雙語·當呼吸化為空氣 十六歲的時候

十六歲的時候，我開始負責開車送弟弟吉旺去上學。一天早上，像往常一樣，我又晚了。吉旺很不耐煩地站在門廳，大喊著說他可不想又因為我動作慢被留堂，所以問我能不能快一點。我用沖刺的速度下了樓，一把推開前門……差點踩到一條正在打盹的響尾蛇，差不多有兩米長呢。這又涉及一條“鄉(xiāng)村生存知識”，如果你在自己門前弄死了一條響尾蛇，它的伴侶和后代就會到原地筑巢，永久扎根，就像戈蘭德爾的母親報殺子之仇。于是我跟吉旺抽簽決定，贏的那個就拿鐵鏟，輸?shù)哪莻€戴上厚厚的園藝手套，再拿一個枕頭套。一陣莊嚴又搞笑的“手舞足蹈”之后，我們終于把響尾蛇弄進了枕頭套。接著，我使出奧運鏈球運動員的勁兒，把手上的東西拼命扔到沙漠里去，還計劃好下午晚點再去把枕頭套撿回來，免得被媽媽發(fā)現(xiàn)了挨罵。
When I was sixteen, I was supposed to drive my younger brother, Jeevan, to school. One morning, as usual, I was running late, and as Jeevan was standing impatiently in the foyer, yelling that he didn’t want to get detention again because of my tardiness, so could I please hurry the hell up, I raced down the stairs, threw open the front door. . . and nearly stepped on a snoozing six-foot rattlesnake. It was another country fact that if you killed a rattlesnake on your doorstep, its mate and offspring would come and make a permanent nest there, like Grendel’s mother seeking her revenge. So Jeevan and I drew straws: the lucky one grabbed a shovel, the unlucky one a pair of thick gardening gloves and a pillowcase, and through a seriocomic dance, we managed to get the snake into the pillowcase. Then, like an Olympic hammer thrower, I hurled the whole out into the desert, with plans to retrieve the pillowcase later that afternoon, so as not to get in trouble with our mother.

童年時代眾多神秘難解的事件中，最主要的并非父親為什么舉家遷到亞利桑那州金曼這個沙漠小鎮(zhèn)，反正逐漸長大的我們也越來越喜歡這里了，最讓人百思不得其解的是，他是怎么說服媽媽的。這兩個相愛的人越過大半個地球，從印度南部私奔到紐約（他是基督教徒，她是印度教徒，他們的結(jié)合在兩邊都受到譴責，而且導致多年的家庭紛爭——母親的母親從未承認過我的名字“保羅”，而堅持叫我的中間名“蘇希爾”），再到亞利桑那。母親本來就特別害怕蛇，對蛇有完全克制不住的恐懼，但到這里來就被迫要面對。就算那種最小、最可愛、完全無毒的小紅蛇，都能讓她尖叫著沖進屋里，鎖上所有的門，抄起手邊任何尖銳鋒利的大家伙，比如耙子、劈刀、斧頭什么的。
Of our many childhood mysteries, chief among them was not why our father decided to bring his family to the desert town of Kingman, Arizona, which we grew to cherish, but how he ever convinced my mother to join him there. They had eloped, in love, across the world, from southern India to New York City (he a Christian, she a Hindu, their marriage was condemned on both sides, and led to years of familial rifts—my mother’s mother never acknowledged my name, Paul, instead insisting I be called by my middle name, Sudhir) to Arizona, where my mother was forced to confront an intractable mortal fear of snakes. Even the smallest, cutest, most harmless red racer would send her screaming into the house, where she’d lock the doors and arm herself with the nearest large, sharp implement—rake, cleaver, ax.

經(jīng)常出現(xiàn)的蛇總是讓她焦慮不已，但母親最擔心的，當然是孩子們的未來。搬來這里之前，我哥哥蘇曼就快要高中畢業(yè)了，他就讀的那所中學在威徹斯特縣堪稱好大學的“直通車”。搬家到金曼不久，他就被斯坦福錄取了，于是很快就離家去讀大學了。而我們都知道，金曼不是威徹斯特。媽媽研究了一下莫哈維縣公立學校系統(tǒng)，四處走訪了一番，變得心煩意亂。最近，美國的人口普查將金曼定性為美國人口接受教育程度最低的地區(qū)，高中輟學率比平均水平高出大概30%。能上大學的都是鳳毛麟角，當然肯定沒有去哈佛的了，而哈佛又恰好是我父親心中優(yōu)秀的標準。媽媽打電話給自己那些居住在東海岸富裕郊區(qū)的朋友和親戚征求意見，結(jié)果發(fā)現(xiàn)有的倒是真心對她表示同情，有的則很高興——卡拉尼什的孩子們突然接受不了良好的教育了，他們的孩子又少了兩個競爭對手。
The snakes were a constant source of anxiety, but it was her children’s future that my mother feared for most of all. Before we moved, my older brother, Suman, had nearly completed high school in Westchester County, where elite colleges were the expectation. He was accepted to Stanford shortly after arriving in Kingman and left the house soon thereafter. But Kingman, we learned, was not Westchester. As my mother surveyed the Mohave County public school system, she became distraught. The U.S. census had recently identified Kingman as the least educated district in America. The high school dropout rate was somewhere north of 30 percent. Few students went on to college, and certainly none to Harvard, my father’s standard of excellence. Looking for advice, my mother called her friends and relatives from wealthy East Coast suburbs and found some sympathetic, others gleeful that their children no longer had to compete with the suddenly education-starved Kalanithis.