I suddenly had the sense that what was happening was a mistake, that we had been given somebody else’s life.
In the days and weeks that followed, I spent most of each day sitting by Birju’s bed chanting to him from the Ramayana. The book was a large hardcover wrapped in saffron cloth. Some of the pages had grease stains from the butter used in prayers, and one could look through the stains and see the letters on the next page. Every time I opened the book, there was a puff of incense smell from the book having spent so many years near altars.
I had never prayed like this before, every day, hour after hour, so that my throat ached and even my tongue and gums hurt. I had not believed in God till then. Now, praying as if it were work, I began to believe that there had to be a God. People weren’t stupid. My mother wouldn’t be making me pray this way, people all over the world wouldn’t be building temples and going on pilgrimages, if there weren’t some benefit to it. It was strange that there was a God. I imagined that God was far away, busy, impatient, not really interested in the many people who wanted His help, but obligated for some reason to hear our prayers.
Time passed. I watched my mother cut Birju’s fingernails. She seemed scared doing so. “Is this all right?” she asked him. I watched her and felt like I was dreaming.
Birju had his oxygen mask removed. Many of the wheeled poles were taken away. Now he looked the way he always had, except it seemed that he was dreaming with his eyes open. A doctor said that he was blind, that oxygen deprivation had destroyed his corneas. It seemed disloyal to believe this.
Birju moaned, he yawned, he coughed, but his eyes were like a blind person’s who always appears lost in thought. He responded to things. If there was a loud noise, he turned his head in the direction of the noise. Then he rolled it back and just lay there. Occasionally he had a seizure. His teeth clamped shut and they squeaked against each other. His body stiffened and his waist rose off the bed and the bed began to rattle. Seeing this, I was frightened. I stood by the bed and looked at him through the railings and wondered what to do.
For 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 white 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 that 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 the illustration. 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 very 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.
My school was on the way to Birju’s and 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 our parents. When I did not, he told them himself. 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 or threatened me. After this the bullying stopped. I had been angry that Birju had told our parents. I had not thought that what he suggested would make a difference. The fact that it did surprised me.
Birju and I were sent to spend the summer with our father’s older sister, in Arlington, Virginia. She and our uncle lived in a small white house beside a wide road. The houses in Arlington had yards. The damp air there smelled of earth and greenery. Among the most noticeable things about Arlington was that the television networks were on different channels than in Queens.
Part of the reason that I thought Birju was dealing with more complicated things than I was was that during the school year, he had begun studying for the test to get into the Bronx High School of Science. Every evening, he sat and went through study guides. His studying seemed so important that it was as if he were carrying the fate of the family. In Arlington, while I got to go out, he was not allowed to leave the house until he had studied for five hours.
When we returned to Queens, Birju’s studies only increased. Instead of two hours every weeknight, he had to study three. He worked all day on weekends, stopping only when the 8pm shows started. Many nights I fell asleep on my mattress to the sound of his pencil scratching away at our kitchen table.
Still, my mother felt that Birju was not studying hard enough. Often they fought. Once she caught him asleep on the foam mattress in the room that my parents shared. He had claimed that he was going into their room to study. Instead she found him rolled on his side, snoring.
She began shouting, and called him a liar. Birju ran past her into the kitchen and returned with a knife. Standing before her, holding the knife by the handle and pointing it at his stomach, he said, “Kill me. Go ahead, kill me. I know that’s what you want.”
“Do some work instead of showing drama,” my mother said contemptuously.
The day of the exam finally came. On the subway to the test, I sat and Birju stood in front of me. I held one of his test preparation books in my lap and checked his vocabulary. Most of the words I asked him, he did not know. I started to panic. Birju, I began to see, was not going to do well. As I asked my questions and our mother and father listened, my voice grew quieter and quieter. I asked Birju what “rapscallion” meant. He guessed it was a type of onion. When I told him what it was, he looked as if he were going to cry.
“Keep a calm head,” my father scolded.
“Don’t worry, baby,” my mother said. “You will remember when you need to.”
The exam took place in a large white cinderblock building that looked like a parking garage. As the test was going on, my parents and I walked back and forth on a sidewalk by a chain-link fence. The day was cold, grey, damp. Periodically, it drizzled. There were parked cars along the sidewalk with waiting parents inside and the windows of these cars grew foggy as we walked.
My father said, “These tests are for white people. How are we supposed to know what ‘pew’ means?”
