My Brother's Great Invention

This chapter is a humorous short story told in the first person, written by Anita Rau Badami, whose name appears directly under the story's final line. The narrator who says "I" throughout is a character inside the story, a fourteen-year-old girl also called Anita, with a younger brother named Anand, one year her junior. Because narrator and author share a first name, it is tempting to read the story as a true memory, but on the page it is simply a story narrated in the first person by a character the author has created.

The setting is an ordinary home in a city close to Kharagpur, a few hours from Calcutta (the story itself notes that the city is now called Kolkata). The household is a familiar one: a father who leaves for the office, a mother who goes to the market, a sister who would rather finish her novel, and a brother who cannot leave a screwdriver alone. Nothing here is exotic or historical; the comedy comes entirely from one character's restless urge to invent things, and from how that urge keeps colliding with ordinary household life.

Two inventions drive the plot: a burglar alarm rigged up because of a rush of thefts in the colony, and a time machine inspired by the film Back to the Future. Both are described by Anand with total confidence and received by everyone else with doubt, which is the engine of most of the story's humour. When you write about this chapter, treat it as a first-person comic narrative rather than a report of real events, and keep Anita's voice, affectionately exasperated with her brother, in mind throughout.

The story opens in the middle of the action, with Papa roaring from the front doorstep, soaked and furious, demanding to know who rigged up "that water bag". This is a deliberate choice: we are dropped into the consequence before we are told the cause, and only once Papa has stormed off and Anand has sensibly vanished does the narrator pause to "put you in the picture."

The cause, once explained, is simple. There had been a rush of thefts in the colony, and Anand decided that what the house needed was a burglar alarm. His plan was to hang a water bag above the door so that, the moment the door opened, an alarm would clang and the bag would fall on the intruder's head, giving the family time to call the police. The flaw is one that any reader can spot before the story states it outright: Anand rigs the alarm to trip only when the door is opened gently, reasoning that a thief would open it stealthily rather than throw it wide open. He never considers that his own father opens the door exactly that quietly every single day.

Anita is drawn into the scheme despite her better judgement, warning Anand more than once that she wants nothing to do with it if things go wrong. Her warning does her little good: when Papa does get soaked, it is Anand who disappears and takes the blame alone, while Anita's own doubts about "the alarm's guessing powers" turn out to be entirely justified. The episode is short, but it sets the pattern for the whole story: an invention built on a plausible-sounding idea, a flaw nobody wanted to point out, and a parent left to deal with the mess.

A week of peace follows the burglar-alarm disaster, broken only after the family watches the film Back to the Future. Anand decides at once that he must build a time machine of his own. Papa locks away his toolbox and hides the key; Ma keeps a wary eye on her oven and mixer, because Anand's "inventing binges" are known to involve dismantling whatever gadgets he can get his hands on. True to form, his room becomes, in the space of a fortnight, "a network of wires, springs, levers, and bulbs," complete with an enormous control switchboard, while Anand himself stops combing his hair and starts looking, in his sister's words, "like a savage."

When the machine is finally ready, Papa flatly refuses to let anyone try it out, though Ma's gentle intervention wins the family permission to at least look at it. The real complication arrives the next day: Papa and Ma leave for a wedding in Kharagpur, a few hours from Calcutta, for a single night, and extract a promise from Anand that he will not touch the time machine while they are away. He agrees, the narrator tells us, only "half-heartedly."

That night, while Anita stays up finishing a novel, she hears scratching, a rattle, and a click at the front door. The intruder turns out to be Boppa, the man who had recently begun sweeping the compounds in their row of houses, and who therefore knew exactly when the house would be empty. Threatening the children with a cudgel, he orders them to point him to their father's room. Thinking quickly, Anand sends him to the wrong room entirely: his own, where the time machine sits waiting.

What follows is a crash, a scream, and a string of strange sounds, muffled thumps, an eerie whine, a low hum, before the neighbours arrive and the children are freed. Boppa is never found. The only trace he leaves behind is his green scarf, lying on the floor beside the switchboard.

Anand is defined by one trait above all others: he is utterly convinced of his own genius, regardless of the evidence in front of him. He describes his burglar alarm as carefully planned, shows Anita a "blueprint" to sound professional, and later insists his time machine truly worked even when every adult around him laughs at the idea. He is "bothersome," in Anita's own word, and frightens people "half to death," yet he is also undeniably resourceful: in the one moment that matters most, with a stranger's cudgel pointed at him, he thinks fast enough to send Boppa into the wrong room.

Anita is the story's narrator and its voice of common sense. She doubts the burglar alarm's "guessing powers" from the start, tries more than once to keep herself out of trouble, and is the one who insists, when the parents hesitate, "We're old enough to look after ourselves, Ma." Her scepticism never curdles into meanness, though; she stays up to finish her novel rather than sleep, she shakes her brother awake the instant she senses danger, and she is fully at his side through the night of the break-in, despite every warning she gave him earlier.

