Nish Patel

 Nish Patel

Each Other

My brother and I tried to play basketball at our neighbor’s place one August afternoon. I must have been eight or so. When the ball first clattered against the backboard, a horde of wasps crawled out from the sandbag-laden base of the hoop. We sprinted for the garage. After a hurried war council by the outdoor freezer, we salvaged from a bin an aluminum baseball bat and a fat yellow Wiffle ball bat.

One boy whacked the base of the hoop with the baseball bat. A second boy hovered in wait, poised to knock dazed wasps into the next yard with the Wiffle ball bat. The third stood in reserve and provided encouragement. In this manner, we proceeded at a decent clip and with fanfare. After three days, we’d dented both the hive’s population and the hoop’s plastic substructure. Yet the enraged survivors kept fighting.

On the third day, my brother suggested that we use a garden hose to flush them out. As bedraggled wasps emerged, legs spasming and seeking purchase, we set upon them with the bats. In five minutes, the campaign was over. Listless, in awe of our own power, we headed to the swings, the basketball hoop quite forgotten.

And so my brother’s and my summer shuffled on. We brown boys and a handful of white neighbors played tag through three adjacent houses. We slipped through the brambles in pursuit of trails and lairs to call our own. We threw basketballs with furied direction, stapling together the driveway with games of Knockout and 21. We roped in and loosed kids as their mothers shouted them home.


Fearing for all of us, my parents bundled my brother off to be diagnosed when I was in third grade. I only learned about this as an adult. The psychologists did not have a diagnosis, according to my parents. The three of them are gifted liars. My parents never took me to a shrink. They were suspicious of therapists pushing pills and coddling children.

My brother and I continue to have a clean bill of mental health.

I scheduled my own appointments with shrinks in college, while working, in graduate school. None stuck.

My last push was in 2019. I’d been on a hotline the previous night, thumbs cramping from texting until the sun rose. I trudged down the gray street bundled against fall, climbed seven floors to the practice. Their hours were just about up and the building was beginning to shut down.

The therapist and I stepped through the door into a room drenched in cloudlight, me and this counselor. The room had quicksand chairs and shelves lined with scientific books, some lying over each other like lovers on a bed. Somewhere beyond the window, the sun was already slipping behind the windmills.

“I’m so sorry—I know I’m not in a crisis. I talked to the lady outside and told her that it’s not actually that urgent. I just came in-person to make the appointment, and she asked me to do it over the phone, and I said, Well, I’ve tried a couple of times, but I’ve always been too scared to pick up when you call back, but really that’s on me and I can call then, and then she cut me off and said, Let me see who’s in and if he has a moment.”

He blinked. “Well, I’m glad you came in today. Why are you here?” His voice was soft.

I did not stay silent, nor cock my eyebrows, nor crack a grin. I spoke and spoke until I ran out of breath. In his voice of feathers and sugar, the man replied,

“Remember, this isn’t a therapy session. So I can’t provide that for you right now. I can offer you an appointment with a therapist, maybe in several weeks?”

When I had my appointment six weeks later, I spoke in even measure. I knew every term and every symptom. I become clinical when I am frightened:

According to a meta-analysis of 97 studies produced by the University of Manchester in 2019, individuals suffering from borderline personality disorder are nearly fourteen times more likely to report childhood adversity than individuals with a clean bill of mental health.* Recent genetics research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that the PTSD created by child abuse alters the very epigenetics of individuals who experience it. While the genetic material does not change, the chemical cocktail of childhood trauma activates and silences genes at a rate up to twelve times higher than individuals who experience trauma during adulthood. These changes to brain development, disease risk, and other core bodily functions can last a lifetime.**

This time, I don’t open the doors to any snarling and fearful thing inside me. I say nothing that matters. There are no tears, and there is no catharsis.

For a few years of my childhood, my family would all watch Jeopardy! together. My dad, brother, and I flashed looks at each other as we competed to answer questions first, while my mother patiently endured our one-upmanship.

