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My grandfather prayed twice everyday, for forty two years. At some point, he was an atheist - a young rebel and all that. No one seems to know what changed that about him.

He was a brilliant man, who studied law but refused to practice it. He settled for a mediocre life - worked in a bank all his life, got married at an early age and had four children. He retired early and saved nothing. He smoked a lot and chewed a lot of beetle leaves. Highly passionate and quite exaggerated at times, he was always a bit of an eccentric. He studied English and French voraciously all his life. After he retired, he became a French tutor. Literature and cricket were his greatest passions and Kamal Hassan, his greatest hatred. “The man sounds like he's vomiting every time he utters a word”, he would say.

From the time I remember, he read with a magnifying glass. He was going almost blind from the age of forty, but so what! He was too passionate to give up on his books for such a silly reason. He also carried a black umbrella everywhere he went and made note of his every expense in a little notebook. He insisted on tallying the account to the paise, every day. If he couldn’t remember something and the account did not tally, he’d make up an expense and tally it anyway.

On January 20th 2009, he died. When he died, he was not reading, teaching, writing accounts or praying anymore. Sometime in 2000, he had a stroke that paralysed the left side of his body. Within a few years, he was completely bed-ridden. You’d never think so if you met him, but he relied heavily on my grandmother for everything. When he was bed-ridden, shriveled up to no more than 4 feet in all, he still demanded for masala dosa every Sunday and made funny noises and a disgusted face when something was not done satisfactorily for him. When someone visited, he'd complain endlessly about my grandmother in the only word that came out of his mouth: “Peru”.

In those nine years of life in a corpse, he re-discovered his childhood. From being carried to the bathroom and given sponge baths, to fussing about watching television late at night, he seemed to have become a child all over again. But he was a man driven by his pride, his good looks and intelligence all his life. And he did not let that fade. You see him lying there, all shriveled up, in an almost fetal position, growing skinnier, his skin rotting before your eyes, and you could feel nothing but admiration. He was almost a vegetable, but a proud one nonetheless. It must be that resolve and strength of character that made him live in that condition for so long. Every time we visited we’d suppose it to be our last, but the next time he’d be smiling his toothless smile, having that proud look on his face after every shave.

His death was peaceful and quiet. It was nothing extravagant, no fuss or drama - very unlike him. The last thing he did was hold my grandmother’s hand, making sure that the coffee she was pouring from the tumbler did not enter the wrong hole.

I should've learnt French. You are an inspiration. At least, not many men are as handsome these days – already balding at 30, but still strikingly handsome.

At a different time

I was talking to an old friend recently, about old times. But our childhood had nothing in common, except for one: Brothers. We both had brothers about four and a half years older to us. Once this was discovered, naturally, we did a whole lot of brother-trashing! Do not misunderstand people, we do adore our respective brothers and everything, but that’s just what little sisters (actually, any sisters of brothers) do.

So, first I will remind you that, as a second child, most of my toys were hand-me-downs. Things the brother was bored of, trashed, dismantled or tore the eyes out of. Out of these, I barely remember any, except for a very sad teddy bear, a freakishly tall stuffed doll whose very Country singer-like name I can’t remember, a white robot-something and a kitchen set that I barely understood. A kitchen set, yes. I mean how utterly presumptuous, conceited, sexist and all that! I usually either buried those little cups and ugly, floppy tables or used them to scoop out mud so I could build my secret cat-hideout. Oh yes, I snuck a stray cat (Jinx) home in my 6th grade summer break and religiously fed my share of milk to it. That was fun while it lasted, which was until my grandmother chased it away the very first day I returned to school. I know it has to be her, the way she went on about how “black” Jinxy was and how its bad luck will make me fail 6th grade and wash vessels for the rest of my life! I do mean to confront her one of these days about her racist attitudes.

Anyway, I digress terribly. I was talking about my favourite childhood toy - the white and blue robot-something. I have no idea what it was. I’d like to think it was a man. Robo-man! Erm...clearly, I wasn’t a very imaginative child. But he! He flipped and had wing-like things at the back of his movable hands. And the blue patches on his head lit up, when he was switched on. He even spoke what is now very sexy robo language! I don’t have many memories of Robo-man, though. But the most special one was that time he (I, with him as my tool) stabbed the living crap out of that ugly Barbie my cousin sister owned. I always hated those blasted creatures and never owned one. Alas, now I have several of those prancing about me. They’re alive too! Eech.

But since I’m on the topic of childhood, toys and bothers now, let me tell you an often-narrated story of mine. If you have a brother (younger/older), you will know what a pain in the backside they can be. I say, the brother and I had a perfectly inharmonious (translates to perfect) relationship. A wrestling, hair-tearing, biting, death-threatening, spitting sort of relationship, if you will. From him sticking chewing gum on my head so I had to chop off all my hair to get rid of it, to me “humiliating” him in front of his football buddies by showing them his most embarrassing pictures, we’ve done it all. But this particular incident, very curiously, seems to interest listeners the most.

It was a regular day. I was about 8 years old and the brother and I had had our regular dosage of fights the previous evening. I had, as usual stormed off to bed grunting about what an idiot (see, I didn’t abuse then) my mother had given birth to. We went about doing regular things that day, going to regular school and doing the regular kneeling down in front of class for regular not doing of homework and all that. But as I returned home that regular evening, suddenly things weren’t so regular. There had been a somber tragedy in my household. It was in our room, in fact. The evil, conniving brother had tapped my weakest link. It was pure, cold-blooded revenge. I walked into our room, to find him simply looking at the computer. But I sensed a slight smile, almost an evil smirk on his impish face. His eyes darted slowly towards the window and back. I followed his eye-movement till I stopped still in utter horror. His eyes had only briefly rested on the limp body of an abnormally large stuffed doll, with its livid-looking limbs hanging loose, like the roots of one of those really old Banyan trees. There it was! The doll, whose name I can’t recall. It was my favourite doll, the ugly, horribly dirty doll that wore the green dress with bold pink and white flowers and the purple hat till its very end. The brother had suspended her on the curtain rod, where I couldn’t reach. She was hanging there, from a thread tied to her neck and connected to the rod.

Then…

Then what! He convinced me she had committed suicide and I cried miserably for the rest of the day. The next day of course, I took fancy to something else. But oh, the hell I gave him for that!
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I write this today, as I remember. Brother, we may not be from a family who profess their love for each other. We may not share anything anymore, we may not wrestle or secretly watch sitcoms that I’m not allowed to or play basketball with a holed-in bucket or sit together for hours with my math text (thank goodness for that!), but you are a distinct part of my childhood…and life. I never thought I will, but today, I wanted to write about the brother. Someone very close to me once asked why I sometimes prefix “the” and not “my”, when I talk about a person. But you are not one such person, brother. This post is for me more than it is for you, my brother. For my childhood and yours, for all that we shared and will share.

Of course, I sincerely hope you never read this one. Ever.