To My Brother’s Ghost
You lived for three days.
When I was eight, I found an “It’s a boy!” card in our dad’s roll-top desk. A drawing of a bonny baby boy holding a blue balloon. I asked our mother about the card, even though I knew I shouldn’t have. She lit her tenth cigarette of the day and said I’d upset her. After that day, little brother, your story was revealed over what felt like days, but could have been hours or years. It is hard to be sure.
In 1985, I was a chubby three-year-old sitting on my pregnant mother’s lap in the airport wheelchair. We were moving, temporarily, to Bombay because my mother had suffered a severe flare-up of her autoimmune disease in her second trimester. No one explained to me that I’d be getting a sibling, and I remember just thinking it was a big adventure. I remember my father taking me to Hanging Gardens and propping me onto a little red carousel car, a memory filled with the sounds of traffic and cawing crows and children shouting. Less vividly, I remember being fussed over and carried off by hospital nurses, who were charmed by my chubby arms, Shirley Temple face, and brown ringlets.
“ If I could just fix that wrong thing, whatever it was, I’d also be protected by my family the way my cousins were. After I found out about you, little brother, I figured maybe the wrong thing was my gender.”
All throughout, I had no idea why we were in Bombay and why my mother was in the hospital. Decades later, the relative whose Pedder Road apartment we’d stayed in told me you were the size of a kitten when our father sat in the back of the ambulance—your body covered with a handkerchief upon his lap—as it drove along the Arabian Sea to the cremation grounds. Even in shining, sophisticated, 1980s Bombay, they didn’t have the means to keep your little premature lungs working. Despite having lost her newborn, our mother was taken to the maternity wing. Her breasts must have leaked milk when she heard the cries of babies being wheeled to their mothers. Of all the forms of torment, this had to be one of the cruelest.
Your name was Adar, Middle Persian for fire. Meaning: wealth. Meaning: respect. After the disappointment of my female birth, you were the dream—the son of a favorite son. “I remember his face. He looked like you,” our grandmother confided in me years later. When I was little, even before I knew you’d once existed, and certainly after, I often wished I was born a boy. I was given a name that can belong to either boys or girls. Perhaps to experience what it would’ve been like to raise a son, my father bought me Hot Wheels cars, He-Man figurines, and water pistols. He took me on long, tiring hikes through the woods near our home and told me stories about princes and djinns, about hunters of man-eating tigers and leopards. If I cried about getting dirty or wet in the rain, my father said, “You’re not made of sugar and you’re not made of salt.” If I was sick with one of my frequent stomach aches, he advised, “Just imagine the pain going away.” He’d tell me to fight my own battles when I was yelled at or spanked for “back-answering” or being “cheeky” to relatives. He bought me the books that I turned to when reality became hard to bear. I must have read every book by Enid Blyton, who used to write stories about English boarding schools and adventures in lighthouses, castles, and shipwrecks, featuring bold, outspoken, clever children to whom no one ever said they were too stupid, or too fat, or too unlovable.
Raised in a large, multigenerational household, the kind glorified in family-friendly 90s Bollywood blockbuster movies, I was held to a different standard than my cousins—even the girls, who, when it came to the standard flashpoints of adolescence (weight, grades, modesty, boyfriends, and so on), were afforded a lot more wiggle room within the corset of gender. As for the boys, it felt like almost anything could be forgiven and nothing was expected. They were simply treasured, like precious jewels or thoroughbred horses. Their affection and attention was coveted, prized. Once, when we were both very small, barely out of diapers, a cousin threw open a public toilet door while I was inside and held it open for his friends to peer in. It was a squatting toilet—I was facing the wall, so full of shame I thought I would die. I complained, and heard, “Boys will be boys!” I lashed out, and was promised a thrashing with a slipper, the way my grandfather house-broke puppies. My failings as a child (I was spoiled, rude, selfish) and then later as a teenager (I was overweight, my outfits were obscene, my grades were a disgrace, I was slutty) were met with reprimands, gossip, or the silent treatment. My cousins’ mistakes and shortcomings were shrugged off as age-appropriate, normal, unremarkable—a funny memory to embarrass them years later at a graduation party or a wedding. I witnessed, again and again, the adult members of my multigenerational home, my Bollywood-esque utopia, treating the other children, their own children, and their children’s friends, with unfailing kindness, equilibrium, and consideration. And I saw how that kindness was seldom extended to me. My father loved me, but he did not protect me. I grew up believing that there must be something wrong with me. If I could just fix that wrong thing, whatever it was, I’d also be protected by my family the way my cousins were. After I found out about you, little brother, I figured maybe the wrong thing was my gender.
