Why does my brother keep asking me whether he should forgive our father, as if I haven't been deciding that myself for twenty years?

Strip the sentiment away and what remains is blunt: your brother does not want your answer. He wants your wound — proof that someone else bled here too, so he is not the only one who has to bleed. You are not a counselor to him; you are a mirror he holds up to justify his own unresolved pain. And the fury you feel is not about his repetition. It is about the twenty years in which nobody asked you the same question, nobody stood at your door soaked and needing proof. Two people, one old grievance, and both calling the circling 'conversation.' The honest move is to name what is actually happening: he is not asking about your father. He is asking you to share the bill for a debt neither of you ran up.

“Virtue is the only good. Everything else is just furniture.”

— Diogenes of Sinope, reported in Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers

He is not asking for your answer — he is asking you to be the answer, to absorb the verdict so he never has to stand in that dock himself. Your irritation is not impatience. It is the specific sound of someone who has done the brutal, private work of choosing, watching another person treat that work as a shortcut. Forgiveness in this frame is not a conclusion you arrive at and then possess. It is written in the chest at 3am, over and over, in handwriting only you can read. It cannot be photocopied. It cannot be borrowed. Sartre's radical freedom is not a gift you pass to a sibling — it is the weight each person must lift without assistance, the one form of labor that cannot be outsourced. To hand him yours would be to rob him of the only thing that will actually help him: the necessity of his own choosing.

“Man is condemned to be free.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism

The mihrab faces one direction, and it is not toward you. Islam draws a line that many traditions blur: the question of whether to forgive a wrong is, at its root, a question between the wronged and Allah — not between two siblings standing in the rubble of the same house. Your brother's account with your father belongs to God alone, and the light he sees in you is not permission; it is his own longing, reflected back. You have been full for twenty years. Your hands are not empty vessels waiting to carry his hesitation. Afu — the Quranic call to pardon — is addressed to the individual soul, not delegated to a family representative. He must face the qiblah himself. You cannot face it for him, and you were never asked to.

“Let them pardon and overlook. Would you not love for Allah to forgive you?”

— Quran 24:22

Before his asking, before your twenty years of deciding, before the father and the wound — Vedanta points to what remains when all of that is cleared away. The one to whom this question appears has never once been diminished by it. You have spent two decades believing yourself to be the exhausted decider, the elder who went first, the one still pressing a hand against the cut. But the self that is truly there — Atman, undivided, untouched — was never inside the verdict. The rope you have been calling a snake is the story of a self burdened by a past that, on close inspection, belongs to no one. This is not consolation. It is a harder instruction than forgiveness: to ask who, precisely, is tired — and to look until the question dissolves into the one asking it.

“The Self is not born, nor does it die at any time.”

— Bhagavad Gita 2.20

He watched you carry it and assumed you had worked out how to put it down — he did not see that you simply got stronger. You have been in the courtroom with your father every Tuesday morning of your adult life, rendering verdicts that expire by Thursday, and your brother walked in during what looked like a recess and mistook your exhaustion for resolution. That is the absurd condition laid bare: the rock does not get lighter, the hill does not end, and the person at the top is not waving because they have won. Camus did not say Sisyphus was happy because he solved the problem. He said Sisyphus was happy because he stopped needing to. Your brother's real question is not about forgiveness at all. It is: was it survivable? Are you okay? And he cannot say that — so he asks about the rock instead, still waiting for you to hand him the answer you never received.

“One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

— Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus