Some Questions For A Brother

A sister is haunted by the loss of a beloved sibling

- Ina Puri

He looked distinctly out of place in that emergency ward, smartly dressed as always in only the finest—from his suit and tie to his polished-to-a-shine shoes. Only that thing around his neck did not belong to my brother; a ghastly green plastic rope, sawed off shabbily at the ends when they brought him down. That and his face, eyes bulging, tongue out and mottled. I did not know how to respond. Instead, I went about dusting his suit and rearranging his arm, which was dangling at an odd angle from the stretcher. The doctors declared him ‘dead on arrival’. Later, when they returned him from the mortuary, they had wrapped him up in sheets and tied him up with ropes.

Did Arijit Lahiri, my beloved Rocky, think of what was to come when he made his decision? Did he know his clothes would be torn off him and his insides poked at by strangers? Did he think about it as he went about organizing the day? When the body is finally consumed by fire, all that you have left are questions. We rehearsed his last day incessantly, picking over it for clues. We heard he walked his dogs, gulped down his breakfast and drove off, cheerfully fixing to meet his wife and her parents for lunch. From colleagues’ accounts, it had been another hard day at the office.

After work, he had stopped to buy the plastic rope he needed and then went on to hang himself from the ceiling fan in the old house they had lived in. His laptop and briefcase were placed neatly on a chair. His wife found him that evening. In retrospect, I was relieved when we took him home that last time, I in the front of the van, him, draped in sheets, at the back. The driver played the radio and I began to accept that it was all over. We were alone then, he and I, not laughing about some silly joke or quarrelling even—just silent.