The Last Brother Page 2

  I had a brother one year older than I, whom I loved more than anything in the world, and a little brother a year younger than I, who, I believe, loved me more than anything in the world. Anil and Vinod. And me, Raj.

  I remember how I constantly tagged along after Anil and how Vinod, in his turn, tagged along after me. In the camp, as soon as a child was able to walk or more or less understood what you were saying to it, it ceased to be a child, it had a role to play, tasks to perform. My first memory is very clear in my mind. I do not know what Anil had done or failed to do, but my father is holding his head in the crook of his arm, and with the other he is lashing my brother’s buttocks with a very green bamboo cane, all ribs and knots, with a very fine tip. My mother stands weeping at the door, her hands over her ears, and suddenly, beside me, Vinod hurls himself at my father, attempting to snatch the cane from him, and my father, with a thrust of his elbow, flings my little brother to the other side of the room and my mother rushes over. From where I am I cannot see Anil’s face but I remember my father having him at his mercy and the only weeping I can hear is first that of my mother and then of Vinod but he, my big brother, does not weep.

  Later, when I was an adult, when my father was dead, and my son already in his teens, I told my mother that story. She doubted whether that memory could be my own, I was too little, she said, barely four years old. She thought I must have heard it from Anil but I know it is my first memory of the camp at Mapou. That scene where I remain a spectator and where it is my younger brother, aged three, who comes to Anil’s defense, while I am the one who should have done that. Me. When I think again about that first memory of my life it also seems as if I was keeping a low profile because I felt guilty about something, because I was the one who should be receiving the lashes of the cane, not Anil. It is curious, I can remember the color of the earth at the camp, and the way it gave off that acrid dust, I can remember the rain, I can remember the mountain at the end of the camp, beyond the stream, the dark shape that stood out against the sky at night and blocked our view of the stars. I can remember all this but I cannot remember what I had done that day for which Anil took such a beating.

  As a child I was a weakling. Of the three brothers I was the one who was the most fearful, the one who was always somewhat sickly, the one they protected the most from the dust, the rain, the mud. And yet it was I who survived at Mapou.

  Among our many tasks at the camp the one we never balked at was fetching the water. The stream flowed past a few hundred yards away from the camp and we knew that, unlike the other children at the camp, we were lucky. Some of them went with their fathers to the cane fields, others had to dig and maintain ditches to drain away the water in anticipation of the next deluge, whereas we went to the stream.

  At the edge of the camp there was a little wood we would walk through on a path scarcely marked among the thickets. Anil led the way, Vinod brought up the rear, I was, once again, the most protected of the three. This path seemed to me marvelous. Along the way there were wild strawberries and in summer mulberries grew plump on the bushes. Butterflies came and settled quite close to us, we would stop and look at them, filled with wonder at their mixture of colors and I am certain that at such moments what each of us dreamed of was turning into a butterfly: arraying himself in bright colors, becoming weightless and flying away.

  Anil always walked with a stick bent near the top into a U, sometimes resting his hand in the crook of it. It was a branch from a camphor tree which had been strongly scented for a while but had then simply become a little boy’s stick. He would twitch the grasses in front of him to drive away the snakes, which terrified us, Vinod and me. Anil adored this stick. It was, after all, the only thing that was really his own, that he did not have to share with anyone at all. It was a source neither of danger nor envy and no one could claim it from him.

  We could hear the stream even before we saw it and at this moment Anil would sometimes turn to us with a mild smile and I would restrain myself from leaping and running. We would go there at a time of day when we were certain not to meet anyone. It was a stream that flowed down from the mountain and even when I was little I was aware of the purity of its water, which emerged from the higher slopes, perhaps from the clouds, it was dazzlingly clear and, according to Vinod, had a faintly sugary taste. This stream was our Eden and we traveled from the hell of our camp to paradise almost every day by way of the little wood, passing through it with ceremony.

  The three of us had six buckets to fill and we would delay the moment when we had to return to the camp. We caught little fish trying to swim against the current and peered at ourselves in the water. And today, when I think of my brothers, I see our three faces reflected in the stream, blurred a little by the ripples on the surface of the water: Anil on my left, Vinod on my right, and we appear startlingly alike, with our crudely trimmed black hair, our eyes swollen from the dust, our thin necks and our teeth that look too big for us, so hollow are our cheeks, and the way we have, all three of us, of taking it in turns to look at one another and laugh.

  Anil was the one who signaled our departure and we never argued. We filled the buckets to the brim and began the return journey, which was much less pleasant than the outward one. Anil had taught us how to walk with a supple tread so as to spill as little water as possible. The iron handles cut into the palms of our hands and we clenched our teeth. Anil tucked his stick under his arm and never dropped it.

  When my mother returned from work the house had to have been cleaned, the earth in front of the door tamped down as neatly as possible, the water must be in the barrel, the wood lined up for the fire, the bundles of dried leaves well fastened and ourselves seated there, as good as gold. Night would fall quickly, the men would come home from the fields and then another life would begin for ourselves and for our poor mother, one filled with shouting, the stench of alcohol, and tears.

