Rajesh was precocious. He inherited my father’s intellect and multiplied that by a hundred. He inherited my mother’s emotionality and multiplied that by a hundred. He would rationalize his feelings and everybody else’s feelings, and yet his one expression was often just anger, bordering on rage sometimes.

There’s a very early picture of him sitting on our mother’s lap with a scowl on his face, scowling at the world. He was like one and a half or two years old, and it’s quite a telling picture. You know, what was he angry with the world about at that age?

Having said that, there is another picture a little later, a couple of years later, where I’m sitting and two years old and he’s four years old and he’s sitting behind me and he’s got his arm around me, and it’s one of the most beautiful pictures of siblings that one can find. And that same protective arm that he had then, he had the same approach to me through the rest of our lives, which was to be protective towards me. But the expression of it was something that never sat right with me and I always pushed back, and that was perhaps the source of much of our conflict.

He was an overachiever. He didn’t do particularly well in school, but something clicked at one point in time in his life when he was 17, 18, and his academic and intellectual life just took off. And he was just unstoppable after that. It was just a string of exceptional achievements: Amherst, MIT, working for top pharmaceutical companies, NIH, the list goes on. He at one point thought he might like to receive the Nobel Prize for his work, but that didn’t quite happen, obviously. But he did work with a number of Nobel Prize winners in their labs and as collaborators.

In the immediate family, he was recognized for his intellect. I think that was something that everybody recognized right away, and everybody recognized his temper also at the same time. When he would visit relatives later, he would bring bags of gifts for people—not one, not two, bags of them. And that was my mother’s excess, in some sense, expressing itself in a different way. He would, I think—this might sound a little harsh, but I think he tried to buy love through these expressions, and he would be frustrated when it wouldn’t come back to him in the way that he hoped for.

He was always on, always on an edge kind of energy that he had. He rarely seemed to relax. He was ultra-intense. He had this extraordinary capacity to tell a story, to explain concepts and ideas, and he was a naturally gifted teacher. And it was one of his regrets that he moved away from academia and teaching into a more commercial line of work because that’s what he thought the family needed.

Logic was his god, so was rationality, and I think he found it very hard to accept other points of view which were, in his perspective, illogical. And he could be fairly cutting and dismissive of those. So right from school, he struggled to make friends and the friendships he had were fairly volatile. He did mellow down later and he did make other kinds of friendships over a period of time. But I think it was very difficult to feel settled with him, that you could rest easy in a relationship with him. You never know where the volatility would come from next.

He tried to be the head of the family fairly early on. I think that led to some pushback from my father until their own equation became so fractious that I think after a point my father decided to withdraw from it and said, “You know, alright, you do what you want to do.” And so he took on the role of being the provider for my mother particularly over a long span of time. He supported her financially for many, many, many, many years because my father hadn’t left much liquidity for her. There was the house that my mother lived in, but he really just became her provider. He did it unquestioningly, he did it in excess, he did it with the frustration of my own mother’s excess and tendency to overspend and not take into account that he had his own family to run.

And he left home early. At the age of 16, he went to England and he tried to bridge that gap by providing financially, berating people when they were behaving in what he thought was irrational ways, and always making an effort to keep the connection going.

Here are some memories of Rajesh. The earliest one—it’s not quite a memory, it’s a recollection from a cassette tape that I heard that my mother had recorded. My father was in Doha and the three of us were here in India at that time, and my mother made a recording to send to my father so he could hear our voices. And there was Rajesh who was speaking, and then it was I. He must have been seven or eight, I must have been five or six, maybe. And I remember that every time I tried to say something, he would butt in and speak over me, so I never really said anything in that cassette. And it was just largely him, and many years later I would look at that and say, “Okay, so this got defined fairly early on.”

A second memory is—and this was quite a defining one which I remember very clearly and I’ve written about it in the blog—which was me playing a cricket match with him being the wicketkeeper behind. I was batting and I was playing whatever I was playing, and then he was constantly giving me advice from the back on how I should be playing. And at one point of time I turned around and I said, “Can you just, you know, keep quiet so I can, you know, play my shots?” And he did go quiet, but what I didn’t realize was the anger that had built up in him during that time because the game was over, we picked up the stumps and we were walking home, and I was ahead of him and then I felt a crashing blow to the base of my spine and I fell down. And that was him, angry with me for standing up and telling him to keep quiet.

I never spoke of it to my parents until my mother got to know of it like when I was 45 or something. I mean, I just told her in passing and she said, “Why did you never tell me?” and I just shrugged my shoulders because things stayed between me and Rajesh, we didn’t go to our parents for sorting out our problems. Not that he threatened me saying, “You shouldn’t tell Amma or Abba” or anything like that, but it was just somehow an unspoken understanding that whatever transpired between us was between us.

Fast forward a few years and I had a surgery for my lip. It was meant to be a plastic surgery because my father felt that I was being very conscious of the very vivid scar on my upper lip which got cut when I was born. And being the perceptive man that he was, he said, “We should do something so you don’t end up with a complex about this for the rest of your life.” And he fixed what was supposed to be a plastic surgery—I don’t think it was that—but it was a surgery to straighten out the lip which was a little crooked. And anyway, so I was in surgery and I came out of surgery and the first face I saw was that of Rajesh and my hand reached out to touch his face.

