My friends used to call my younger brother ‘battery.’
No. We were not a part of a gang. This was not a Pappu Pager sort of thing!
The thing is that my mother would send him with me in the evening when I went down to play. I was around 11,12 years old
He is a day short of 8 years younger than me. He’d follow me wherever I’d go. Not like the sweet pug from the ads.
He’d threaten to snitch on whatever my friends and I would chat about or do.
‘Battery’ since he would be there wherever I was!
My dad wanted a daughter when my mom was expecting. I wanted a brother to play with. We made a hundred Re bet. The day my brother was born, my dad took me to a toy shop to buy 100 Rs worth of toys (a lot in Calcutta of the early 80s), then for lunch at the Calcutta Zoo restaurant and then we went to see the new addition to the family. I soon realised that there’s not much that you can do with a sibling who’s so much younger than you. Reverse of cats as I now know. They are the most fun as kittens.
My brother was supposed to be a birthday gift to me. Party pooper that he is, he came out a day earlier!
He was born at Woodlands, which is just beside the Calcutta Zoo. the only one among our parents and the two of us to have been born in Calcutta, or India for that matter. When I’d get really peeved with him, I’d say that he must have got exchanged with one of the monkeys in the zoo! He’d go to my mom bawling!
The other day I told my mom about how Baby Loaf settles down somewhere and how little Nimki him finds him and settles down beside him.
‘Does Loaf like it,’ she asked.
‘I don’t think he gets a choice,’ I replied.
‘Ha ha. Like your brother who followed you everywhere and tell me about your girlfriends!’
‘Girlfriends’?
Becoming a grandmother has made her more liberal apparently! It was not a word to be taken lightly amongst us right till I got married!
My brother loved South Indian food as a kid. Which in Calcutta in the 80s and 90s meant dosa, vadas and idlis (but who ordered idlis?!). So much so, that my mom and I would jokingly say we’d marry him to a Madrasi girl.
Yes, yes. We weren’t woke then and for whatever it’s worth there’s a heritage restaurant called ‘The Madrasi Hotel’ in Jamshedpur and the owners don’t have a problem with the name.
He married a Bengali girl. A tuition romance. I was the first in the family to spot the two. Even though I had left Kolkata by then.
Did I snitch? Or tell tales as it was called then?
Of course not!
Both love ‘Madrasi khabar’ and often order it in from Udupis at Gurgaon. For my mother too, who is with them at the moment. And my niece. She and my mom share idlis.
A story which came to me while I had my dosa sambar chutney breakfast in Bandra, made by #kayteecooks.