One evening when I was nine, I challenged my father to a few matches of Connect Four after Jeopardy! We are a board- and card-game family, we Patels. American board games: Sorry, Topple, Clue, Mastermind, Monopoly. Indian card games: Saath-aat, Saath-theu, Dol-Theen-Paach, Kadi Ni Rani. My brother sat next to me.

I won the first game, the second, and the third. He lost or we drew several, then dozens of times. The night ran longer. Each victory seemed more improbable than the last.

My mother urged my brother and me to bed, as we both had school the next day, but my father insisted that we all keep playing until he won at least once. No one wanted to go to sleep anyway. How long could my streak keep going? Laughter and frustration mingled across the broadness of his face.

We all sat on that floor for more than an hour before he triumphed. With a grunt of satisfaction, he pushed his heavy hand against the floor and got to his feet. The carpet still bore his body’s imprint after he’d lumbered over to the couch and sprawled out in his shapeless scrubs, chugging a Diet Coke, devoting his full attention to the Mets.

When I was twenty-three years old, I asked my mother about that night. She informed me that it was my brother who’d played my father to a standstill for hours on end. I’d just been the one watching, remembering his victory as my own.

“No, Mom, I’m absolutely certain I did that.”

“How many times did we go back to school to get your coats, or your hats, or your gloves? Besides, he was always better at those games than you.”

By the age of eleven, my brother could call replicates of stat sheets to his mind’s eye. With the approval of the tall doctors at my parents’ dinner parties, he listed three-point percentages for every NCAA starter going back a decade. At that age, I once spent an hour hammering at a twenty-second piano piece, unable to fit the notes into the right order. With barely a glance at his sheet music, his piano-playing eclipsed mine. At our recital, I watched his every finger sparking against artificial ivory, bright and hot.

My memories grow hazier as time passes. My memory has never been strong.

* * *

When I was a child, my mother took my brother and me to the local pool most summer days between lunchtime and dinner. We played basketball and wall ball during agonizing adult swim periods. The concrete radiated heat underneath our wet feet, and the spiky grass on the far right side of the pool area poked at us. The air smelled like chicken tenders and acrid chlorine. My mother would read a mystery thriller, usually James Patterson or Dean Koontz. I like to imagine that to this day, my brother can close his eyes and see children laughing and screaming as their parents reprimand them for running too fast.

About a year ago, I found pockets of largely self-diagnosed people discussing a condition called aphantasia. The term was coined in 2015 by Adam Zeman, a psychology professor at the University of Exeter.* Anna Clemens, writing for Scientific American, described it as “when the mind’s eye is blind,” where people could not visualize images.** Many doctors remain skeptical, but scientific acceptance is growing.***

“Aphants” seem to have many experiences in common. Most had previously assumed the mind’s eye didn’t actually exist, and they figured that humans talked about their thoughts with some sort of weird, abstract metaphors. They are confused when friends have strong opinions about what characters or settings in books look like. Many have weak autobiographical memories—their visual memories form impressionistic paintings at best, and nothing at worst. Some aphants believe they have experienced aphantasia from birth. Others report developing it in response to depression, psychosis, or brain injury.

I have struggled to form mental images since before middle school, at least. I remember the chlorine burn of the pool, the curling millipedes churning in the ports to the pool’s filtration system, the feeling of white paint against my hand as I raced to touch the shed wall. I can describe them. Yet I have no memories of specific days at that pool, and I have no discrete, visual memories that took place in the pool itself. When I read Holes for the first time, I had no idea of what Stanley Yelnats should look like. It hadn’t even occurred to me that other people might.

After I found online aphant communities as an adult, I began to regard my memories and mind differently. Visual memory is a spectrum: I’m not totally mind-blind, but I can’t render images I read, for instance, without intense and conscious effort. My visual memories are exceptions, not rules, and even my strongest memories are still camera shots out of focus, blurred, and made vivid by my emotions. I can picture when my girlfriend dropped her tacos when I surprised her, but I can’t picture when she first told me she loved me. Smell and taste are hard to remember, but touch and hearing are visceral. I now sometimes pause after each sentence I read in a novel to construct the scene before me. I build the time of day, the room and its furnishings, the characters. At first, it would take me a minute to see a single clause. I have become faster, but I am still slow. Even then, I see fragmentary snapshots that slip away after less than one second.

