Audio: Akhil Sharma reads.

“Break her arms, break her legs,” Lakshman’s grandmother would say about her daughter-in-law, “then see how she crawls to her bottle.” What she said made sense. Lakshman’s father refused to beat his wife, though. “This is America,” he said. “I will go to jail and you will be sitting in India eating warm pakoras.” To Lakshman, it seemed unmanly of his father not to take charge.

It happened every time the family went to a party. Before they left the house, his father would wipe down his comb. He would tuck a handkerchief into his pants pocket. He would get out the notebook in which he had written down the lyrics of movie songs, because he liked to sing and hoped that somebody would ask him to.

The parties were segregated: there was the kitchen, where the women gathered, and there was the living room, where the men stood and talked about politics, investments. Lakshman’s mother was thirty-two, short, stocky, curly-haired. She would stir up trouble. Even when she said ordinary things, she sounded as if she doubted they were true. “You are happy?” she’d say to a woman as if the woman were overlooking something. The surprised person would then feel that she had to defend her happiness. The other women in the kitchen were not used to this kind of behavior. They would grow quiet and look at Lakshman’s mother as she stood silently, appearing pleased, and sipping her Scotch. The fact that his mother drank was itself unusual. Perhaps she did it to be different from the other women; perhaps she wanted to be like a man and therefore more important. When she’d got a little bit drunk, she’d go into the living room and stand among the men, drinking from a small glass and talking about stocks and the World Bank. The men treated her with condescension and irritation, not so much because she was a woman as because she was a woman pretending to know things that she did not know, and vanity and foolishness, which were tolerable in a man, were not tolerable in a woman.

Lakshman’s mother had begun drinking when he was eight. This was around the time that they’d been sent to America by his father’s parents, to expand the family’s export business. From the very start, she had behaved differently with alcohol than other people did. At most parties, tea and juice were offered first and alcohol was an afterthought. At Lakshman’s parents’ parties, his mother was the one who offered drinks. She pressed alcohol on whoever entered the house. “Whiskey, bourbon, wine,” she’d say, smoothing each word. “Tea, Coca-Cola is also there.” Sometimes the men who came over would praise her for her drinking or talk about their own, how it was only during the third drink that they began to feel happy. Whenever a man praised his mother for her drinking, Lakshman became anxious. Because of the movies he’d seen, he sensed danger when he spotted his drunken mother talking to a man. Instead of joining the other children in the basement, boys and girls his age who were running and playing and shrieking, delighted to be allowed to stay up late, he’d follow his mother around the house. Keeping an eye on her made him feel safer but also prolonged his anxiety. By the end of the night he’d be so exhausted that he wanted to cry.

The drinking overtook her quickly. By the time Lakshman was nine, she was drinking during dinner. His father, who rarely drank, protested. “Every night you have to drink?”

“I can’t have a little happiness? Is there something wrong with me that I must suffer?”

When Lakshman was eleven, she started drinking during the day. His parents’ marriage had been arranged by their parents, who did business together, and his mother and father had never really liked each other. Around that time, they stopped sleeping in the same room. To the extent that they spoke at all, it was either in shouts or in sarcasm. “Do you know what kind of people drink during the day?” his father said, shaking a finger at her. “Drunkards. You are a drunkard.”

Lakshman, coming home from school, would sniff the air near his mother to confirm what he could tell with his eyes. If she was drunk, she seemed hollow, as if she were directing her body from afar.

Lakshman’s family’s life seemed strange to him, his father mostly ignoring his mother, often refusing to be with her, getting up from the kitchen table and leaving the room when she came in.

When Lakshman was thirteen and about to graduate from eighth grade, his mother’s kidneys began to hurt. He would come home and find her standing in the kitchen, holding an ice pack against her side. The fact that she cared so little about herself seemed to indicate that she cared nothing for him or his father. He wanted to mock her and shout at her, but he was afraid that she would hit him.

His mother did occasionally try to change. Once, she went to a doctor, and though she probably lied about how much she drank, the doctor still urged her to go to Alcoholics Anonymous. She went to A.A. meetings for a week or two, then stopped.

In the past, Lakshman’s father had travelled to India four or five times a year. As Lakshman’s mother’s drinking worsened, he began going more often. Lakshman felt strange being alone at home with his mother, sitting at the kitchen table, doing his homework, while his mother drank upstairs. The silence in the house was so intense it hummed.

When Lakshman was fourteen and his father was in India on one of his business trips, his mother decided that she was going to stay in bed and drink.

Her room was large and had a cream-colored carpet and a king-size bed. There was a picture window behind the bed and, to the side of the room, another window, which looked out onto a neighbor’s roof. Lakshman stood in the doorway and watched his mother’s preparations. She seemed cheerful as she moved around the room. She opened the windows completely, although it was winter. She put two cases of wine on the carpeted floor beside the bed. She put several jugs of water on the carpet, too, and, by the head of the bed, a white plastic bucket to vomit into.