My Brother

“What’s wrong?” I sat up, suddenly convinced that I had committed a terrible social blunder. It was impossible to believe that I had misread the signals and forced myself on an unwilling partner. But why else would she weep?

“I did not believe you,” she said at last. “You told me, and I did not believe. But it is true. You are not Leo. You are the brother.”

She had moved away from the bed and was reaching down to pick up her gown. I was sitting up, but I was naked and in the darkness and the unfamiliar room I had no idea where my clothes were. Before I could move she was at the door, slipping away from me.

As the door closed behind her all my old doubts and insecurities came flooding back. “Frozen Englishman,” Leo had said to me once, mocking me as we stood on the beach. “It’s the cold weather, you’ve got no blood in your veins. Come on out to L.A. , and maybe you’ll learn the right way to make love to a girl.”

He had been joking, but it still hurt — because I believed it.

For half an hour I lay on the bed, too depressed even to turn on a light. My headache was back, worse than ever. My thoughts went again and again over the same question: What had I done, what ineptitude so blatant that it would convince someone who wanted to believe I was Leo that I must be someone else? In our lovemaking we had not even spoken to each other. What had I done wrong?

I was still in my narcissistic fit of misery and self-pity when the door opened again. Bare feet came padding across the floor, and the bed moved as someone placed their weight on its edge.

“Here.” Ameera’s voice was only a sad whisper. “Take this. It is yours.” She pressed a sheet of paper into my hand.

“What is it?” The darkness was total. I had the wild idea that maybe this was the document I sought, the thing that told me what Leo had been doing here in India .

“I do not know,” she said. “Leo gave it to us and told us to keep it in case some day he did not come back. I ca

The sheet of paper seemed to burn in my grasp. I had to get to a light, to see what it said — but even more urgent than that, I had to know something else.

“Ameera?”

“Yes?” Her voice was dull and unhappy.

“I’m sorry. For what I did. I’m sorry that I wasn’t…” It was hard to say.

“Wasn’t?” Her voice was puzzled, a couple of feet away from me on the edge of the bed.

“I’m sorry you weren’t happy. I’m sorry that I failed you… when we made love.” My voice choked in my throat. “I mean, you knew I wasn’t Leo. I’m sorry for what it was I did wrong.”

“Oh.” Her voice sounded different, as though she had turned her head away. “No, it was not that. Not when we loved. It was…” Her voice faltered. “It was afterwards, when we were lying here. And I touched you. I knew then. But I do not know how to say…”

I felt the bed move as she stood up, and heard her bare feet as she moved towards the door.

“I ca

“Why not? Please tell me, whatever it was.”

“I ca

“Touched me?” She had touched me all over.

“Yes. He was — cut. You are not cut. I knew it then, as soon as I touched you.”

The door opened and I saw a swirl of white as she glided through and out of the room.

Cut? Operation scars? I had plenty of those, but we’d had no operations, either of us, before the final crash. So what on earth was Ameera talking about?

I lay back in the bed, and suddenly understood. A strange mixture of emotions flooded over me — relief, amusement, grief, and guilt. Ameera was quite accurate. Leo had been cut. Like most American males, but unlike me, he was circumcised. Only in unusual circumstances would anyone be able to use that as a method of telling us apart.

The sheet of paper was still clutched in my hand. I wanted to read it at once, to know what it would tell me. But I was gripped by powerful and uncontrollable emotions. If I am honest, I have to say that my strongest feeling was relief. My delicate male ego had survived a major trauma. Now it was more than I could do to keep my eyes open. The headache was creeping back, pulling a band of tightness across my forehead, and my brain felt numbed. Tomorrow. I would read the paper tomorrow.

In less than a minute I was asleep. And, human sexuality being what it is, I had wildly erotic dreams — of Tess. We were making love in the middle of the Maidan, ignored by the hundreds of passers-by who scurried through the midday heat on their urgent but inscrutable Calcutta business.

- 10 -

I slept late and woke to a silent house. The clothes set out by my bed fitted perfectly — no surprise there, they obviously belonged to Leo. Downstairs there was no sign of Ameera or of the wizened Chatterji, but the table was set in the dining room and a full buffet breakfast laid out in warmed chafing dishes on the long sideboard. As I helped myself, one of the servants peeked in through the door that led to the kitchen, and a minute or so later he was back with Royal Worcester teapot and coffeepot.

Whatever I thought of Leo’s habits in India , there was no denying that he had lived like a king here. I couldn’t help comparing this with my own travel experiences, a dreary succession of cramped hotel rooms and warmed-over meals.

As I ate boiled guinea fowl eggs and buttered toast I pondered again the document that Ameera had left me in the middle of the night. My first look, the moment that I awoke, had been doubly unrewarding. My eyes refused to focus properly, and the blurred and fuzzed image that I could see seemed to be mostly random numbers and letters. The symptoms were not a new problem — I’d encountered the same thing in the hospital — but Sir Westcott had given me stern instructions on what I had to do when it happened. No reading or concentrated eye work until the effects wore off. I was forced to sit there and wait, trying to swallow my impatience.

The food seemed to help. As I drank Darjeeling tea from a delicate porcelain cup, I took another look at the paper. Ameera had said that it was intended for me, but I felt sure she was wrong. For one thing, many of the words were written in an unfamiliar script, either Hindustani or more likely Arabic. Underneath a first paragraph of that came the cryptic “CBC, sdb 33226; Code: Redondo Beach .” After that, the only words of intelligible English: ” 35 Amble Place , Middlesbrough , England .”

My address, for the flat I kept in north Yorkshire . It was the first tie that I could relate definitely to me. For the rest, I had to have help.

The house had no telephone, or at least not one that I could find. I went outside. After a couple of false starts, my arm-waving and shouts of “Taxi-taxi” got through to the man at the little gate house. He nodded and shouted to a boy of about ten who was leaning against the wall outside the house. The lad ran off along the street and trotted back a couple of minutes later leading the way for an old blue Peugeot and its turba

“Grand Hotel? Chowringhi?” I said.

A nod, a grin, and we were off at a sedate crawl along the crowded streets. As we chugged along it occurred to me that I would have trouble finding the house again without assistance. I handled that in the only safe way I could think of — I didn’t pay the driver when I went inside the hotel, but left instructions with the English-speaking Head Porter that I might be in my room for quite a while, and if necessary he should make sure that the driver had a meal at my expense while he waited for me.