Of course, my brain shapes how I write. When writing fiction, I develop concept art for every scene I write. When writing autobiography, I largely keep to short and asynchronous vignettes—were I to use longer segments and lush prose, I’d run the risk of fudging the truth. I confirm details with other people and my journal entries. I rarely write dialogue, and the exact wording is murky.


When I was eleven, I grew sure my brother was stealing my birthday money. I told my parents. They told me that I must have forgotten where I put it. We returned to my room to find him arm-deep in my dresser looking for more. I remember shouting, crying, and hitting. I remember my disgust at his weeping and a snitch’s vindication of justice served.

When my brother graduated from college, my family stopped by his apartment to help him clean it out for his move to medical school. My eyes froze on the titles on his bookshelf.

“These are some of my favorite books! I’ve been looking for them for years, now.”

“Don’t be such a dick, Nish,” he snapped at me, “I know how to read, too.” He turned to my parents. “Look at the kind of shit I have to deal with from you people.”

I picked one up. I flipped through the book’s pages and found my handwriting, cramped in the margins.

“These are my books,” I said quietly.

“You are so fucking paranoid!”

I walked over to my mother and pointed to my scrawled commentary. She looked at my brother, bemused.

Suddenly, he laughed. I glanced sidelong at my parents. “Don’t turn this into a big deal,” they advised me. And so I loaded the rest of the books into his car. In the six years in between the first theft and my departure for college, whenever I lost anything, I suspected he had stolen it or hidden it. Notebooks, coats, hats, money, glasses, books. Over and over again, I found my wayward things on my nightstand, or on the lip of the piano, or any of the million places I had left them. Blood rushed through my cheeks each time, shame and relief warring within me. These lost-and-found possessions winked at me, reminding me that I had more cause to distrust my memory than my brother.

We lived in America, of all places. The kids at our school were white, our family friends were white. I’ve never been to Gujarat. We kids didn’t take to the Gujarati language, and our parents couldn’t be bothered to teach us. To us, India remained the Gujarat of the 1960s. Surrounded on all sides by whiteness, it was all the more important to my grandparents that their grandchildren carry some part of India with them.

In the Hindu epic Ramayana, the beloved Prince Ram is exiled from his kingdom by his father. His wife Sita and little brother Lakshman accompany him. When the king of Lanka abducts Sita, Ram and Lakshman recruit an army of divine monkeys, invade Lanka, and rescue Sita. At the age of ten, I spent two and a half hours reciting a blow-by-blow of these heroes’ deeds to my father’s parents. At my grandfather’s behest, I wrote an essay about how I was like Ram and my brother was like Lakshman. Ram is the ideal king. His younger brother Lakshman is the ideal brother. It is not a subtle play, and I was not a subtle boy. I was, however, a liar and a petty bully. I called my brother a Neanderthal because of his jutting jaw. I insinuated that he’d been adopted because he didn’t resemble either of our parents, while I looked like my father in miniature. I hated watching my brother splinter, sputter, and clench, but I had a gnawing, wormy satisfaction when I could set him off. Horror is less scary if you know when the monster will jump from the shadows. Gods and bodhisattvas may walk the earth, but we sure as shit aren’t them.

After the conquest, the epic takes a turn. Ram, in his role as the ideal king, forces Sita to undergo numerous purity tests to prove her fidelity and appease his gossiping subjects. Eventually, he banishes her, and then refuses to accept her again. Humiliated, she begs the earth to swallow her whole, and it grants her wish. Lakshman, caught between his obedience to Ram’s orders and his compassion for the people of the kingdom, drowns himself in the Sarayu River. Ram, grief-stricken by the loss of his brother and beloved, drowns himself in the same river shortly thereafter.