Papa and Ma together strike a balance the story clearly enjoys. Papa is the household's voice of firm refusal, locking away his toolbox and declaring "When I say NO, I mean NO," yet he is also the one who softens enough to let the children show him the finished machine, muttering that if the house falls, it will be Anand's fault. Ma is gentler throughout, soothing Papa after the burglar-alarm incident and pleading Anand's case to see the time machine, but she is equally firm about the one promise that matters, that it will not be switched on while they are away.

Boppa, the sweeper who becomes the thief, is sketched in only a few lines: a "ruffianly fellow with a green scarf," armed with a cudgel, who knew precisely when the house would be empty because sweeping the compounds had given him the run of the neighbourhood. He supplies the one moment of real danger in an otherwise comic story, and his unexplained disappearance is what keeps the ending open rather than neatly closed.

The most interesting choice in this story is what it leaves out. Boppa walks into Anand's room, there is a crash, a scream, and a set of noises nobody can quite place, and then he is simply gone. The neighbours search the house and find nothing; the only way out, they are certain, is the way they themselves came in. Logically, this should be impossible, and the story never explains it away.

Three responses to this mystery sit side by side without the story choosing between them. Anand is certain: "My time machine! He's gone through that!" he says, eyes shining, and he goes on believing it for good, convinced he is now a genius. Mr Sharma dismisses it entirely, smiling "indulgently" and saying, "What an imagination this boy has!" before sending the children off to bed. And the narrator, who has watched the whole story unfold, gives us one more detail tucked into a single sentence: the time machine is dismantled because Papa thinks it is not safe, "maybe he also had a niggling suspicion that it worked."

That last phrase is doing careful work. It does not confirm the time machine is real, and it does not dismiss the possibility either. By ending on an adult's quiet doubt rather than a clear answer, the story keeps its tone light while still rewarding a closer reader: the most sensible character in the household, the one who locked away his toolbox out of pure caution, is the one who cannot quite bring himself to rule it out.

The story leans heavily on onomatopoeia, words that imitate the sounds they name, to carry the reader through moments the narrator cannot see directly. A clanging alarm, a crash, a scream, muffled thumps, an eerie whine, a low humming sound: these sound words do the work of a camera the narrator does not have, letting us picture the chaos in Anand's room purely through what Anita and Anand can hear through a locked door.

The dialogue is full of idioms that give the narration its conversational, funny tone: Anand's inventions cause "hoo-ha," he regularly "gets on Papa's nerves," he risks "frightening someone half to death," and Anita warns that she does not want to "get a shelling" for his schemes. A sweeper "sweeping out the compounds" has, in effect, been "leaving the coast clear" for his own theft, and the children "fell over ourselves" trying to explain what happened to the confused neighbours. None of these phrases mean quite what their individual words suggest, which is exactly what makes them idioms.

The story also uses binomials, fixed pairs of words joined by "and" or "or", in the kind of everyday way a reader might miss on a first pass: a plan might need to be "safe and sound," a drawer full of "odds and ends," a decision that is "make or break," two sides weighing "pros and cons," a last chance that is "now or never," and a friendship built on "give and take." And running underneath both inventions are phrasal verbs that describe exactly how they work: the alarm is "rigged up" and later "tripped off," plans elsewhere "turn out" one way or another, and the family nearly "runs out of" patience with Anand's schemes.

When you are asked to summarise this story, resist the urge to retell every line. Instead, organise your answer around the two inventions: what each one was meant to do, what actually happened, and who ended up blamed or credited. A cause-and-effect structure works especially well here, since nearly every event in the story leads directly to the next, a thin alarm leads to a soaked father, a week of calm, then a film that starts the whole cycle again with the time machine.

Keep the narrator and the author separate in your own writing, just as you would for any first-person story. Anita the character tells us what she saw and felt; Anita Rau Badami the author chose what details to include and, crucially, chose not to resolve the mystery of Boppa's disappearance. A good answer about the ending should say what the text actually gives us, three different reactions, no confirmation either way, rather than picking a side the story itself refuses to pick.

Pay attention to tense when the story moves between what happened earlier and what happened more recently; the text itself does this carefully, as in "Anand had vanished by this time and reappeared only after dinner when Papa had cooled down," where the past perfect ("had vanished," "had cooled down") marks the earlier of two past events and the simple past ("reappeared") marks the later one. Using the right tense when you retell events out of their original order will make your own writing clearer too.

Finally, support every claim about character or theme with a specific moment from the text rather than a general impression. "Anand is confident" is a weaker answer than "Anand calls his plan carefully planned and shows Anita a blueprint, even though the alarm goes on to soak his own father." The second version proves the point instead of just stating it.