For over 40 years of my older brother’s 60-year-long life, the overarching family narrative was the fact that he dropped out of the hallowed halls of IIT, half-way through. And this, in the 1970s — when ‘dropping out’ was a phrase newly heard in these parts; voices were dropped and faces turned red in shock or sympathy at the scandal of it all. This was the time when batches upon freshly baked or newly minted batches of engineers from here emerged to be wooed by employers and potential in-laws with equal fervour. Many simply flew off to the U.S., and blazed trails that are still visible.
There was not a whole lot of swotting, sweating or family tension over ‘IIT entrance’ back then. Just my brother and his books, and parents who did not need to hound, push or track. I was nine then, and when he emerged from his study for a break, cracking his knuckles, he would allow me to look through a small microscope he had been gifted on his 16th birthday. We would examine dog fleas, onion membranes, parts of plants.
Movie march
On some days, he and a couple of his friends would take themselves off to the theatre to watch a film. My parents would mildly wonder if it was okay for him to toddle off to watch a movie in the middle of studying for an entrance exam, but it was a mild wonder, never a worry. If it was an English film, like The Guns of Navarone , he would come home whistling the theme song. If he went to see Teesri Manzil , or Jewel Thief , he would come home air-drumming RD’s bongo, and carrying those slim lyrics booklets sold outside the theatre. At one point, he must have owned easily 70 to 80 of these. (Today they would have been collector’s items, but nobody thought to keep them.)
And just like that, one day there was a letter in the mail, informing him that he had secured entrance into IIT, with even a 40-something rank. The import of this dawned on us and the people around us only slowly. There was no high-jinks jubilation. Just a busying to prepare for this new stage.
I have a recollection of all of us dropping him to his hostel room in Powai, of a ‘racer’ cycle in parrot green bought for him to negotiate the campus.
Over the next year, he would come home for the weekend and we would make the longish excursion to drop him back on Sunday afternoon. He would bring with him bits of his widened world: names of musicians, books, movies, Mood-I and LPs and the newly-coined jokes, the PJs.
For me, as a 10-year-old, all of this nice stuff seemed to happen within the blink of an eyelid in time. What became a very long, well-trodden path, an often-repeated refrain, was what came after and remained till the very end: his dropping out and the downward spiral from then on for the next 40 years of his life, till the end of his days.
A steady fall
Something happened then. Grades fell, subjects and then entire semesters, were dropped; there were some explanations, some conjectures, and some confabulations. It became a family-defining year. And all the years that followed from then were in the shadow of this occurrence. I grew up to the family leitmotif of this grand fall from grace — one from which he simply never picked himself up, whatever the other opportunities. My parents became, on their son’s front, at first mystified, then sad, then angry, then cynical, then bitter, and then perhaps reconciled to his jagged, almost blighted, existence for decades after.
No doubt there had been better times — well before I or my sister were born — when they were, the three of them, in a bubble of happiness. But there was so much subsequent overlay of disappointment and disaffection, that as the youngest child I had little access to those early years.
Until I happened upon this picture that surfaced recently. Just 2”x2”. It is London, 1950. My brother is under a year old, my father is a modestly-paid mining engineer. My mother has placed her son on some small stone structure, and has hidden. My father is the photographer and they are trying a ‘look ma no hands’ shot. But she can’t help peep out in playful delight from behind the structure, herself barely 20, a young woman with a toothy grin. Looking on, are war-recovering old Londoners. (The same people who, my parents once told me, would leave a few pennies or a bottle of milk or powdered eggs from their quota at the doorstep of my parents’ digs. A wordless gesture towards a new mother and child who could do with extra rations.)
From this photo, taken 10 years before I showed up, comes the zephyr bearing with it, a moment, many such moments that must have been, that tell about the way they were. Before.
All the three players in the tableau that made up this picture are gone. And if a curtain needs to drop on all that happened and failed to happen in their lives later, this picture could well be that curtain.
Gouri Dange is a novelist and family counsellor whose latest non-fiction book is Always a Parent .
