My brother and I used to fight or bicker every waking hour of the day, week, and eventually years from when I was about 10 until he left for college about 4 plus years later. After he had graduated and came back for a few years before returning to the States to do his masters, yours truly, this highly evolved one still had to share a room with him where I was constipated with constant frustrations but refraining myself from any confrontations just to keep the peace. He was laconic in his communication with me but taciturn would be more apt in description.
Na, he wasn’t (that) a bad kid (nor was I). We just couldn’t get along or communicate the way most siblings would and that was all.
Being three years my senior, he was obviously bigger, taller and had martial arts training. When I had to fight him when being bullied , I could never topple or win any physical altercations. The only way I could fight back was putting on my thinking cap and start planning for retaliation sans any physical violence .
To get back at him, I normally worked in stealth! I would take my time. I would save my lunch money and head down to the downtown dingy toy store where they also sold stuff like stink bombs, itchy powder, fake rubber wriggly worms, snakes and insects! Unfortunately, those rubber critters couldn’t scare or affect him (come to think of it, none of the stuff from this store worked on my brother)!
The pranks that failed:
1) I once sprinkled itchy powder on the pouch of his underwear of all places. He didn’t feel anything except for some light prickly feeling ‘there’.
2) Dropped two mini vials of stink-bombs in between the textbooks in his school bag hoping that the books would somehow crush the vials somewhere in transit. Those stupid vials never broke and even if it did, the smell would only last 7-8 seconds. Furthermore, if he got cut by the broken shards of glass from the stink bombs, I am sure my parents would have grounded me till 80!
3) Removed one whole chapter from his textbook the night before while he was asleep after checking that the next day, his class would read and discuss on that very chapter of that book the next morning. My Mom came at me with a cane when she found out!
4) Ditto above but this time, I made tassels all around the pages of a chapter on another textbook with a pair of scissors hoping that his classmates would ridicule and laugh at him for that. He somehow never reported that to Mom nor did I ask him. He probably knew he was the one who made me mad in the first place.
Now, the ones that worked:
1) Reset his alarm clock. One night while I was taking a night cap with my parents in the kitchen at about 10-ish, I knew my brother would come down at any minute because I had tempered with his alarm clock right after he had gone to sleep. True enough, he walked into the kitchen in his full school uniform. Mom started giggling uncontrollably and to my surprise, she didn’t punish me. My brother just went back to bed and he also didn’t get back at me the next day.
2) Scoop a few of his guppies and fed them to the chicken.
3) Remove the colorful tails of some of his prized male guppies and threw them back into the aquarium.
4) Scoop a few more guppies and threw it into a big round shallow earthen pot that housed his ugly and stupid looking tutu fish that fed on smaller fishes (used to call his tutu fish a good for nothing fish until being fried with sweet and sour sauce by my grandma after a long period of time. Cannot recall if the fish meat was tough due to the age of the fish).
5) Removing parts from his model airplanes that he had painstakingly assembled – a wheel or a propeller blade at a time.
6) My brother was a disciplined kid and would assemble his folded uniform on a stool by his bed every night – the shirt, the pants, belt, metal school badge and underwear. I would remove any one of those items after he had gone to bed (he was also the ONLY one in our family who slept early. My sisters and I described him as, ‘chicken-eyed’ because of that).
7) You could do so much with his music cassette tapes and put them back into their cases as if no one had touched them. I don’t think I need to elaborate on this. Couldn’t do too many though because I liked music a lot even at that age and if I destroyed the ones that I liked, I won’t get to listen to them and buying a tape or record was a luxury then – bootleg or otherwise.
8) I got into the bathroom and locked myself inside just in time before he could catch and would have probably clobbered me. How did I get out of it despite him being persistent and waited by the door for me to eventually excite from the bathroom? I poured talcum powder into my mouth and with my saliva, it formed into a gooey substance (NEVER try this at home for it’s a definite health-hazard)! I opened the door and instead of coming at me, he back-tracked calling me a mad man after noticing my mouth. I obviously couldn’t talk but my facial expression told him to back off or I spit! We ended up laughing instead afterwards.
There, I was this lively, cheerful but a tad mischievous kid until my family relocated from Ipoh back to Petaling Jaya. At the same time, ALL my siblings were shipped off to college along with my cousins! I evolved into a socially troubled teenager but that’ll be another story.
My brother and I still don’t talk much to this day, even though I am now bigger, taller, and just two belts away from black in Taekwondo. Of course I will protect him if somebody ever hurt him.
Above: My brother and I circa…oh I can’t recall but this is my favourite photo of the two of us!
Related post: “the crawlies get creepier with age“
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