A Piece of My Heart

By most standards, my brother, who is eight years younger than me, has led a most brutalized and traumatized childhood. His arm still has a shadow of scars inflicted by me, his tooth was once knocked out because I was tutoring him and thought his handwriting that day was particularly bad, he was made to dress like a girl until the age of four every time I wanted us to play something dramatic, he was slapped because he couldn’t remember the spelling of China, he was fed coffee powder disguised as cocoa, he was woken up on days his annual results were to be declared by a strange whispering in his ear that said, “Wake up, today is the day you flunk”, and he was told every ridiculous story I could ever make up, and worse, he was forced to believe them. But he, Aritro to most of you, Riju to his family, and Rijua to me gave away from a very early age the steely determination and intelligence that he wasn’t ever going to crumble under this pressure.

There were two ways he went about it. First, for every thing that went wrong in his life, Riju knew whom to blame. The trend started when I was eleven years old and he was three and was passionately in love with vehicles – toys or otherwise. His toy car collection rivaled those of big shops from where our parents and miscellaneous loved ones bought the goodies to contribute towards his noble cause. Every morning and evening, Riju would require/demand to be taken downstairs to the parking lot of Nilgiri Apartments in Alaknanda, New Delhi, where we lived at that time, so that he could scrutinize the arrangement. He knew the names of all the brands and their colors. Riju would then come back home and arrange his cars in that exact way, right down to the last detail, customizing if he fell short of one car, or color, or make. He even replicated, say, the fifth car that had an awry tire, or the ninth one that was parked wrongly, or the fifteenth parked facing backwards. Or our own, slumbering, because our father had decided to go to work on his scooter. Riju's three-year old mind did not know how to count but he recognized patterns and he replicated them perfectly, every day, sometimes every hour, tirelessly and seamlessly.

But in this paradise of cars and their arrangements, there lived an ogre. She used to come back from school eagerly because there was always a human being at home waiting to be played with. Now, one of the first things the ogre did upon entering the house was pocket two or three of these cars, from mind you, a collection of at least a hundred similar sized contraptions. She hid them and covered her tracks well by obliterating the gaps caused. Sometimes, to play even more safe, she pocketed only one when there were three more of the same size, brand and make. But she was caught within two minutes of the deed every single time, simply because the victim was far smarter than most people she had ever played jokes on. So he would toddle back from wherever he was, walk over to his careful arrangement, scrutinize with his shiny black eyes while his silky thick hair fell all over his forehead and chubby pink cheeks, and either holler or speak quietly, “I know you have taken such and such car...from such and such row/column. It was representing the grey Contessa I saw in the parking lot this morning. Give it back.” I nearly always thought he did it by magic, today I know Riju does it because he has an astonishing kind of memory.

The second arrow in his quiver was and still is, his incredible sense of humor. When Riju decided to fall in love with Manchester United, initially for the first few months, I remember myself to have been supportive of this choice. But over time, he became obsessed and Man U became his sole reason to live. He began to read voraciously, he began to remember details of every match played in their history, every player ever recruited right down to his height, weight, total number of matches played, goals scored, number of times nose picked, armpit scratched...Riju knew it all, every single detail, which he of course needed to share with us, his family. So I had to retaliate. In the only way I could...because by then, he was becoming taller AND stronger. Much aggrieved and humiliated I began to spin long yarns -- of how Sir Alex was actually a goatherd in disguise, how Beckham got routinely beaten up by his wife and three sons, how ManU was the club of everyone who was illiterate in Britain, how Mrs. Ferguson washed every player’s clothes by hand because the club had no money.

I did this again last night, over our Internet telephony chat. And Riju bore it again, gracefully and with humor. By adding details that made these stories come alive even more. By making me laugh and laugh and laugh until the neighbors nearly called the police. By reminding me once again, as if I needed any more reminding, that however different we might be, as siblings we make perfect sense. We add up.