After a game of Saath-theu did not go his way, my brother raged and swore and threatened us. My dad responded the way he always did. I remember we were on vacation in Puerto Vallarta: our first trip to Mexico. I was nine. I think my brother had just turned eight. My father’s parents murmured in another room. My mother’s mother pulled me aside because I was so upset and resentful. I hated the sound of crying.

“He ruins everything,” I complained.

“You know how he is. You are his older brother. Your job is to be an example for him,” my grandmother sighed, searching my face as I stared into the knots in her fingers. “Are you listening, Nish?”

I nodded. I’m not like him. I can keep myself under control, I thought.


Years later, my teenage brother threatened to kill my mother. He’d held a knife at her in the past. He’d held a knife at me in the past. Sometimes, he moved upon us in a fury. Each time, he’d eventually set the knife down. Those times, I’d done my scripted part, which was to do nothing.

I remember when he eyed a knife on the kitchen island. I was on the other side of the island, he was by the oven, and my mother was at the sink, three points of a triangle. When he took a step forward, I did not wait to see if he was moving toward the knife, or toward my mother, or toward me, or just shifting his feet. I sprinted at him. I saw nothing, but I heard the crash and pump of my heart, heard his yells. I opened my eyes. I wasn’t sure when I’d shut them. He lay in a pile on the floor, tears streaming down his face, a grating and nauseating sound emerging from his bloodied mouth. My gaze fixed on my hands. I gritted my teeth at the noise and sight of him. I staggered to my room past my shouting mother, past even the redness trickling from my middle knuckle, trying to escape his wail.

When I wonder if I have fabricated this memory, too, I look at the middle knuckle of my right hand. A small scar still marks where I hit his teeth.

When my father would come home late from work on summer nights, my brother and I would plead with him to play catch with us. We would troop out to the backyard holding tennis balls in our hands. He’d cock his arm back, hurl it high into the air, and we would sprint around trying to catch them. We’d run in circles and crane our necks against the deepening sky until the black flies came biting, until it grew too dark to see where the balls were flying, until our growling stomachs chastised us back into the house.

* * *

My weak mind’s eye struggles to remember the things my brother used to do, but my ears, skin, and muscles remember. My arms still clench when I think of the sound of my brother’s fist crumpling glass. In my head, I hear him screaming at my mother, “You fucking bitch!” and my jaw tightens. My skin crawls as I feel the way the air seemed to crack when my brother realized he’d crossed my father’s line.

I know the way that his insults escalated as though he could cuss and threaten his way back to safe ground. Sometimes, he’d rage himself into calmness. Other times, my father would approach my brother. My father would stretch out his hand, a barn door blown backward by a storm. My brother’s sobs would come from the floor, sinking into the walls and ceiling, pooling in the corners of the room.

The screams and shouts were routine. Their aftermaths were harder, as my parents pretended we knew how to be normal. When my brother was angry in the kitchen, he often bent cutlery. A fork is bizarrely silent when a human hand bends it backward. As a child, I always thought that the stainless steel should scream from such twisting and deformation. I remember my folks awkwardly bending the forks back into shape later on each day. Eventually, all our forks were crooked but functional.

One night, my parents left my brother at home as a punishment for some infraction. The rest of us were heading to a family friend’s party. They disliked punishing him this way: they did not want to leave him out of the family’s life. As my parents began backing the car out of the garage, I sat in silence in a back seat filled with all of my good reasons for staying quiet. They talked to each other quietly in Gujarati.

I ground my teeth. I held one hand in the other, cracked each knuckle until my grasp felt uneasy, until my fingers would feel clumsy upon the piano keys a day later. My nails etched sliver moons into my palms. Why does he always cry and scream like that? Why can’t he just keep it in?