Would a boy with my face have lifted the burden of girlhood from my shoulders? Would his desirableness have given me the cover to grow up free of familial expectations? If I couldn’t have love, I’d have settled for a benign sort of neglect, a chance to navigate the forest of adolescence on my own terms, without the rigid paths from which I’d be hurt for straying. Once, an aunt said through gritted teeth that she’d pinch my vulva if she saw me sitting with my legs apart. This aunt was a beautiful woman, with features chiseled out of crystal, delicate and striking. Her beautiful face turned hideous, warped in a bare-toothed rictus, a death-grin, as she floated towards me, hand open, outstretched to pincer my most delicate flesh between pink-nailed fingers. This is what I can’t unsee. I remember closing my legs as an electric current of fear ran through my body. The threshold of puberty was a most treacherous time. While we girls learned the languages of shame and secrecy both at school and at home, the boys were outside, playing tennis and cricket, shirtless, wrestling in the mud, stealing sips of beer.
A boy whose name means respect: You took our mother when you left. Our father had always looked at tragedy through a philosophical lens—he said your soul must have been so evolved, you only needed three days on earth to end your cycle of rebirths. He was stoic in the aftermath of your death, creating space for my mother’s grief, which grew as huge as a dark star, swallowing everything in its orbit. The parts of her that understood what it meant to mother well were cremated too, leaving a ghostly woman who’d lost her desire to be present, to be gentle, to be kind. Before you, I had a bright, quick-witted, and creative mother who'd take me shopping on her Kinetic Honda scooter, perched in front of her, trapped between her thighs, my hair in a little fountain peeking over the headlight. After you, I had a mother who used her talents to drill into me that I was neither smart nor good nor capable. A constant, steady trickle of criticism that wears me down slowly, imperceptibly, the way a flowing river grinds smooth a boulder’s edges. I lost a decade to people-pleasing, to eating disorders, to chasing after dysregulated and emotionally unavailable partners, to careers abandoned to anxiety and imposter syndrome. Even today, if I’m at the receiving end of rude, aggressive, dismissive behavior, my ambushed mind will parse it as what I deserve. Kindness, not cruelty, is the aberration.
“I think of my cousins, for whom love was not something earned. It was always at hand, like a pair of house slippers you slide your feet into and walk off to do other things.”
Little brother, your brief life was a tiny, flickering candle that lit up my mother’s humanity. When the candle went out, it left behind impenetrable darkness. It left behind a woman who, on the eve of my birthdays, would begin working herself up into tears by saying, “This is the last day you will be this young age; the last hour; the last ten minutes,” until the joyful anticipation of my special day fled my body, to be replaced with suppurating guilt about hurting my mother by growing older. Even today, I’m filled with dread and anxiety at the prospect of anything good happening to me—like being accepted into an MFA program, or being pregnant, or publishing my work—for the backlash inevitably waiting in the wings: abusive text messages, binges, breakdowns. “I feel so jealous” is a sentiment my mother repeats often to me, on the phone, over email, in person. “You have everything I wanted for myself.”
A boy whose name means wealth: Did you know hardship could hide itself in the middle of abundance? From the outside, I had every advantage and privilege of a daughter from an upper-middle class family with cooks, drivers, gardeners, and club memberships. But if you’d lived, would I have awoken in the mornings to the smell of pancakes, and not ashtrays and stale vodka? Would we have had a soft, quiet bedroom to sleep in without being startled awake to the sound of fighting, or of parties filled with confusingly friendly adults? Would someone have cared if I was dirty? It's not something I like to talk about—being eight years old and not having bathed for weeks, with dirty hair and underpants with holes. Or wearing short dresses l had outgrown that spurred aunties to talk behind their hands and warn their daughters about me. I’d hug these other mothers to take in their comforting smells. It amazed me that they smelled like cold cream and flowers baked in bread, and not cigarettes and vomit.
We all live with a ghost self, the person we’d have been if things had turned out differently. When I think about who that other me could’ve been, I think of my cousins, for whom love was not something earned. It was always at hand, like a pair of house slippers you slide your feet into and walk off to do other things.
In my late twenties, a few months after I was married, our father’s faulty heart gave out—he left me in search of you. My ghost brother, I hope you’ve been reunited. He is buried in the Parsi cemetery in a marble tomb. Pink bougainvillea and fat stray dogs lounge among the headstones. For his epitaph, I chose lyrics from a favorite song: “This world was never meant for one as beautiful as you,” which I realize, as I write this, was how he felt about you.
About the Author
Naheed Phiroze Patel's writing has appeared in The New England Review, The Guardian, Wasafiri, Lit Hub, Poets & Writers, Chicago Review of Books, HuffPost, Scroll.in, BOMB Magazine, Public Books, PEN America, The Rumpus, Asymptote Journal, and elsewhere. Her debut novel Mirror Made of Rain was published by Unnamed Press in the US in May 2022 and HarperCollins India in South Asia, and was praised by NPR as “a personal, empathetic view on mothers who society has deemed failures.”
Read Naheed’s “Behind the Essay” interview in our newsletter.
Edited by Tusshara Nalakumar Srilatha.
Header photo by Sandra Seitamaa.
