It's close to 10 AM here in Dubai and am still in my bed. I've been on bed-rest for over two months now. I'm unwell.You are allowed to assume that getting off my bed could kill me.
But death is not just when you die. Death is also when you lose a loved one. I have learnt this the hard way.
In the first week of March this year, I lost my younger brother to a car crash in India. If you ask me, I still cannot believe it because I didn't see him for the 'one last time'. He was gone anyway - the crash apparently killed him on the spot. But I was not there to see whatever transpired after that. To support my parents and my youngest brother. (We are three children to my parents and the one who passed was the middle child).
There were so many things to tell my brother. Had I known that he were going to die, I'd have telephoned him to say all the things. But the truth is, I hadn't spoken to my brother for over a year. In the last five years I had shared only a few sentences with him. There were so many things unsaid. Left to be said. He left so suddenly that now am going to take all those things with me and tell him those when I meet him in the next world.
Am hoping I can tell a few things here. To get them all off my chrst. At least one thing everyday. So that am left with one thing less to say.
My brother would have turned 29 years today. 29 years ago, this was the day my grandmother got her first boy grandchild, and my parents, their first son. My brother was never treated special for having this privilege. Rather, he was always a suppressed child. He was shy. Didn't turn out to be a great conversationalist. Didn't make lot of friends. Didn't break records in school.
He studied well enough to get a good first class in his tenth and went on to study his diploma in E&E. He was always good at such stuff. As a kid, he used to make little cardboard houses and then power them up using wires and little bulbs and mock generators. When he was 20, he had become a JE, a gazetted government officer. He never spoke much. Never asked for anything of his parents. He always only gave.
I can never forget my brother's sweet smile.
I can never believe am outliving him.