Right as my mom began to accelerate backward, she slammed on the brakes and cursed. Two hands pressed hard on the trunk of the car, linked to two gangling arms and a snarl.
I don’t remember how the rest of the night went. He wasn’t hurt. I think his gambit worked, but maybe it didn’t. We never talked about any of it. Not during or after. Keep your mouth shut. What happens in the family, stays in the family. It isn’t your business. Stay out of it. Do you want to end up upstairs, too?

But the evening definitely ended with us at the party. My mother smiled with slight circles under her eyes. My father’s laughter filled the room. I lost myself as best as I could in the books on the shelves, doing my best to learn how to forget the last two hours. Perhaps my brother ran amok in the arrogant glory of his childhood. All of us lied with every false happiness on our faces, all of us full of our good reasons for staying quiet.

We have only one of those crooked forks left. It is my father’s favorite. When my brother and I were small and the night was good—my father was not called in for a late night at work and no one broke anything—my father sometimes played a game with us. He would tell us it was time for bed. We would dawdle, round the corners needed to traverse the kitchen and hallway, and make our way up the stairs, only part of the way.

After a few beats, he would lumber toward us, all shoulders, to check. Giggling, my brother and I pressed against the railings of the staircase, clinging for dear life. The wood abraded the edges of my fingertips.

Each time, our nerve would break as my father’s shadow swallowed the staircase. We’d dash toward him, hoping to slip underneath his shovel hands. With a shout, he would swoop down upon us, throwing one boy over his shoulder and tucking the other under his arm. My brother and I laughed and kicked until he deposited us in our beds like bags of soil, turned off the lights, and brought the night to a close.

I was bored and caused problems in preschool, so my parents enrolled me into kindergarten early. I immediately received poor marks on my social skills. Discipline issues got me kicked out of class every day for my first semester of first grade. My brother entered school two years later. Equally bored, he soon skipped a grade. The school considered advising me to skip a grade as well, but I was deemed too immature to progress.

I was alone at school but not at home. I had a little brother bound to me by age, space, and blood. And just as I could not be unbound from his sound and fury at home, he could not pull himself from me.

So we played and fought. When aunts or uncles visited, we would share his bed. Sheltered under the blankets, I wove him adventure stories of people from the lands of Pee and Chee, a Gujarati word meaning poop. We swam thousands of laps through the pool during chilly summer mornings, spitting out mouthfuls of drowning millipedes that fell in from the abutting forest. He screamed, swore, and threw punches at me, and I fought back. In one basement fight, I tore the skin off his face. My brother still has two light scars on his cheeks dealt by a five-year-old’s fingernails. We raced down ski slopes, chasing the tiny bumps and jumps dotting the side of the trails. His unsteady screams ended dozens of game nights. He and I clustered around a computer, taking jealous turns at mini-golf games. When I quit a session of NBA Live 2004 to deny him a win, he threw a controller into the wall.

As we grew older, he remade our world into his arena. His charisma seared to touch, and he made it known to me each day: that I was friendless, that I was doomed to failure, that I would never find my portion. He made it known to my mother every day: that she wore every slur a person could bear.

The children of our family friends were not bound to me. At parties, I stayed with the moms, or fiddled with the piano, or searched the bookshelves for something to read in the corner. People pulled in by my family’s gravity grew as accustomed to our brotherhood as they could.

When we moved to an even whiter area, our family made a new set of friends, including a pair of Indian-American boys around our ages. Our families went on vacation and the four of us shared a bedroom for a week. On the penultimate night of our trip, one left the room and the other stared at the two of us.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen two people who treat each other the way you two do. Do you actually hate each other?”

When I was six years old, the whole extended family went to see The Lion King on Broadway. We’d been to New York City before. In the past, we’d taken the bus nearest my grandmother’s place in North Jersey to Port Authority, hopping the subway to the Museum of Natural History. On those trips, we’d rarely break into sunlight, so this felt like seeing a true city for the first time.

We exited the theater, joining the mingling crowd emerging into the street’s chaos. My mother minded us to pay attention to our surroundings. I trailed my uncle’s black coat and fat body and thinning hair until he turned around and I saw a stranger’s face. I spun in a circle. No one was near me. I was stranded in a world of cold, tall shoulders.

