My Big Brother

The narrator's big brother was five years older than him, yet only three grades ahead in school. His brother had started his own studies at the same young age, but he never liked to rush anything as important as education. He believed in laying a firm foundation before building further — taking two years, sometimes three, over what others finished in one. After all, how could an unsteady foundation ever hold up a great structure?

The narrator was nine and his brother fourteen, and by simple right of seniority, his brother expected to supervise and instruct him, with every order treated as law. His brother was, by nature, a serious and studious boy, forever seated with an open book — though he also liked to fill the margins of his notebook with doodles of birds and cats, and would sometimes copy out the same word or verse over and over in careful handwriting, creations the narrator could never quite make sense of.

The narrator himself was not nearly so keen on studying. Given half a chance, he would slip away from the hostel to play marbles, fly paper aeroplanes, or simply meet a friend — and whenever his brother's stern, scowling face caught him at it, he felt instantly guilty. His brother's remedy was always the same: a long, sharp lecture about hard work, wasted time, and their father's hard-earned money, delivered in tones sarcastic enough to leave the younger boy in tears.

Stung by these scoldings, the narrator would resolve, again and again, to study with all his might, and would draw up an ambitious daily timetable that left no room for play at all — lessons stacked hour upon hour from dawn until bedtime. But a schedule drawn up in a fit of resolve rarely survives contact with a green playground and a fine day, and it was usually abandoned within a day or two.

Trouble caught up with the narrator again one day when a loose balloon drifted overhead and half the boys in the hostel went racing after it — the narrator among them — only for him to collide with his brother coming the other way. Ashamed to be seen chasing a balloon "with ragamuffins," the narrator was treated to a fresh lecture, this time about how five years of age and experience could never simply be caught up with, however many grades one passed; real wisdom, his brother argued, came from years lived, not marks earned. His brother went on, half in complaint, about how difficult his own lessons were — endless kings and dates in History, baffling lines and angles in Geometry — insisting that his repeated failures were down to hard luck, not a lack of intelligence, and warning the narrator not to grow proud simply because he himself had passed.

When the yearly exams came round again, the pattern repeated: the narrator passed once more, while his brother, despite having worked himself pale and thin with study, failed. Far from feeling triumphant, the narrator was moved to pity at his brother's tears, and their bond only grew warmer with time — his brother's scoldings softening, little by little, into something closer to gentle concern.