day, unknown

this is a rare instance, which has a picture to begin the letter.



I saw for the first time, my eldest brother. Or, the brother I never had. Which, to lessen the mystery, could just be a fascination for a black-and-white photograph.

In the true sense of what is now commonplace about our fear of Photography (how it captures your soul), I fear this photo.

Perhaps, it's not only my soul that is captured, but how the photograph evades any form of personal memory - a memory that is not my own. I am reduced then to an imagination of several threads. One of them is the whereabouts of my dead brother, never to reach adulthood, but still haunts my family via a photograph.

I cannot think of him, because I never knew him. And he, being dead, perhaps left with a soul, does he then have the cognitive ability to know me? Does he, at the corner of my room, rock with my breathing and makes known of his haunting existence with a wail? And yet, I probably imagined that - just as I imagine the shadows in my rooms, as I frightfully turn the lights on and off.

The photograph does not reveal who he was, instead, it reveals the inexplicable gap that is forever lost. It is a black hole that sucks dry my own blood, (of which he once had, the same blood that flows in my Father) and manifests itself as an assimilable valley, deep with forgotten memories, (not mine), and looms around this house like a mockery, a memory, of what it means to live - that is to die.

My brother is without a shadow, reduced to a fading piece of paper, no breath, no dreams, no sound to say "I am here". But this photograph always contains the imperious sign of my future death. No, not only that, it contains as well, before my birth, the unpredictability of my inevitable birth. It sits fittingly in a lacuna (whether mine or his), between the possibility that I could never had been born, and 'I am born, face me, because you live on without me.'

We meet, at last; the photograph as the medium. It does not capture your soul. It captures, instead my imagination and the moment before your death. And I could hold you, without cradling you and rocking you to and fro, and ask if you know me.

Perhaps, I could be great friends with you; in compensation for the brotherly love I never had with my only brother alive. But, my brother, you also once threatened my existence.


if he were to be alive now, I probably wouldn't be.


And yet, my happiness is dependent on the possibility that my family was ready to love me excessively (before my birth, but in the womb) because they never had an elder brother but the youngest. Never the twain shall meet.

Then again, I should never dwell on what could have happened, because the absolute truth is that I am now alive to meditate on a photograph - that which captures nothing, but my anxiety and your past existence.

Surely, it is as they say, "I am looking for someone in the photograph." It is with certainty that the photograph captured my brother as he was then. Instead, what is not certain is that how the photograph captures me. I am staring at myself, as I lift up the photograph and stare at it. I am staring at a labyrinth of my identities, the circumstances given leading up to the the moment of encounter - between the photograph and I.

As I stare at it, I know I am staring at an eternity that is not mine alone. I am staring at a lineage that I can no longer trace. But more than that, I am staring at my individuality - that which is developed in place of my brother's that never would be. There is definitely a connection there, despite the fact that we share little similar physical traits, but that connection is given by virtue of a passage of time.

So, even if I should one day misplace the photograph, or treat it as refuse; the simple fact is that I once had a brother that I have never met and never will. In between the decades as well as the states of life and death that separate us, the intractable reality is that I live on, he did not; and that is the indissoluble bond between the dead and living, between us brothers, whether we love or hate, touchable or untouchable, the loyalty to the dead is always stronger than flesh and blood. Because I can no longer tell him that I love or hate him, which only makes sense when my own voice reflect and reach my own consciousness. Instead, I can only stare at him, and know that I live on, he did not, repeating this story until I cease to live, even if I could take a thousand more photographs than he did. In the end, we are reducible to a single photograph, but each with a different story to tell. I have been given the chance to take a longer time to tell mine, but that does not mean you did not have your story.

This leaves me with a regret, so profound, so entrenched and conditioned since young - I never met my eldest brother. I wonder what influence it had on the childish mind of mine but it certainly had an effect on me (and definitely on my mother). The bond then is not of the usual sibling love/rivalry. It is, instead a bond that collapses all bonds into a single infinite moment that terrifies my existence - I am still living but I must die that someone else lives on, one after another: He died, I live, then I die, Someone else lives on....till it realises Time as much as it de-realises Time, imploding in this moment when we meet, you and I, without touching (and never will) in the same way as the moment of touching have been. In short, love it or not, every such photograph of a dead person related to you, tells you to be utterly yourself; that you are utterly yourself. There are so many things in excess, including the fact that I am idealising my dead brother.

And Time is not one of them. It is credible down to the infinite Photograph - is now and forever was.

Sometimes, the best stories are those told with less words, less pictures. Because they tell us how to live in the now, as everything else disappears.