Left Foot, Right Foot

ONE

It was for man vs. a nation of millions that you recorded song for sis. millions, as it’s known among the few who listen to your music, your fourth album, the first after P’s departure as percussionist and K’s departure as girlfriend, was described by the sparsely-read music mags that covered it as stripped down and raw and, in a rare 7-star article in the now-defunct underground folk zine AAA, maybe the greatest political confessional since Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited. As spare as the rest of the album, song for sis was composed on a MIDI controller, an acoustic guitar, a home studio mic and a laptop minutes after you’d called sis, bawling your eyes out, sure you would die alone now that K was gone. She’d listened for two hours as you relayed in painstaking detail every one of K’s transgressions, every perceived injustice P had visited on you. And she’d reassured you: it’ll all work out, it’ll all be ok, left foot right foot, left foot right foot, don’t forget.

Left foot right foot: sis’ recipe for overcoming life’s myriad challenges. Sis: younger by a minute-and-a-half, hard worker, great listener, the slow-and-steady to your quick-and-heady, self-proclaimed family bore. In the first of two childhood tests your parents had the two of you take, where you showed early signs of what pa called raw intelligence, sis only showed early signs of above-normal intelligence. You can be whatever you want be, ma concluded about you, staying silent on the issue of what she thought sis might end up being (above normal intelligence means very smart, she said). Sis, no more than six years old, spent the car ride back home from the test centre on the verge of tears, and you, only a minute and a half older yourself, had to muster all your strength to not gloat. The personality test that followed would zero in on your confidence, your openness to new experiences, your amiability, but paint a less striking picture of sis: honest but shy, someone who needed to get out of her shell, let the world in. Anything you want to be, ma would conclude once again, remaining silent, once again, on the question of what sis might end up being (she’s a good girl, ma would say on the drive back from the test centre).

TWO

Throughout your childhood, you’d just assumed that you and sis would both grow up to be engineering majors. It’s what pa had done, it’s what ma had done, it’s what most children of salaried urban India did[1]. The question really was about what you’d become once you’d graduated: a banker? a consultant? an engineer, maybe? It was only when pa suggested towards the end of middle school that you could consider majoring in economics and orient your high-school experience towards that goal that you realised that anything you want to be was code. That it meant you maybe didn’t have to train to be an engineer at all. That maybe you could take a less conventional path, the sort of path befitting a precocious child who was confident, open to new experiences, amiable. The system – as represented by ma and pa – believed that no matter which path you chose, you’d land on your feet. Sis, not so much. As someone endowed with nothing more than above average intelligence and a pleasant personality, her success wasn’t a sure thing. Although never explicitly stated, it was just assumed she’d do what it took to get into a decent engineering college. Like pa had done. Like ma had done. Like most children of salaried urban India do.

In fact, throughout your childhood, nobody ever had to state explicitly their expectations of sis. There were three hours of studying daily without need for prompting. There were weekly swimming classes without need for prompting. Weekly singing lessons without need for prompting. There were no boyfriends, no remarks in the school diary, no complaints in the PTA. Year after year, she placed tenth-or-so in a class of forty, and year after year there was no indication that anyone – be it a teacher or ma and pa – expected much more. All that was really expected of her was that she stay the course: move from the seventy-fifth percentile of the class to the seventy-fifth percentile of salaried urban India, just as she had moved from the seventy-fifth percentile of juvenile intelligence to the seventy-fifth percentile of her class.

As a child, you envied the no-stress environment in which you believed sis operated. In the eighth standard[2], for instance, the first time the both of you were in the same division[3], she ended the year ranked tenth in class, facing not a fraction of the scrutiny you did after having placed second. Like every other year, she received a well done and a signature on her report card from pa. You, on the other hand, having never finished anything but first in class before, faced an inquisition. When ma and pa found your answers to their intense questioning insufficiently illuminating, sis was called in as a witness. Was he paying attention in class? Was he goofing off with friends? Is he spending more time with girls? Sis, of course, replied yes, no and no. In a house with no raised hands and only the occasional raised voice, this inquisition amounted to an unimaginable escalation. Finding yourself alone with sis in the living room after ma and pa retired for the night, you lashed out. You’re so lucky, you remembered crying out through tears, you’re so lucky they don’t care.

