I Wore My Brother's Hand-Me-Down Dreams
His old textbooks came with his old expectations, pre-underlined.
My brother's physics textbook arrived in my school bag already underlined, and for one full year I believed the underlines were a map. Rohan was four years older, and in our house his name was less a name than a unit of measurement. Marks were counted in Rohans. Behavior was graded against the Rohan standard. When I scored 82 in maths, my father looked at the paper for a moment and said, quietly, “Rohan got 96 in this chapter,” as if the chapter itself remembered.
I got everything of his. The blazer with the sleeves my mother took up. The geometry box with his initials scratched into the tin. The bicycle with the seat set for his legs. And the textbooks, always the textbooks, arriving each June like weather, margins already annotated in his small, confident pencil.
The teachers got him secondhand too, except in reverse. On the first day of ninth grade, my chemistry teacher looked up from the attendance register, found my surname, and brightened. “Rohan's brother!” she said, and thirty heads turned. That was my introduction. Not my name... my relation.
Here is the part nobody tells you about being the younger one: you don't just inherit the objects.
You inherit the verdicts.
Rohan was good at physics, so I was expected to be good at physics. Rohan was quiet, so my talking was a defect. Rohan wanted engineering, so the word engineering was stitched into my future before I had learned long division, the way my mother stitched his name into my uniform and only sometimes remembered to change it.
I want to be fair. Rohan never lorded it. He was gentle with me in the offhand way of older brothers, half attention and half elbow. It wasn't him pressing down on me. It was his outline, the shape he left in every room, that I kept being asked to fill.
So I studied his underlines like scripture. If Rohan had underlined Newton's third law twice, I memorized it twice as hard. If he had starred a derivation, I copied it until my hand cramped. I thought his pencil marks were the trail of a mind that never got lost, and if I stepped exactly where he had stepped, I would arrive where he had arrived.
I arrived at a 74 in physics and a stomachache that lasted through most of tenth grade.
The truth is I liked words. I liked them embarrassingly.
I kept a notebook inside my physics notebook, a smaller one, where I wrote lines about the rain on the water tank and the sound of my grandfather's radio. I hid it the way other boys hid cigarettes. In our house, poetry was a thing that happened to other families.
The turn came when Rohan was twenty-three and I was nineteen, the night before his wedding. The house was full of relatives and marigolds, and he pulled me up to the terrace with two stolen bottles of Thums Up, and we sat on the water tank with our backs to the party.
“I need to tell you something stupid,” he said. “You know those underlines? In the textbooks?”
I said of course. I said I'd practically memorized them...
He laughed, but it came out wrong, and in the light from the street I watched my brother's face do something I had never seen it do. “I underlined when I was panicking,” he said. “That was the system. Whatever I couldn't understand, I underlined so it looked like studying. Baba would walk past and see me marking the book and leave me alone.” He took a long pull of his drink.
“You were following a map of everywhere I was lost.”
For fifteen years I had been reading his fear and calling it genius, and he had been watching me do it, too ashamed to say so.
He told me the rest of it in pieces that night. That he had wanted to study history. That he'd said the word once, at fourteen, at dinner, and our father had set down his glass and said, “History of what, unemployment?” and everyone laughed, and Rohan laughed too, and that was that. He put on the engineering like a blazer that almost fit and walked forward, because he was the eldest, and the eldest goes first through every door so the rest of us can see whether it's safe.
“You have the notebook,” he said. It wasn't a question. Of course he knew. He'd found it years ago, looking for a charger. “Don't do what I did. Don't underline your way through a life.”
The next day he got married and moved to Pune, and I went home and took out the small notebook from inside the big one, and for the first time I let them sit on the desk side by side, in the open, where anyone could walk past.
It took a while... these things always take longer than the movies suggest.
I finished a sensible degree because fear has momentum, and I don't regret it, exactly, the way you don't regret a long detour with decent scenery. But I kept writing, and I stopped hiding it. I found profiles of writers nobody had heard yet, people with surnames that had also been units of measurement in their houses, and reading them felt like finding out the terrace had always been full of brothers. I read an essay on why safe poems lose and recognized every safe line I'd ever written, all those poems underlined in advance, built to make someone walking past leave me alone.
So I wrote the unsafe one. It was about Rohan, about a family where love arrived dressed as expectation and we all just wore it. I sent it to him before I showed anyone else. He read it on a train, he told me later, and had to look out the window for a while, and the man next to him asked if he was all right, and my brother, thirty-one years old, senior engineer, said, “My little brother wrote that,” to a complete stranger. Not Rohan's brother. My brother.
The measurement finally running the other way.
There's a photograph my mother keeps in the steel cupboard, the two of us at some cousin's birthday, me swimming in his old blazer, him standing behind me with both hands on my shoulders. I used to think he was holding me in place.
I look at it now, at his fingers actually gripping... and I think he was holding on.
Last June, my aunt asked if we still had Rohan's old textbooks for her son, who is twelve and terrified of physics in a way I recognized over the phone. I found them in the trunk under the bed. Then I sat on the floor for two hours with an eraser, rubbing out every underline, every star, every false trail, until the books were only books.
On the first page of the physics one, where a map should be, I wrote: These pages are blank on purpose. Get lost in your own way.
He'll understand it eventually... we all do, eventually.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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