  All the men in the camp drank. I have no idea where or how they bought this drink because no one had enough to eat. We swallowed flat bread baked by our mothers and fried herbs, occasionally vegetables, and every day we drank stewed tea. My father was no better or worse than the others. He yelled things we could not understand, sang songs that were incomprehensible, so heavy and swollen with alcohol was his tongue, and if we did not sing the way he wanted he would hit us. Often we ended up outside, huddled against our mother, and we were not the only family in this situation.

  What more can be said about those nights in the camp? I did not feel I was any more unhappy than the others, my universe began and ended there. To me, this was how the world was, with fathers who worked from dawn till dusk, came home drunk, and bullied their families.

  In the year I was six my father sent me to school. Only four children from the camp went there and for us, the three brothers, school, along with the stream and the steam from the factory, was another aspect of paradise. But my father had decided to send only me, neither Anil nor Vinod, and this was the worst of punishments for me. I wept, I wailed, I shouted, I was impervious to strokes from the cane, to my father’s slaps and threats, and, above all, I was unmoved by my mother’s pleading. She looked at me with moist eyes and said to me Raj, I ask you, do it for me, go to the school.

  In those days children never won. I did indeed go to the school. There were only two classes, one for the little ones, the beginners, like me, and the other for the ones who, in theory, could read, write, and do sums. They gave me a slate on which I could write with chalk and I must confess that when I encountered this unknown world of school and teaching, my immense distress was diminished. I set off at seven o’clock in the morning and my two brothers would come with me to the edge of the camp, at the opposite end from the mountain. I had to walk around the camp, since the classrooms were located some way away from the factory. Sometimes, for as long as this walk lasted, a good half hour, I would imagine that all three of us were on our way to school and that soon the cards on which the world was explained to us in pictures and words woul
d be displayed before all our eyes. On one of them there was a man dressed in pants and a short-sleeved shirt, he had wavy black hair, a gentle face, and a smile. At the bottom of the card the word PAPA. Then Anil and Vinod would have been able to believe what I told them: not all the fathers in the world were like the ones at the camp, like our own.

  My brothers would contrive to wait for me in the afternoon so we could go to the stream together, but often I would come back to an empty camp and all its ugliness would suddenly become apparent to me. At such moments there was only one thing I wanted to do: bury my head in my hands and weep. I compared it to the card for HOUSE, a lovely, clean, white thing, with a blue roof, proof against rain; it was solid, truly solid, with proper walls. It was clear that in houses like this the dust did not swirl around people’s faces like a cloud of flies, the mud did not slither viciously, like snakes, into every nook and cranny. It was clear that in houses like this there was not a bamboo cane, all ribs and knots, with a very fine tip, propped up against the wall, motionless, innocent, harmless but daring you to look at it.

  At school I also learned a sense of guilt. That insidious thing that held me back from being an ordinary little boy, roaring with laughter, playing with the others, or just sitting quietly, staring in front of me. When I was in the classroom this feeling left me. But after the lesson was over I once more became Raj, the only brother who goes to school. Why me? I never ceased to ask myself. In my bag made of dried palm leaves I always hid the dried pear handed out at the morning break, but the cow’s milk they gave us had to be drunk then and there. I drank it slowly, closing my eyes, thinking hard about Anil and Vinod, picturing them cleaning the house, cutting wood, tying up cane leaves, bent, weary. All they had to make them grow was sugared water.

  I wished my father had chosen another of his sons to educate. But Anil would soon be going out with him every morning to cut sugarcane. He was strong, he already had muscles that bulged beneath his skin, he never complained, and, with his determination and strength at work, he would earn money, coins he would not drown in arrack but would give ceremoniously to my mother. Vinod would have been better in my place, but he was nimble and clever and, though he did not have Anil’s strength in his arms and legs, he was lively and never complained either. Whereas I was not much use for anything, since I spent half the year coughing, half the year drinking bitter herbal decoctions to get rid of the loose cough that lingered within me, my mother said, and sometimes I was in the grip of convulsions for whole nights and my feet became frozen. When the cough finally calmed down I would trail along with my brothers, feeling as if there were something gnawing at my chest. My legs lacked muscles, they were thin as sticks of bamboo, and I was such a light thing that Anil often carried me. I would wrap my two legs around his belly, my arms around his neck, and he settled me on his back and great was my love for him.

  When I came back from school and everything had been done without me, my sense of guilt made me hyperactive. I would rush about searching for fresh sugarcane leaves for the kitchen hearth, even if my brothers had already stacked up the bundle behind the house. I wanted to go and fetch more water, but the barrel would not hold more than six bucketfuls. I tamped down the earth again and when the wind made the dust motes dance I stayed in the house, armed with a rag, chasing away the grit as it settled on my mother’s cooking utensils, on our sleeping mats, and even on my father’s bamboo cane, all ribs and knots, with its long, fine tip. Coughing away, I struggled against the monster inside me that always won in the end, I was out of breath, my arms throbbed with pain but never mind, as I flailed about like a weary madman, I made my brothers laugh.