“Don’t give me a headache,” my mother said. “I am worried enough.”
“Maybe he’ll do well enough in the math and science portions that it will make up for the English.”
My stomach hurt. My chest was heavy. I had wanted Birju’s test to come so that it would be over. Now that the test was here, I wished Birju had had more time.
Midway through the exam, a break occurred. Birju came out on the sidewalk. He looked frightened. We surrounded him. We began feeding him oranges and almonds, to cool him and to give his brain strength.
“Just do your best,” my father said. “It is too late for anything else.”
Birju turned around and walked back toward the building.
Days went by. It was strange for Birju not to be studying. It was as if something were missing or wrong. Often Birju cried. “Mummy, I know I didn’t pass.”
A warm day came when I could tie my winter coat around my waist during lunch hour, then another one, like birds out of season. In Delhi they would be turning on fountains in the evening and crowds would gather to watch.
Then the results arrived. Because Birju had said it so many times, I knew that an acceptance letter would come in a thick envelope, but the one Birju showed me was thin and white. Tears slid down his cheeks.
“Maybe you got in,” I murmured, trying to be comforting.
“Why do you think that?” Birju demanded angrily. He stared as if I might know something that he did not.
Our mother was at work. She had said not to open the envelope until she arrived, that we would take the envelope to the temple and open it there.
My father arrived home after my mother. As soon as he did, Birju demanded that we go to the temple.
Inside the large chamber, my mother put a dollar in the wooden box before God Shivaji. Then we went to each of the idols in turn. Normally we only pressed our hands together before each idol and bowed our heads. This time we knelt and did a full prayer. After we had prayed before all the idols, we went back and knelt before the family of God Ram. Birju knelt down between our parents.
“You open it, Mummy.”
My mother tore off one side of the envelope. She shook out a sheet of paper. Birju had made it!
“See. I told you we should open it at temple.”
We all leapt to our feet and hugged.
With her arms still around Birju, my mother looked at me over his shoulder. “Tomorrow, we start preparing you.” she said.
We went to Arlington again in the summer. By now, after two years in America, I had grown chubby. I could grip my stomach and squeeze it. Birju was tall and thin. He had a little mustache and tendrils of hair on the sides of his cheeks.
Once more I lay on my aunt’s sofa and watched TV. Once more the TV shows were different from the ones in Queens and they made me feel that I was living far from home.
Most days, Birju went to a swimming pool in a nearby apartment building. One afternoon in August, I was stretched out on my aunt’s sofa watching Gilligan’s Island when the telephone rang. The shades were drawn and the room was dim. After she hung up, my aunt came into the doorway. “Birju has had an accident,” she said. “Get up.” She motioned with a hand for me to rise. I didn’t want to. By the time we got back from the pool where Birju was swimming Gilligan’s Island would be over.
The apartment building that had the pool was tall and brown. There was a small parking lot by the pool and an ambulance was standing there, with a crowd of white people surrounding it. Being near so many whites made me nervous. Perhaps they would be angry at us for causing trouble. Birju should not have done whatever he had done.
My aunt said, “You wait.” She moved forward. She had arthritis in one hip and she pushed into the crowd with a lurching peg-leg gait.
I remained at the edge of the crowd and now, alone, I felt even more embarrassed. A minute passed and then two. My aunt came back through the crowd. She was hobbling quickly and her face looked scared.
“Go home,” she said. “I have to go to the hospital.”
I walked head down along the sidewalk. I was irritated. Birju had gotten into the Bronx High School of Science and now he was going to be in the hospital and our mother would feel bad for him and give him a gift.
As I walked, I wondered whether Birju had stepped on a nail. I wondered if he was dead. This was thrilling. If he was dead, I would get to be the only son.
The sun pressed itself from above and also, its heat reflecting off the sidewalk, from below. I thought I should probably cry. It seemed like the right thing to do.
I imagined myself alone in the house. I imagined Birju in the hospital and my aunt there. I imagined next year with Birju in the Bronx High School of Science and me going to my ordinary school. Then the tears came.
Just as I had expected, Gilligan’s Island was over.
I lay back down on the sofa. I watched TV until five, when the news started. I picked up a book and propped it on my stomach. I read for a while, but I was aware that my aunt was gone. Something exciting was occurring. I felt as if I were not getting to participate in an adventure.