You wish you could say you regretted saying what you did the moment you said it, but you didn’t. At thirteen, you genuinely thought they didn’t care about her grades, and you genuinely thought that made her lucky. You thought they saw her for who she really was. That, to them, you were always what you could be. To them, you were convinced, your sister existed in the present, but you only existed in the future; all they could see was unmet potential, anything you want to be, infinite risk to the downside. You couldn’t conceive of a bigger tragedy than that. You didn’t, for instance, consider what it might’ve felt like to be an also-ran in your own home, to see your parents treat your brother’s bright future as a project for all four of you to undertake, to see your own future as sealed before the arrival of adolescence because of two tests and a series of inconsequential examinations. You didn’t see anyone else’s experiences as having even the slightest hint of tragedy; your sympathy was directed firmly inwards.

In the living room that night, sis didn’t take offense; instead, she consoled you. It'll all work out, she said. It’ll all be ok. Left foot right foot. Left foot right foot. She smiled. Left foot right foot, you repeated, calming down.

THREE

You spent the summer break that followed the eighth standard teaching yourself how to play the guitar, imagining yourself in a pop-punk band a la Green Day. You even floated the idea to sis, maybe you could form a band together: her on vocals, you on the guitar. The twins in a two-piece band? As if we don’t catch enough shit in school, she joked. Besides I’m done with singing classes. They’re no fun. No singing classes, you exclaimed. Next you’ll tell me you’re also going to stop swimming. I am, she replied. Got to focus on the tenth[4], exams aren’t easy for some of us.

So, she stopped swimming and stopped singing and when the results of the tenth standard board examinations came in, you discovered that you’d performed no better than she had; you’d both scored 90%. When sis, predictably, decided to appear for the national engineering examinations that followed the twelfth standard board examinations[5], you abandoned any ambition of majoring in anything other than engineering. When you both got into high-ranking engineering colleges, you ensured that yours was the more prestigious course in the more storied institution. You ensured you were the first to leave home, the first to settle into hostel life, if even by just one day.

But sis really took to it. Away from home, she really began to flourish. In her first year of college, she picked up where she left off with swimming and singing, while also beginning to develop a passion for building web apps. After her second year, rather than spending the summer break home like you and most other students did, she spent six weeks putting the final touches on a music recommendation platform called IfYouLikeThis, which had started out as a first-year course project. In the summer after her third year, she was even more occupied and could only make it home for a week. First, there was the national athletics tourney between the country’s top engineering colleges at which she captained her swim team to the overall championship[6]. Then there was an internship with a large CRM company. 

It was only once the four years of college were done that the two of you got to spend a substantial chunk of summer together; your last summer vacation in your childhood home. The previous four years had eroded your sense of petty competition; instead, as the summer passed, you found your heart fill up with reluctant admiration. Your once self-doubting sister had grown into a self-assured, highly capable adult. Where you’d accepted a job in the first company that would have you for an employee, sis had finalised a pre-placement offer at the CRM company at which she had interned; this meant a higher pay, a sizeable chunk of ESOPs, the whole package. Where you struggled to retain even the few friends you had made in college, mostly from the avant-garde book club you’d started on a drunken second-year night, sis flew down to Bengaluru for a week to catch up with her college buddies and her boyfriend of a year and a half. Where you spent late nights drafting elaborate plans for world domination, sis watched tv, read, bought herself a MIDI controller and a home studio mic to record covers of new wave songs from the eighties. Left foot right foot.

