A Readymade Friend

My creative juices are certainly flowing. It’s amazing how a bit of Bacardi can do wonders. Or maybe I was just too frustrated today. Not that I’m inebriated…takes a lot more than a bit of Bacardi to do that to the Goddess. Anyway, tonight was spent with family. The only advantage of drinking with buddies is you can drink a lot more, plus you can light up. Drinking with family is a lot more sophisticated. No cigarettes. And very controlled drinking. Quarter the number of drinks i usually have. But Bacardi is Bacardi. Good music. Folks treating you like an adult. However, smart-ass kid brother is highly amused. Making faces at sis trying to be all adult in front of people for whom she’ll always be a kid. But the guy’s really cute. He was this cute when he was a lot younger. He would fall all over himself to please me. He idolized his cool-sister-with-all-the-answers. He used to make up stupid games for me, when we were latchkey kids, and we’d spend hours amusing ourselves after school, waiting for parents to come back home. Watching TV was always more fun with him around – we’d bitch about the same silly songs and ads on air, he was a gifted mimic, and whether he was doing a Dharmendra or Shahrukh, his mimicry was bang on. He’d always thought I was a brave lady, but it was always him who got rid of the lizards in the bathroom. He’d stroke my hair and put me to sleep, even fan me when there was no electricity.

When he started growing up, that was the worst phase of our relationship. He always talked back, and I never got used to not being fawned upon anymore (he did it a lot more than my parents). At times it was pretty evident he hated me. He refused to do anything that was asked of him. He refused to listen to reason. We’d go for months not talking to each other. Until one day I realized that I had felt the exact same thing from fourteen to seventeen. But too late, I was away at college. We hardly spoke.

Now that I’m back, he is a strapping young lad who refuses to let me out alone after 9. I’m some eight inches shorter than him now, and he crosses the roads with an unshakable grip on my wrist. He arranges for his friends to give me extra driving lessons. Tonight he and his friend came to pick me up from work, and then we drove around, (OK I drove hehe), each moment the realization seeping into me that these are two young men, with whom I now relate on a totally different level. Now I’m not annoying older sis who’s gonna rat on them. Now I’m cool young woman, and they have this strange sense of pride in being able to hang out with me and connect with me on the same level. It’s like the relationship was itself a fledgling, which has grown the way we have. I think smart-ass kid brother was actually showing me off tonight. Finally, something warming my heart after a totally horrid day.

Thank god for smart-ass kid brother. Growing up as a single kid would have been damn lonely. And I’d never have had a readymade friend when I came back home.