As kids, my brother (he is younger to me by a year and a half) and I have always fought with each other. We fought for anything and everything, be it TV, books, cycle, food and what not. We couldn’t stand each other. The study table we shared was divided equally between us by drawing a line in the middle. If even a centimeter of a book crossed over the border, the entire house would break loose. We hated each other so much. But there was one time when we did not fight and took a decision together.
We had shifted to a new place for some reason. It is neither a town nor a village. Because we had shifted from Kudremukh (a township), both of us disliked the new place. I was 9 and brother was 7.5 years then. We were not allowed to play outside. We had strict orders from mom to be together "play together if you want to, don’t go with others", she said. According to her the place was new and it was too early to mingle with others. So we were forced to play all the games together though both of us hated it. We badly wanted to play outside one day. So promising her that we’ll be together we went out. We saw a few guys playing cricket. They were looking for few more to join their team and we could not resist either. Without thinking twice about mom's warning, we joined the team. Everything went well for a while. When it was my brother’s turn to bat, he hit a six towards a coffee estate and we lost the ball !! :-O We searched high and low for it but could not find it. Since the ball was not ours the other guys started demanding for a new ball. Both of us did not dare to ask for a new ball at home. Those guys followed us home and complained to mom :((.
My mom was so angry, she shouted at both of us and did not let us get inside the house. “You both wait outside till your father comes home, then we’ll see,” she said and locked the door from inside. There was still an hour left for dad to come home. We started discussing as to what would happen when dad came home. Dad was a strict man, not that he didn’t love us but he didn’t want anything to go wrong. We were both scared of him and could not even imagine what he would do. All of a sudden my brother started saying things like our parents don't care for us, they punish us for every small thing, blah blah blah. I too agreed with him. We decided that there was no point waiting there outside, we thought we should leave home. Next question was where to go. We had 2 options - either to go left or right. Left would take us to Belur and right to Sakleshpur. We decided to take left because Dad worked in Sakleshpur. I don’t remember any other incident were we both took a single decision. And so deciding we got up to go. Just then, my mom opened the door and called us both inside. When dad came home, everything was back to normal. He got to know of this incident only as recently as 5 years back.
This is a common discussion at my home when my brother and me are around. I still shudder to think - What would have happened if mom had not opened the door at the right time?