At the end of summer, sis was the first to leave home. The family made a trip out of it, visiting uncles, aunts, ma’s old friends, pa’s old friends, visit after dull visit concluding with the same rehearsed request: take care of her, she’s new to the city. It irked you; as if sis needed taking care of in a world she’d made her own. As if taking care of her was a responsibility to be delegated to far-off family and relative strangers. Through the week-long criss-crossing of Bengaluru’s streets, you couldn’t help but see every childhood examination, every childhood test, every throwaway comment as a perverse slight. You came to see yourself as a willing participant in a decades-long charade. Every evening, your heart would fill up with a resentment you didn’t know you had the capacity to feel. Every morning you’d attempt to empty its contents, only to find yourself at Mr. Iqbal’s or Sivan mama’s or Ms. Patty’s in the evening, your heart filling up again. On the final night of the trip, after a visit to Mr. and Mrs. Mam’s, sis found you outside the hotel lobby smoking a sneaky cigarette. You should quit, she said. I know, you replied, before falling silent. I’m always just a call away, she said. And my place is always your place, she continued, if it ever gets too much in Bombay and you don’t want to fly back to them. You laughed. You know they’ve always tried their best, right? They’re still trying. They’re trying so hard. We got lucky with them. I always think, I got so lucky.

You’ve never cried so hard.

FOUR

You can’t say that you unlearned all the habits of your teenage years right away. When sis’ relationship with that boy from Bengaluru ended in tears and recriminations, you were sad for her, yes. For a day you might’ve even been devastated and wished immeasurable suffering on the man. But there was also a tinge of schadenfreude. When she was requested to move to the San Francisco headquarters of the CRM company and take on a meatier role in deciding the future of their core business line, you were delighted for her, proud, in awe, but also a little jealous. After all, wasn’t it you who was destined for greatness? Weren’t you lied to? Or at the very least, left unprepared for the real world’s real outcomes? You loved sis, just like you always had, you just wanted to also be better than her – that doesn’t diminish your love, does it? You wanted to be the one taking year-long sabbaticals to explore self-generating music composition algorithms. You wanted to be the one falling in love with someone you met at a painting class. Even today, you want to be the one moving to a big house so your future kid with this painting person might spend his/her childhood outdoors. But you aren’t.

Maybe it’s you who will end up in the seventy-fifth percentile of India’s urban salaried class. Maybe there was a mixup at the test centre that day three decades ago, an untrained understudy tallying the scores, an over-enthusiastic counsellor passing them on to giddy parents without noticing that the scores had been mixed up. Maybe it was sis, not you, who was destined for greatness.  

You can’t say you’ve unlearned all the habits you’ve developed over years of thinking this way. You still, on occasion, descend into spirals of self-pity. You’re far more guilty than your parents ever were of living in an imaginary world; except, unlike them, it isn’t your future in which you live – it’s an alternate present. One where you’re not some operations head at some Bengaluru logistics unicorn, but are instead more successful, better remunerated, more venerated. One where your life isn’t the very image of what it means to be a single person with disposable income – hopping from one Friday night at a new Mediterranean-inspired al fresco place to the next at a house club that’s been opened in what was once a run-down cheap motel. One where your life is instead the image of stability: an eternal Sunday afternoon spent with a with a wife and a golden retriever, both of whom you are, in real life, yet to meet. One where you haven’t for a decade been making albums like millions, songs like song for sis, under an assumed name just to get a breather from your desperate need for recognition, for success.

One where the next job isn’t the one that propels you to a lifetime of untold success. The next woman you meet isn’t the one who reveals within you a groundswell of undiminishing love. The next album isn’t the one that launches a global search among music nerds for the anonymous visionary who goes by the name Count Backwards.

A life you described in song for sis: one of peace, patience, virtue.

Left foot. Right foot.

[1] A society of engineers begets a society of engineers

[2] To be read the same as eighth grade.

[3] To be read the same as class.

[4] The tenth standard board examinations, marking the point at which one matriculates from school in India.

[5] The twelfth standard board examinations, marking the point at which one matriculates from junior college / high school in India.

[6] Your college’s women’s swim team came in second.