  Our life of mud and grit came to an end shortly after New Year’s Day, 1944. At the year’s end we had received clothes given by the wives of the bosses at the sugar factory. Clothes already worn by their children, but this did not matter at all to us, we were thrilled by the fabrics, the colors, and the styles. We all three of us had white shirts as well as shorts of different sizes and colors. Mine were a green pair, made of a soft material, and if I ran my fingers over it I could feel the strands in the fabric that were not visible to the naked eye. The shirt made my neck itch. Anil had a kind of Bermuda shorts, I know this now, but I remember we were forever making fun of him, his calves emerged from this long khaki affair and at the time we thought it was too big for him. We only knew about shorts and pants, not Bermuda shorts. Vinod had a pair of dark brown shorts that my mother took in at the waist with three safety pins. We were probably ridiculous, but we felt, how shall I say, special.

  We went on wearing these clothes for several weeks and we had them on when we went to the stream that afternoon. The shirts no longer made us feel itchy, they were dirty, and only one of the safety pins on Vinod’s shorts had survived. After weeks of intense heat the clouds were low and dark, and half the mountain was hidden. Not a single butterfly came to meet us, the bushes were dry, the wind set off miniature tornadoes and we stopped to watch the leaves spiraling up and falling again. We heard the stream quite late and my big brother turned back and smiled at us, but we did not hurry as we usually did.

  The stream was pure and clear, with a faintly sugary taste, as Vinod would say. At the height of summer it became narrow and had difficulty making its way around the great rocks, gray with sunlight, that crowded into its bed. We played there for a moment, then Anil decided to climb upstream toward the mountain, to find a place where the water gushed out more powerfully. I remember glancing at the camp. Merely a rapid glance over my shoulder, the trees we had just been passing through looked undernourished and were dancing at the mercy of the wind. We moved on, our buckets in our hands, Anil in front with his stick, Vinod behind me, and it was at the foot of the mountain that the rain suddenly came down.

  I am seventy today and I still remember, as if it were yesterday, how the thunder felt as if it were coming from our own stomachs, so much did it reverberate within us. I remember the fear, at the start, the eerie silence that followed the thunder, which petrified everything. Nature itself was on hold, and, as for us, we no longer dared move. Long minutes when huge, cool raindrops began by wetting our hair and our faces, then soaked our clothes. I remember the ghostly mist that arose from the earth when it had absorbed the first drops. We generally enjoyed such a moment but this time it was different. I sensed it, my brothers sensed it. Very quickly lightning flashes were unleashed, more thunderclaps rang out, and we began to run.

  How long did we spend hurtling downhill? The dry pebbles, which moments before had been grazing our feet, had disappeared; we were treading on slippery, sticky soil, struggling to pluck our feet from it. The sun had gone out. There were walls of rain and a curtain of sulfur arose from the earth. Anil’s white shirt bobbed up and down in front of me and I was trying not to let this fragment of white out of my sight. He was saying come on come on come on and then suddenly, in the blink of an eye, nothing more. No voice, no shirt in front of me. I stopped and Vinod bumped into me. My little brother gripped my arm and began calling Anil Anil Anil. I did the same, together we yelled out our elder brother’s name. I do not know how long we went on shouting like that, running through the mud, without any landmark, our eyes closed shut by the force of the wind and the rain and soon, heaven help me, soon there was only my voice shouting Anil Anil, and then Anil, Vinod, Anil, Vinod. I yelled with all my might but the wind, the rain, the thunder, the flashes of lightning, the roaring of the torrent of mud that our beloved stream had turned into, drowned my voice and gave me no chance.

  Five days later the men of the camp found Vinod, without his shirt, his head trapped behind a rock. It is not easy, when you are a child of eight, to see your little brother, who loved you more than anything in the world, his head smashed in by who knows what, his fingers and toes torn off by the stones hurtling down the mountainside, his body battered from having remained trapped behind a rock for five days, at the mercy of a stream we so loved, the stream that, for him, had a faintly sugary taste and th
at had become a torrent of mud, loose stones, and rocks. He was cremated the same day, all the preparations for the ceremony appeared as if by magic: the stretcher of camphor wood, the white sheet, the garlands of flowers, the incense, the priest with a big red spot on his forehead and his book of sacred verses in his hands.

  Anil’s body was never found. A few days later, in the course of one last search with the people from the camp, I discovered his stick. It was there at the edge of the little wood and I recognized it, thanks to its U-shaped end. I let it lie in my hand and I could never express how much I missed my elder brother at that moment. The stream had become limpid and pure once more and while the men were searching for Anil’s body, I tossed his stick into the current. I do not know why I did that, it was an unpremeditated gesture, but it was, as I have said, the only thing that truly belonged to my elder brother. The stick floated downstream, catching several times against rocks, but then it, too, disappeared. I leaned over toward the mirror of the water, as in the old days, and saw only a single furrowed face, with bulging eyes and a grimace. A bottomless well opened up within me and I know I did not hurl myself into that solitary image, into that thin, unhappy reflection, so as to obliterate it. I know I did not do this because my mother came running up behind me, calling out my name at the top of her voice, calling the only son who was left to her.