THE STRANGER IN MY HOME
  • Home
  • Vignettes
    • Encounters
    • Events
    • Experiences
    • Epiphanies
  • Stories
  • Fables
  • Translations
  • Miscellany
  • Now/Then

now  /  then

blogs and blends

Brother/Twin

12/18/2016

2 Comments

 
​My mother said that when we were infants people often asked whether my brother and I were twins. I found it hard to believe. He was taller, better looking and fairer, the last quite important in India.
 
I would be tongue-tied and even failed to say my name when my parents introduced me to their ever-flowing stream of friends. In contrast, my brother would announce his name clearly, with a confident smile, and add that he was a student in the school next door.  I remember guests would turn to my parents and say how bright their eldest son was. Then, realizing that I was within earshot, added, “Your other son is charming too.” 
Picture
​We were close, always together. Our parents took great pains to treat us equally. If he got a new shirt, I got one too. On his birthday, I too received gifts, and he on mine. We were avid readers and always asking for books. Father never chanced buying a book for one without buying another for the ogling brother.
 
We were avid sportsmen too. Whatever he played, cricket, soccer, badminton or table tennis, I wanted to play too. He excelled in table tennis; I was relieved to find that I was adept in badminton. We loved cricket and wanted to be like Don Bradman or Mushtaq Ali, having been taken by father to see the latter in Eden Gardens. I wasn’t a great batsman, but bowled competently and fielded diligently. But I noticed our friends always chose my brother to be the captain of a side, never me.
 
This was understandable, because he was highly sociable. He talked, he laughed, he could easily start a conversation with a total stranger. I could at best join a group and  be congenial.
 
I could see how smart he was. Though Bengali was our mother tongue, we learned to speak English early, because several of our parents’ colleagues were English and we played with their children on social occasions. We had barely learned English before my brother started reading Aldous Huxley and Bertrand Russell. He talked excitedly about the ideas he had picked up from new authors. I listened open-mouthed and tried hard to keep up. I admired his acumen, particularly as I saw nothing comparable in other young people I met, and I felt like a plodder next to him.

Picture
He could be shockingly direct and rebellious. Father saw him reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover and wondered whether he should be reading such a book. My brother wondered in response whether our father had read the book and, if he had, understood it. I overheard my parents discussing his obstreperousness for days.
 
My brother had a simple solution. He went to visit my aunt in a distant town and decided not to come back. He stayed with her, went to a different college and attended a different course.

​
​He did not realize the magnitude of the shock he had administered to our parents. And to me. We were such a close-knit family and so constantly together that his absence felt like an enormous physical void. Mother’s eyes seemed to mist every time she looked at the vacant chair at our dinner table.
 
Our paths diverged from that point. To our surprise, he forged a successful academic track, gained a doctorate, worked at a clinical institute, and eventually joined the country’s most creative social science think tank. He pioneered research in new areas and wrote a series of seminal books. One thing never changed. He remained steadfastly his own person. He stayed disorganized and idiosyncratic, resolutely original and invariably controversial.

Picture
​I worked for industry and government. I didn’t care for status. I didn’t even care much for immediate results. But I had fun analyzing how things worked or didn’t work. Pompously, we called it strategy.  I found my plodding approach a help: People are always throwing facts at you – and often views pretending to be facts – and you need a way to get past that and unmask what lies behind. I learned to respect tradition, but also be ready to try the untried.
 
The curious truth is I feel I have become more articulate and less asocial, while my brother has turned more inward. Even curiouser is the truth that, though we have lived in different continents for thirty years, our links were never stronger.
 
I still admire him, but I flatter myself I understand him better. I know he understands me better than anyone else. We could indeed be twins.

2 Comments
Utsav Banerjee
12/26/2016 05:22:50

A fantastic piece of article sir!! This is what you call to me an unvarnished ,unflattering and unflavoured appreciation and at the same time unveiling different facets of the different shades of characters ingrained so robustly in the two of your lives, that of you and your brother and at the end a respectful tribute with and all along the article only respectful admiration and not an iota of competitiveness and ill feeling or a sense of a sweet revenge or something like that..

Reply
Manish
12/26/2016 21:03:03

Thank you, Utsab, for your heart-felt comment. Besides being my brother, he is the most admirable man I have met in my life. I do adore him. Grateful for your comment.

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    Manish Nandy

    Writer, Speaker, Consultant
    Earlier: Diplomat, Executive


    Archives

    January 2022
    December 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015

    RSS Feed


    Categories

    All

Proudly powered by Weebly
© Manish Nandy 2015  The Stranger in My Home