My Brother Narayana Rao

DR JL Narayana Rao

My mother delivered him during the last week of the seventh month of her pregnancy.

  He was very weak when he was a day-old baby and often gasped for breath. Our grandmother Janakamma always prayed to God for his long life.   

  Right from birth to three years, he faced many health issues, but he overcame them from his fourth year.

Though born in Madras during the early 1940s, he studied at our maternal uncle Sharma’s house in Machilipatnam till he completed his fifth grade.

He returned to our parental home in Madras to continue his studies from sixth grade at the corporation school at Nungambakkam, Madras. He studied diligently and was promoted to seventh standard. But he became a backbencher later and was detained in the eighth standard.

My father was very confident about the educational talent of my brother. When he learnt about the detention, he was furious. He rushed to the school and entered into a verbal duel with the headmaster.

  My father challenged him that he would make his son (my older brother) get through matriculation in two years with high marks.

While the ferocious war of words was going on between my father and the headmaster, my older brother was making rounds of the school premises on his old bicycle in a carefree manner.

My father called out to my brother and asked him to go home.

My father counselled my brother to study hard at home and get through the matriculation with high grades. My brother nodded humbly and studied hard.

When the results were published, my brother’s registered number was not to be seen in the third division of the column of the news paper.

My father was first disappointed. Still, he had hope about the success of his son. Even the number could not be seen in the second division. Then my father checked for the number in the first division. There's the number.. My father’s joy knew no bounds. He never expected my brother to be so intelligent..

My father was delighted. He gave my brother ten rupees to celebrate with his friends on his success.

His academic graph shot up thereafter. He studied pre-university at Pachaiyappa College and later joined in the medical course of M.B.B.S at Stanley Medical College.

Generally speaking, it is very tough to get through the anatomy exam in the second year of the M.B.B.S. degree course. But my brother passed through the exam, scoring high grades.

My father was so elated that he arranged a grand party for brother’s classmates on the terrace of our house.

My brother was proud to say that Parimalan, the adopted son of  late Annadurai, the founder of the DMK party, was his classmate.

  He was a victim of linguistic politics when he wanted to join the government medical service of the Madras state.

 The interview board, which consisted of a member of the legislative assembly of the state along with the medical fraternity, asked my brother whether he wa a Marathi or a Kannada or a Telugu, as his name was suffixed with 'Rao'. He even suggested why he shouldn’t seek medical employment in his native state.

Though he was appointed as a doctor at the Madras Government General Hospital and later at Chengalput Government Hospital, it was only on a temporary basis.

He was dedicated to medical ethics to the core. Once a patient demanded a false certificate for medical leave when he worked at an Employees State Insurance Dispensary (ESI) on the beach road in Madras. The patient even offered my brother money. 

But my brother was very honest. He had the patient necked out by an attendant.

The patient did not go away. He lurked at a corner of the lane, leading to the dispensary with a knife in his hand.

When my brother left the dispensary for home, the patient threw the knife at my brother, which hit him at the back of his head. The knife had almost touched the skull but did not pierce through. It was a providential escape for him.

The passersby on the lane rushed him to the General Hospital, opposite to the Madras Central Station.

A criminal case of assault was registered by the police, but the culprit was at large for a long time. Nobody knew what had happened to the culprit..

The government then transferred my brother to the Yercaud (a small hill area) government hospital in the Salem district of Tamil Nadu. There also, he was forced to work on a temporary basis only.

My brother was fed up with the murky politics of this kind and set up a private practice at Wallajabad, eight miles away from Kanchipuram.

Though he had a roaring practice and patients flooded his clinic, he had a great passion for research in rheumatology. He learnt that England was the right place for him for his research.

Shortly he found himself in a full-fledged hospital in Wolverhampton, England. 

Later he worked in Devonshire Royal Hospital, Buxton, and Hartlepool General Hospital, Bishop Auckland Hospital and Burton-on-Trent Hospital till he reached his late fifties, conducting extensive research in rheumatology. He endeared himself to the chronic patients as ‘Dr Jonnalagqadda' at whatever hospital he worked in in England.

Now I will go back in my narration to about three decades earlier. 

He grew up into a fair, short and plumpy boy, unlike me, who was rather tall, lean and dark-complexioned. He used to tease me with 'Aye, BB', which means 'Black boy'. He said that it meant a good boy. He continued to call me that until one day I had learnt the real meaning of the word and hit him with a measuring scale.

In spite of these small fights, my brother pampered me like a little prince since I was seven years younger to him. I took it as an advantage, and whenever I hit him, our parents supported me and scolded my brother not to irritate me. 

He had never let go of a single paisa which was due to him. Once our paternal uncle Satyanarayana, notorious for taking loans but never repaying them, took one rupee from my brother's pocket money as a loan. My brother kept on demanding that his loan might be repaid. But he did not oblige. Then my brother hit upon a plan. He stopped teaching him English. Then my uncle came to terms. He repaid the one-rupee loan and urged him to go to teach him English again. My uncle had no schooling. Hence, my brother had to teach him English.

  My brother told our father with a beaming face that he had recovered the loan amount of one rupee from my uncle.

Our father stared at my brother in disbelief. He observed humourously that my brother ought to have become a loan recovery agent for any bank with bad debts. 

He was a love boy even from his early teens. He used to pluck roses in our garden early in the morning and presented them to a fair girl nearby. He courted her thus for a year, but she was just friendly; that was all. So my brother’s romantic advances were in vain.

When my brother grew into a youth, he used to say with a chuckle that it was just a crush.

He married a fair girl who happened to be a distant relation after earning his medical degree. He had two children – a boy and a girl – who were married with children and settled abroad happily. 

Sometimes he was innocent as well. Once at a written general knowledge class in the fourth grade, he was asked who the village heads were. My brother answered that his grandfather and grandmother were the heads of the village.

He had a helping nature and always came to the rescue of the needy among our relatives. When we are all settled down in our lives with our families in different cities, I needed two hundred rupees urgently for a purpose. I wired him, who was in a different city, that I was in bad need of money. The next day, he sent me the required money by money order. But, by then, my purpose was served through some other source. So, I returned the money and thanked him. "See how honest my brother is," he remarked to my sister-in-law. 

Now I come back to my present narration. After working for long years in many hospitals in England, my brother toyed with the idea of getting a spacious flat constructed in Hyderabad to spend his remaining years peacefully..

But cruel fate willed otherwise.

He returned to Madras with his family and had a brief rest at my house and then proceeded to Kanchi to seek the divine blessings of the pontiff of Kanchi Sankara Peeth for the upcoming house-warming ceremony of his flat.

He was a diabetic and was expected to take care about his food timing. But he missed his breakfast and noon meals, because of his busy schedule that day.

While returning, he was to go down the staircase at Park Railway Station to catch a local train. While he was halfway through the steps, the sugar levels of his body suddenly dipped to zero, as a result of which he became unconscious. He fell down headlong, his forehead hitting the iron edge of a step hard. His frontal lobe bulged out, and his death was instant.

He left the material world without having a look at his dream flat in Hyderabad.

This was the sad end of my beloved older brother.