2.Danish Roy

They keep telling you, you're unique, you're different, you have a calling, a talent, a miracle inside of you. I had bought into this theory for a really long time. But no more. I was ordinary and there was no point waiting for that hidden genius in me to bubble to the surface. I would not discover my yet unexplored talent for painting, or interpreting ancient languages, or being a horse whisperer, or interpreting foreign policy at thirty.

  And I think I would have been okay with it, or at least as okay as everyone else is with their ordinariness, had it not been for my overachieving little brother, my parents' favourite, who was wrecking corporate hierarchies like he was born to do so. Only last year, he got into the top 30 under 30 (at 21) in Forbes magazine for being a start-up prodigy. Fresh out of IIT Delhi, his crazy idea of sending high packets of data over Bluetooth in a matter of seconds sent potential investors in a tizzy. He was always in a tie-suit now, carrying leather folders and taking late night flights to meetings where capital flow, structural accounting and other terrifying things are discussed.

  I'm two years older than him and I hadn't even won a spoon race in my life.

  Quite understandably, I was a bit of an embarrassment to my parents—my father was a high-ranking official in the education ministry, and my mother, a tenured physics lecturer at Delhi University. It's not that they didn't love me, of course they did, but it was only because I was their son and they were programmed to love me more than themselves. But yeah, they loved Ankit more, and I didn't blame them.

  Even I loved him more.

  I was still struggling to complete my graduation in psychology (a subject my parents had chosen for me) from a college no one knew about, including the government, I presume. I was twenty-three and I had never been employed, a situation that didn't look like would change in the near future. It was more likely I would flunk my final exams too. Flunking exams by ridiculous margins was my superpower!

  I was the most self-aware dumb person I had ever met.

  Throw me a Suduko and you could study human behaviour in hostage situations. Medieval torture had nothing on me but keep a mathematics exam paper in front of me and I would start shitting bricks.

  Today I was in bed, faking an illness, because my father had invited all his colleagues for an informal dinner where he would talk endlessly about my brother's million-dollar seed funding, shove in their faces little cut-outs of my brother's articles, while my mother would half-heartedly ask him to stop. We had been an upper-middle-class family, living in a duplex, with two cars, an AC and a television in every room, but there we were, talking in millions with dollar signs at the end of it. It wasn't hard cash but it still was money!

  I had no business in such get-togethers where parents update each other about their sons' and daughters' acquired trophies, college admissions, jobs and citizenships, in the US. No, thank you. I was not jealous of them or my brother. I was merely embarrassed. Okay, maybe it was more than mere embarrassment; I could do without feeling suicidal about my failures.

  'But do I need to stay in the house?' I asked my mother who looked beautiful in her green saree and the jewellery she had made my father get from the bank's locker.

  'Yes, you do. They will think we are hiding you.'

  'Why would they think that?'

  The stupidity of the question immediately hit me. Obviously, I needed to be hidden, like an old mentally unstable uncle who roams around naked, slapping his head. 'Can I at least pretend that I'm sick and not come out?'

  'You can,' said my mother after a pause. 'But you have to greet everyone as they arrive. After that you can go to your room. Touch everyone's feet, okay?'

  I nodded and walked back to my room on the second floor, where Ankit and I lived in adjacent rooms, curled up inside my blanket and practised the sick routine I had perfected over the years of usage against unit tests, PTA meetings, annual functions etc. I was just getting into the groove when the covers were pulled off me.

  'Bhai. Get up. It's time. Everyone must be coming,' said my brother, looking quite dapper in a crumpled cotton jacket and jeans. His hair was slick and wet like a gangster's, his face smooth as a baby's bottom and his eyes were twinkling. He was the better-looking brother—the one with the high metabolism, finer hair, and even straighter posture. The gene pool had been quite partial. Maybe I came from a contaminated test tube.

  'I'm sick,' I groaned.

  A look of pure horror came over his face and he rushed to touch my face. 'You seem okay? Have you told Maa? You want a Flexon?'

  I should have hated him but I loved him, quite a lot, that beautiful, overachieving brat of a younger sibling whose brotherly love for me was sickening and claustrophobic. 'I had asked you to get the AC shifted to the other corner.'

  'I'm not sick, Ankit,' I said. 'I just don't want to go outside and socialize.'

  'And I wouldn't have pestered you but the Khannas' daughters are joining their parents. You might want to meet them.' He thrust the cell phone in my face and started to flick through their pictures. I was tempted but not enough to walk into the minefield of questions, humiliation, sideways glances and smirks.

  'Today is your day, Ankit,' I said.

  'I want you as my wingman. I like the younger one a lot and without you, how am I going to separate the two? Please?' He made that face. Fucking prick.

  'Fine, I will be the untalented, boring broth 

er and take the ugly sister away. Years of practice,' I said.

  'You're not that bad, brother,' he said, shook my hand and left the room.

  'Of course I am.'