Dear Brother

Dear brother who draws perfectly straight lines,

Only last night, over a bowl of nimki on the soggier side, Ma decided to retell the episode where it took you three summers and a quarter of autumn in prep school to tell a straight line from a curve. She cracks up every time she narrates it and honestly, I don't remember the first time anymore. There isn't an iota of doubt about how she misses you, even if it be months of feigned forgetfulness and only a day in each of odd, sudden, unsettling storytelling. The other week, I returned from college to find her on my bed, cross-legged and staring at the Elliott Smith doodlings you drew on my wall after the bribe of half a packet of Nutties and a forged letter of consent for your studio internship. The legend of your spatial mishap fails my belief when I look at the wall, because be it the taut strings on the maroon guitar or the toothbrush bristles on Smith's head, the lines do not get any straighter than a casanova's dream. I still marvel at the way you managed to draw them without a ruler, save the smoothest and most reassured one-way stride of the pencil nib. I would screw up a zigzag with just the same reassurance so let's leave it at that. Also, since it couldn't hurt me for you to know now, I wrote your letter on the night I first got wasted and called you because sneaking in through the kitchen window was forbidden art for me then and you were, quite simply put, a veteran when it came to the same. I spared you no slack spot to prick though, considering you bagged the internship and Ma never noticed the window left ajar the next morning.

This is no special occasion and thank God for so, because I have nothing possibly special to convey. Your letters have begun to shrink, and I am not complaining only because I am struggling to produce one genuine reply to the same. Winter's almost here and sometimes, when I am sitting, feet up and sprawled on the bean bag you bought for the room after your first 'art deal', I cannot help but remember the three year-old evening we spent reading out really crass poetry to each other sitting by the fire Baba used to brew in the backyard. 

Remember how Ma used to preserve your middle school project files for my future reference? You wouldn't know this, but three years on, she would take a dig at my projects every time the glue would ooze out a little from the edges of the freshly pasted cutting, the black sketch pen would leave faint blots at the back of the page, or the column/row/under lines would be taken only as seriously as they ought to be. They are still tucked at the bottom of the piles of your old sketch books, your dainty files. Even though I didn't touch one, discarding them didn't feel overly necessary. Maybe I will dig them out one of these days when Woolf over cups of ginger tea and Broadway door-slamming sessions with Ma won't suffice for an eventful life any longer. It would seem largely odd to you, but I wish you were home this time around. The petunias overlooking our window are finally blooming and I swear, they look exactly like their acrylic counterpart you envisioned and painted only days after we planted the sapling. Also, Molly keeps to herself nowadays; I think we never quite got along, especially after you left. I still remember how she would snuggle her feral, furry self against your leg as you drew, and eventually, doze off at your feet. 

Do I regret us not taking the beaten and tested path of sibling hood? Not really. I am glad we never fought over the last piece of cake or the only empty swing in the park. I am glad we never shared homework, discussed firsts, and concocted code names. We got through this without owing and yet knowing. I am glad, brother, that we let the seasons come and go at their own whim and pace, without even once whispering or wishing a colour. 

You know how your cue to a conversation was always that dripping pause followed by the meek clearing of the throat? It would be a perennial pain at the dinner table or at those cackling family get togethers. But I owe it one for the night when I sat from across you, and you wrapped up just in a sentence how one needs to travel as far as the story goes. It was the night you got your heart broken the third time round and spared patriarchy the personal jibe for the umpteenth time. even once. In that moment, I wanted nothing more than for you to leave. And yet, in that moment, brother, I wanted you to leave the baggage behind because you had begun to hunch by then.

I hope you're still looking out, still waiting, not expecting. I hope you still keep your heart afloat, even if be an overcrowded lifeboat of paranormal, anomie, and only a leak of love. I hope you now draw your lines just as straight and just as winding as you want to, because there's nobody to please anymore. I will never forgo my anger towards Ma and Baba for the silence they bred better than they could ever breed unprescribed values and the less popular colours of the spectrum. I will never forgive them for holding your knack against you just to rip apart exceptions which deserve to live in their own right and might. I am glad you burst out, not for rage but for the hues which disregard wavelengths just as much as they regard their flight.

Because brother, drawing straight lines, and just lines, was a pleasure which was always yours, and never a fault.