Around eight my uncle arrived in his dark pants and short-sleeved shirt, with his triangle of wispy white hair. He stood by the sink drinking water from a glass. He still had his shoes on. For him to be wearing shoes in the kitchen was so strange that it made the kitchen feel like not a real kitchen but a display in a furniture store.
“What’s happened?” I asked.
He patted my head. “We don’t know.”
About 10.30, my uncle drove us to the bus station. We were going to pick up my mother. The fact that my mother was coming made what had occurred seem very serious. I began to be scared.
When my mother walked through the bus station’s automatic doors, her hair was loose, her face flattened with fear. She was wearing a yellow sari and carrying a black duffel bag.
Seeing my mother, I worried that she might think I was bad for not crying. I walked up to her. She looked down. It was as if she didn’t recognise me. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ve cried already.”
The hospital room was bright and white and noisy. There was the whir of the machines. There were beeps. There was a loud motorised rumble, almost like that of a generator.
Birju was lying on a bed with railings. The railings reminded me of a crib. There were poles on wheels all around the bed. Bags hung from the poles and there were also machines bolted to the poles. It was as if Birju lay in the midst of many clotheslines. He had a plastic mask over his mouth and nose. It looked like what fighter pilots wear in thin air. His eyes were wide open, as if in panic. He appeared to be staring up at some invisible thing, and that thing was pressing down on his chest.
Birju had dived into the swimming pool. He had struck his head on the pool’s cement bottom and lain there stunned for three minutes. Water had surged down his throat and into his lungs. His lungs had peeled away from the insides of his chest.
My uncle carried a large cardboard box into the room that Birju and I had shared, and he placed it against a wall. My aunt and mother draped a white sheet over the box. They taped postcards of various gods on the wall so that these appeared to be gazing at the altar. On the altar itself, they placed a spoon and in the bowl of the spoon, a wick soaked in clarified butter. They put a wad of dough on the altar and stuck incense sticks into the dough. They did all this quickly and quietly. When they spoke, it was in a whisper.
The ceiling lights were turned off. The flame in the spoon and the smoke rising from it sent shadows shaking over the walls. I lay down on a strip of foam beneath one of the windows. My aunt and mother stretched themselves face down before the altar. They sang prayers. I kept being woken by their singing. I understood that it was proper to pray in moments like this. Still, I knew that Birju was going to be all right and wouldn’t it be better for everyone to get some sleep?
Around five, the ceiling lights were turned on. I sat up. The air was thick with incense. My mother was standing before the altar, her hands pressed together. She was wearing a blue silk sari and a gold necklace and she looked as if she were going to a wedding.
A little later, about to leave for the hospital, we stood in the driveway in the dark. I looked up at the stars. There were thousands of them, some of them bright, some of them dim. I suddenly had the sense that what was happening was a mistake, that we had been given somebody else’s life.
In the days and weeks that followed, I spent most of each day sitting by Birju’s bed chanting to him from the Ramayana. The book was a large hardcover wrapped in saffron cloth. Some of the pages had grease stains from the butter used in prayers, and one could look through the stains and see the letters on the next page. Every time I opened the book, there was a puff of incense smell from the book having spent so many years near altars.
I had never prayed like this before, every day, hour after hour, so that my throat ached and even my tongue and gums hurt. I had not believed in God till then. Now, praying as if it were work, I began to believe that there had to be a God. People weren’t stupid. My mother wouldn’t be making me pray this way, people all over the world wouldn’t be building temples and going on pilgrimages, if there weren’t some benefit to it. It was strange that there was a God. I imagined that God was far away, busy, impatient, not really interested in the many people who wanted His help, but obligated for some reason to hear our prayers.
Time passed. I watched my mother cut Birju’s fingernails. She seemed scared doing so. “Is this all right?” she asked him. I watched her and felt like I was dreaming.
Birju had his oxygen mask removed. Many of the wheeled poles were taken away. Now he looked the way he always had, except it seemed that he was dreaming with his eyes open. A doctor said that he was blind, that oxygen deprivation had destroyed his corneas. It seemed disloyal to believe this.
Birju moaned, he yawned, he coughed, but his eyes were like a blind person’s who always appears lost in thought. He responded to things. If there was a loud noise, he turned his head in the direction of the noise. Then he rolled it back and just lay there. Occasionally he had a seizure. His teeth clamped shut and they squeaked against each other. His body stiffened and his waist rose off the bed and the bed began to rattle. Seeing this, I was frightened. I stood by the bed and looked at him through the railings and wondered what to do.