The tears began to fall, and wiping my eyes I stopped and started in several directions, frozen in the street. Then, my mother and father found me. They were furious in their fear and scolded me over and over again. Afterwards, when we all calmed down, they told me that my brother, tugging at my mother’s arm, was the first person to notice that I had gone missing.

* * *

The Ramayana is the shorter of India’s two great epics. The second is the Mahabharata, a chronicle of the rise and fall of a political dynasty. Five brothers lead the virtuous side; their antagonists are one hundred brothers from a rival faction of cousins. The heroes do terrible things, and good people litter the ranks of the villains’ army. The epic culminates in an eighteen-day battle that nearly destroys both armies.

If the Mahabharata has a protagonist, it is Arjuna, son of the sky god, the most fearsome archer for the good side. His nemesis is Karna, one of the noblest antagonists and the only archer his equal. Unbeknownst to either, Karna is secretly Arjuna’s brother, abandoned at birth to be raised by charioteers. Karna spends his youth and adolescence enduring cruelty at the hands of the good. He is lifted up and recognized by only the wicked. He is cursed thrice over: to be bound up in the earth, to forget his martial knowledge when he needs it most, and to die when he is most helpless.

In a desperate bid for all her sons’ lives, Karna’s birth mother reveals herself and his true identity to him. She begs him to join the protagonists. Bound by his loyalty and his conscience, Karna refuses. Still, he swears to spare the lives of all of his brothers except Arjuna. They hail arrows upon each other in the battlefield. Karna holds the life of each brother but Arjuna in his hands, and spares each in turn.

And then Karna’s chariot gets stuck in the mud and grime of Kurukshetra plain. He tumbles to the ground, his bow string snapped. He pulls at the wheel, desperate to dislodge it. By the norms of warfare, he cannot be killed while defenseless. Karna is unarmed and alone. Yet Arjuna aims his shot, loosens his arrow. Karna falls.

After the battle ends, their mother demands that her sons perform last rites for Karna. When they recoil, she reveals Karna’s identity. And at long last, Arjuna mourns.

Now grown, my brother rarely speaks to my parents and returns home less often still. My mom has to pressure him to text me on my birthday, and even then it doesn’t always happen. He fled, even as I linger.

Things are quieter now. The family has mapped out a cluttered terrain of eggshells, and we don’t have the energy to step on them. My mom pleads with me not to give up on a relationship with my only brother. I try not to come home if he will be there, but I make exceptions for her. A good portion of my friends don’t even know I have a brother. The ones that do know that I don’t talk about him.

He has a girlfriend now, a likely soon-to-be fiancée. My family plays nice when they come by for the holidays. He is our choreographer, our stage manager, and our director.

Three Christmases ago, we and our cousins gathered together in New York City. It ended with tears and screaming in the street. He cried, “Everyone blames me for shit I did when I was seven.” Quivering and hundreds of miles from home, I told him how tired I am of us treating each other without compassion. My eldest cousin, mediating between us, reached out to me as I walked away, grabbing my arm when she saw the tears trickling past my cheeks.

“Oh, Nish,” she said quietly. She then turned to my brother and made us make peace for the night.

I fear his selfishness. I envy his resolve. I am still not good at crying, though I have been trying for many years.

My brother and I went to the local pool for so many summer days. We’d leave the water only when lifeguards shooed us out. In water five-feet-deep, he and I spent hours every day throwing a torpedo back and forth underwater. The torpedo was orange, with purple and green stripes along its flanks. We would throw the missile in ever more erratic trajectories and catch it with increasing panache, barrel rolls and feet-catches and the like. We would see how many consecutive throws we could make until one of us inevitably rose to the surface, bursting into light and noise, gasping for breath.

* https://bit.ly/porter_palmier

** https://bit.ly/pnas121750110

* http://sites.exeter.ac.uk/eyesmind/

** https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/when-the-minds-eye-is-blind1/

*** https://bit.ly/sciencedirect135