Fast forward a few years more, the first trek that I ever went on, he was also on it. It was a difficult trek, challenging trek, and I was a fairly clueless boy in some ways. And I remember I was struggling to—my laces kept coming off and well, Rajesh being Rajesh, he noticed it. And he was like, “Why are your laces coming off all the time and why are you tying them so many times?” And then he sat down to tie my laces for me, and at that time I had pulled out my gloves and he touched my hands and he said, “These are so cold! Why did you not warm up your hands in the morning? You can’t have your hands so cold put straight into the gloves without warming them.” I had no clue, I just thought maybe, you know, my hands will become warmer if I put them in the gloves. I didn’t know that I had to warm them before I put them in the gloves.

We played lots of cricket together, we watched a lot of cricket together, waking up early morning, four in the morning to watch an Australia series against India. We cycled to school and it was always the same formation: him in front, me behind. Always. I followed him wherever his cycle went, I would go faithfully behind it.

Fast forward again a little bit, there was one day when I had to—we were filling out our tires, cycle tires, and we found that the little nozzle, the tube, had come off. And of course, he was the director of all things, right? So he would hand that over to me and he said, “No, you cycle to the cycle shop and buy a spare and you come back.” So I did what he said, I took that thing, I went to the cycle shop, I bought the spare and I came back. And I put my hand into my pocket to give it to him, and the spare was there, but not the metal nozzle. And all hell broke loose, and—

And that’s when I think some fear of him began to set in—that he became a little bit of a father figure in some sense, somebody I would be afraid of in a way in which I wasn’t afraid of my own father. I don’t remember being afraid of my father, a little bit maybe, but with my brother it became more and more.

My father—perceptive man again, saying that one more time—noticed that we were having these difficulties. He decided to send my brother to a boarding school; anyway, that had to happen because there was no Grade 11 in the school that he was studying at at that time. But he held me back, he didn’t put me in the boarding school as well, he said one year of separation would do us good, and would do me good. And he recognized that I was really living in his shadow and he felt he needed to do something. All of these decisions were unilateral; he decided them, my mother was against everything and so there was more grist to the mill of resentment, of feeling like she didn’t have a say in these decisions, which is absolutely fair, even though the decisions had a lot of intelligence to them. They were just taken unilaterally and that led to a lot of conflict between them.

Fast forward, he went off to England, I was in a boarding school, Rishi Valley, and those were my—first years where I could breathe a bit in his absence. It was an important three years for me, and in fact, when I finished, I had the opportunity to go to the same school in England that he went to, but I chose not to because I remember very clearly feeling I didn’t want to follow his path so closely anymore. And so I actually denied myself that opportunity and went on to study in India instead.

And then while he was at Amherst and when I was in Delhi, we started corresponding, and now a little more maturity came into our correspondence. And I think he began to see me in a slightly different light, especially given the conflict that was happening at home. And that led to a different kind of conversation between the two of us and we became much closer. Kind of unified in our anger, bewilderment, confusion of having parents who were so conflicted, and somehow being united in our response to them.

Fast forward a few years and our worldviews began to diverge, and more points of conflict began to emerge. And I remember that there was a phase where whenever he would visit India, two, three days before I would start beginning to panic. And my mother would not understand what it was—it’s not something that I spoke to, but I just would feel this immense dread of him visiting home because he would come like a storm, all of his needs would be met, and he would leave in the wake of his visit a kind of destruction that I felt I had to kind of mend after his leaving. And that continued for a long, long, long time.

Well it um felt like a tin can crushed.

I…

Don’t think I stopped sobbing for days.

…uh…

Just remember crying all the time.

Trying to make sense of what just happened here.

I was… uh… on my own here in Mumbai.

Everyone else was in other parts of the world.

People called… uh…

for condolences…

asking me why did he do that, how could he do that.

He was not the only one who was predictive in this relationship.

I too was in my own way.

And… uh…

I’d intuited something was off a day earlier.

And… uh…

I put off calling my cousins in the US and asking them to check on him.

I didn’t do it.

And then the call came through.

So there was the guilt of that.

And…

several days later an email came through to me which got triggered somehow he had set something up.

And… uh…

which said… uh… at the end of it “Thank you for always being there.”

And as I read those words I was like “See, saying that to me?”

Really?

Did he feel I was always there for him?

What made him say that?

He’d been like a third parent… uh… for me.

And I…

felt orphaned.

I don’t know. I can’t say.

I wish you’d seen me as your older brother and listened to me. Heh, but he inherited my mother’s stubbornness as well, so little chance of that happening. I would say, however much it’s hard to come to terms with the fact that he planned this and did this, I don’t judge him for it. I understand completely what pushed him over the edge. And I’m sad that the universe didn’t send him a reminder of all that he could live for the way it did for me when I stood on that rooftop the other day. And I would say thank you for always being there, even when I pushed you away.