When I was little, Bramettan was immense. An intellectual force whose knowledge about all things provided myriad eye-opening moments in my youth. It began early in life too, when I didn’t know anything about the world. My eyelids were stretched to their limits then.
Bramettan was my oldest brother, the eldest among the three of us; six years ahead of me and four of Rosmin. He was destined to inherit the family mill—a secure if unprestigious livelihood that eliminated all manner of academic pressure from his life. That wasn’t to say he was a bad student. He skidded by among the ranks of the middling and backward masses that seemed always to be in trouble with one teacher or the other but never stressed. Mine own incursions into the jolly comfort of mediocrity wasn’t so readily accepted. I could revel in the pen fights, the recreations of wrestling matches from television and stone pelting with the best of them but I’d committed the cardinal sin of performing well in elementary school. I was earmarked to bring prestige to the family.
“So what if Braman was too worldly and unstudious. He always has the mill. And Gautam, he studies, so you don’t have to worry about him,” relatives would relate to father at family functions, much to his satisfaction. Rosmin’s name never came up in these discussions. That would be a test for father in the future–the finding of a groom that matched or surpassed the social standing of the family.
That test, when it came, was passed with flying colours and not least due to Rosmin’s dainty good looks or her ready employability, having graduated with honours as a software engineer. Father had saved a little bit of money from here and there and good seasons and the inflations of coconut prices for a dowry. The groom was, oddly enough, a classmate of Bramettan’s arrived at circuitously through whispers at the local temple, gossip at community events and phone calls from the United States.
As for Bramettan, he hated the guy. “A snob of the first order,” he’d described the man as, going so far as to veto the arrangement except that father declared that the miller should stick to milling unless he wanted to be kicked out of the mill. The groom, Devnath, was an engineer at a prestigious multi-national software company, for what prestige such things carried. His meeting with Bramettan when it happened, was awkward at best. The engineer cut a sharp figure in his standard formal shirt and stiffly creased trousers, or at least, as sharp a figure as a pot-bellied short man with a hunch developed from developing software over decades can cut. That didn’t matter though. Bramettan’s half-buttoned shirt, flour-lined hair and grubby lungi elicited the comment, “Still mucking about through life, I see,” from the engineer. It was the first thing he said as he shook my brother’s hand noncommittally. It enraged Bramettan further that father and mother laughed with Devnath about that and that Rosmin actually found the git attractive.
In the years after Rosmin had left and during the few times I went home from college, Bramettan and I often reminisced about our childhood. “Remember the time we autopsied that toad?” he asked. “And then tried to sew its head onto a dead mouse?” I remembered out loud. “The stench!” we said together. We’d even plugged in a wire and electrocuted the mishmash carcass in the hopes of bringing it alive. It simply smoked up and had us gagging, quite like how we were laughing about it in the present.
“ And look at you now,” Bramettan finally said after we’d caught our breaths, “studying to be a real doctor! I’m proud of you.”
In time, I did become a real doctor and with some help from Rosmin, more inflated coconut prices and the luck of the draw, by which I mean the questions drawn for the United States Medical Licensing Examination, began working abroad. Years went by and my little old home and the rickety mill and even Bramettan became memories of a distant past that was almost impossible to reconcile with the life I lived now. Asphalt, nitrate gloves, touchscreens and the constant tinge of sanitizer in the air was a far cry from the silver fish infested notebooks and the aroma of copra that I had left behind. A global pandemic and a recession ensured it’d be a decade before I was able to come back home or so I told myself.
In truth, I hadn’t even considered it until father’s death. And then, suddenly, we were all there. Rosmin and Devnath whom I hadn’t met in almost as long flew in from San Francisco. I came from Newark, my two layovers delaying ceremonies, forcing the body to be kept on ice. The house was impatient in its muted state and only breathed after all the rituals were executed.
That night, after the extended mourners had withdrawn, Devnath, with a glass of scotch handy found his lungs speculating on global conflicts.
“The game is about to be upended. I lead the team developing a new missile guidance software for fighter jets. Soon, war as you know it will be completely different,” he said, sitting at the dinner table by the wall on which father’s portrait hung, looking down on him pitifully.
“ What has software got to do with flying?” asked Bramettan, “remember when we made that plane with the cardboard boxes left over at the mill? It flew really well. Now that’s flying. Flying is not about software. If we’d made that plane a little larger one of us could’ve ridden it.”
I did remember the plane. It’d glided a few meters from where we had released it from the terrace.
“Well, you see, the software…” began Devnath.
Bramettan cut him off with a, “Meh… software, shmoftware…,” and walked off.
Devnath and I shared a look of concern. Bramettan hadn’t partaken of the whiskey.
Conflict in Eastern Europe ramped up the following day with threats of nuclear war being reported.
“ I hope I can make it back to San Fran to complete my missile guidance software,” complained Devnath.
“Do you remember the great blast?” Bramettan asked me.
I did. We’d bundled a hundred coconut-leaf crackers in a plastic bag a set it on fire.
“Russia possesses that technology,” he told me.
I laughed out loud but he simply carried on watching the news.
“What do you mean they have that technology?” Devnath asked him, pretending not to see me motion wildly for him to shut up.
“ What do you think the Tsarabomba is? Its hundreds of nuclear warheads strapped together. We did that when we were little. We knew that technology.”
“ Technology? That’s not technology,” Devnath revolted.
“Are you telling me the Tsarabomba is not technology?” Bramettan retorted angrily.
Then, catching himself in the moment of silence that ensued, laughed loudly and went away.
Devnath gave me a look as if to say, ‘Your brother has gone looney.’
I pretended not to see.
Saturday, I’d be leaving. Three layovers before I reach Newark, keeping far away from Eastern Europe. I knew I’d miss all of this– the dust, the pallid odour of rotting notebooks, the drone of the old mill–and yet, I was glad to be away from it; left behind in time, looking ever backward to lease a sense of pride in the present.
I was heading to my room with a mind to begin packing when I bumped into Bramettan.
“ Hey old sport, say, I was thinking about Father. Do you remember how we invented surgery?” he asked.
“ Hold on to that thought,” I said as I hastened my steps. Saturday couldn’t come quick enough.
