Brother’s Silent Love

He died at the age of eighteen, my disabled older brother.Yes, he was free from the cursed life he was given.  Yet he was my brother.  My mother (Aai) was his mother, too.  Up until his body was brought out of my mother’s bed and laid down in the small open court yard between our two little houses of thatched roof, I did not really understand the significance.  I stared at the body with mother at its side, wailing and crying, and even showing her anger at my father.  Father could not afford modern medicine, doctors, specialists, or taking him to a big city for treatment.  He quietly and helplessly listened to her accusations, and with a vacant look stared at the sky.  I realized then that being poor could be a serious and fatal ailment.

We used to sleep in the same bed, Aai in the middle, and two of us on either side of her.  We did not have individual beds.  There were many beds lined up against the walls for our large extended family of brothers, sisters, cousins, their children in our two houses with leaky thatched roof.  If we had extra guests or relatives, we would just spread some hay on the dirt floor to make a temporary bed and cover it with a cotton sheet (chador).  We did not know what privacy was.  Now glancing at my older brother’s closed eyes and his body covered with a white chador lying at rest on ground, I realized suddenly that he was not going to get up anymore, or go to bed at night with Aai and me.  But the idea of just Aai and me in that bed did not thrill me.  I used to complain about our bed being crowded with three people.  He used to wet our bed and that used to then spread to my side.  I used to get mad at him although he was my older brother.  Aai used to explain that he did not mean to, that he could not control.  Wet or not, our mattress was never washed.  It had become thin and hard (from years of use) and dirty.  In places, there were holes and one could see clumps of cotton popping out.  Aai used to set it out in the sun occasionally and beat the dust out.  It had a distinct foul stench.

My brother did not die of a serious disease.  He caught pneumonia.  A few days earlier our aged family barber with very poor eyesight and a hunchback came to our house one day, which was typical, sat on a stool and at my father’s instructions, shaved my brother’s head.I am pretty sure if my brother could say anything, he would have protested against losing his hair.  Then Aai gave him a cold shower.  Summer or winter, we always had cold showers, pouring water with a tin mug from a bucket.  My brother could neither talk nor bathe himself.  He could not put on clothes, brush his teeth, or feed himself.  He could walk, though awkwardly, with his legs bent at the knees and his feet sort of dragging in a lopsided way while his arms dangled at his sides.  Our Aai did everything for him.  As kids we never really thought much about him not being able to do the things we could do.  We saw him every day, and we accepted his life as normal.  He could not run around like us, could not play soccer, could not climb trees, and did not go to school.  Though we knew he was disabled and unable to speak, we were not sure if he could hear.  I remember once father had taken him to the only school in town for the deaf and dumb.  I do not know what happened there.  Either they did not accept him or father could not afford it.  Someone suggested a treatment in Calcutta in a neighboring state for people like my brother.  Obviously there was no guarantee of success and Calcutta was out of reach for my father.  Someone also suggested a diet of healthy and high protein food.  Father did buy some cashew nutsand chicken just for my brother a few times.  There was no noticeable improvement.  In addition, such food was expensive and father’s budget and a large family did not allow such a luxury for one person.  He could not afford to starve everybody, so the high protein diet did not last long.

But our brother did not complain.  He ate whatever Aai fed him.  He wore whatever clothes she had chosen for him.  Although he was unable to speak or do much for himself, he could smile and he could cry.  He made a funny sound when he laughed or cried.  It was not a loud laughter like we did nor was it an outpouring of grief like my mother’s.  But you could see that smile on his face and you could see tears rolling down his cheek when he cried.  In the morning when we used to walk to school, he used to wait at the front gate of the adjacent Shiva temple till we disappeared.  In the afternoon he would be waiting at the gate when we returned home.  We could see that smile when he saw us coming and then followed us inside.  He was happy to see us back.  At our New Year’s (“Bihu”) day when he got a new shirt like everybody else, his face used to shine in happiness.  Sometimes, when Aai was frustrated and tired, she would get mad at him.  She would blurt out loudly in our colloquia tongue, “Moktiltil kay khaabajanmaloisli”, meaning you came to this world to devour me little at a time.  His tears would flow down his cheek, but then Aai would feel sad and wipe his tears away.  We saw it all, but never really knew how he felt.  Friends and relatives of our parents used to comment (among themselves, so our parents would not hear) that if he died it would free him, as well as our mother.  I did not know much about heaven, salvation, and so on, but I did wonder who would care for him like our Aai did if she wasn’t around.

For the first time in my life I had gone to the funeral place by the big river flowing past our home to watch cremation in an open fire.  His body was engulfed by that devouring fire.  People call it a holy fire.  I think it was unholy devouring my brother.  “Ashes to ashes”, you come alone and you go alone – a new realization came to me.  There would be no marker, no tombstone, and no trace of the deceased.  The dead simply vanishes from the scene and erased from our psyche in time.No, it’s still vividly etched in my mind.  One can philosophize talking about immortality, reincarnation.  The truth is it is the end.  Just like that, my brother was gone.  When he was alive, he probably understood (I wondered if he could think) and accepted his life as it was given to him and quietly shouldered injustices life brought to him.  I only used to complain about his wetting our bed, but I never had to walk in his shoes (no, he did not even have shoes).  After he was gone, I missed his presence at night, his send off from the gate, his welcoming smile, and everything else.  I had more room to myself, but it was not the same.