The last two weeks were filled to the brim with joy. Pure, unbridled joy. The kind of joy that makes days fly by at the speed of light, days where everything is rosy and blurry, where every new day is crocheted to the one before with strings of full throated laughter and lullabies of familiarity. The kind of joy only a sibling and years of shared history and friendship can arouse out of the corners of the heart, disremembered by way of quotidian life and fast paced adult living. The last few weeks were about remembering again. A string of days dedicated to living in the past once again; to finding fresh, reawakened faith that it remains the present, and that it will, with all hope and expectation, embrace the future too. It was also about rediscovery.
It was her first time in Paris. For anyone inclined to fall in love with the magic that this city reveals to the inquisitive eye, despite the crowds and the swarms of plastic glazed members of a certain Zuckerberg-owned application and their startling narcissism, despite the metro stations that tell stinking tales of accrued urine and penury and homelessness, and at times despite les parisiens themselves, nothing and no one can prepare you for your first time here. That is only if you promise to meet the city for all that she is, beyond the glit, the glamour and the rosy façade that dazzles bright on the same Zuckerberg-owned application mentioned above; only if you are open enough to let the city carry you as you walk along the Seine, the feeling of insignificance and perspective taking over cell by cell of your being, the sentiment of being one with the world where you can look like anyone, where you can truly be anyone… if not everyone.
It was her first time in Paris and there is perhaps only one other thing more joyful, more surreal than a first time. That is watching someone whom you learnt to love long before you learnt the word ‘love’ and the unfathomable profundity it veils behind its four letter existence, your sibling, behold the same sights and sounds that once breathed new life into your veins. During the past couple of weeks, I just existed by her side showing off the nooks and crannies of a place that took me a little under two years to call ‘home’, like someone who had turned on their favourite movie for a favourite person. I spent the ensuing hours, days and weeks watching her face expectantly, hoping, praying that her facial muscles would twitch exactly the same way as mine, that she will stop and stare at the same things I do, that she will scowl at the things that make me scowl. However, as life teaches us time and time again, that rarely happens, for there is only one of me as there is only one of her. Nonetheless, I persisted. As she walked around these bustling streets, her insatiable eyes searching for more and more and more, my eyes could see only her.
I watched her from near and far trying to guess every move, every like and every dislike that she would voice or her face would reveal. Afterall, if I choose to look beyond our parents, I have known her the longest. It would only be right if I knew her, all of her, through all of time. Yet, I discovered new words, new usages in the way she spoke. New friends and significant others… New hand gestures which I hadn’t really seen before, an undeniable tinge of Mumbai, her new home, in the way words flitted off the tip of her tongue. It was a grown, sensible, independent woman, making her own money, making her own meals, someone who could find her way around the world without expecting my ever-ready pair of hands to protect her, sitting in front of me. This wasn’t the child I had known, this wasn’t even the aggravating teenager I last remembered. This was a peer in front of me, someone who could save me should I ever need to be saved. Someone who could and would protect me. Who was this new person? I could barely recognise her. She has changed, I exclaimed in my head, unsure how to feel about it. Change is such a hard word to speak about.
When I pull out without much thought, a vision of my sister from the Pensieve of my mind, the first image that pops up is that of her from when she was no older than 4 or 5. When I think back on our childhood days, when I access those files stored deep within the archives of this life, it is somehow always summer. That is partially because it is always summer in Trivandrum. Summer begins in childhood and curiously remains there. No matter the kilometres I may walk and wander, away from home, away from family and familiarity, summer lives on in pockets of memory stored unwittingly within flashing images of backyards of rented homes, sweltering afternoons and the cool shade of a great mango tree. But along with the warmth and drops of summer perspiration evoked from such memory, there is also a strange feeling of peace, the calm of just existing children, surrendering to the metronome of our breaths, the kind of sentiment that does not travel with us beyond the realm of childhood. Next to me, I see a child on our grandparents’ bed, lying on her stomach, her little feet up in the air, watching me intently. She is always there. Jet black poker straight hair trimmed around her face like she’s wearing a construction helmet. I can recognise those fingertips, those small nails, those chubby knees in a crowd of thousands to this day. Silver bells clink at her ankles. Silver stars twinkle in the blackest depth of her eyes. What was she thinking? What was she dreaming?
Given my tendency to feel a tad too intensely about even the simplest of affairs, I felt like I had been left far behind in the road of my sister’s life; it felt like I was perhaps unaware of all that she had become… all that had become her. The truth is, this has been our routine for the past 15 years or so, may be a little more. For the past fifteen years this relationship has been about rediscovery once a year, maybe twice when we were lucky. Save for the first 12 years of her life, we have been sisters on two ends of a telephone line except for the yearly holidays that I used to spend at our home in Trivandrum, while living out of temporary suitcases, ready to go, ready to wander. We have been sisters on chat windows and fleeting text messages. It is only in the recent years that we have been sisters on two sides of a phone screen, a luxury; on the two sides of glass, while both of us lead busy and overrated adult lives separated by thousands of kilometres, keeping ourselves barely afloat during high tide. So, where does this ‘surprise’ stem from, Logic wanted to know.
Maybe it was not merely about the surprise in finding newness, unfamiliarity in people we hold inconceivably close. Now that I spell it out, I wonder if the idea of really knowing someone also hides behind its innocuous façade, our ability to control them, our ability to foretell their words and their actions. Their choices too. I don’t know. Perhaps we are hasty to draw boxes for people based on our few encounters for them and we expect them never to outgrow those tight squares that we allow them. Never to prove us wrong. The moment they act out of the character that we assign to them, we feel uncomfortable, for no one likes to be surprised with the unknown. We like to be surprised with things we already know, we like to be right. We like to pretend we are all the same every day. That those few shared encounters, shared fragments of time are all that we ever were. A blatant lie that we tell ourselves. With that one lie we deny ourselves and the people we love, change. We deny them growth.
When we love someone to an extent we ourselves cannot comprehend, we like to tell ourselves that we know them inside out. That we know their thoughts, their worst fears, their guilty pleasures, the things that make them smile, even the things that make them cry. Granted, with certain relationships, it was perhaps once, for a very short span of time, a plausible assumption to make too. For instance, on our grandparents’ bed far away in time and space, I believe I did in fact know everything that child next to me knew and felt. That could be attributed to the fact that a great deal of what she knew and thought and felt then was what I had taught her or revealed to her. I knew all her little thoughts, all her little problems. The world teaches us to believe that this is what “closeness” is supposed to look like. To know everything about someone. It is not true. To say we know everything about someone is as absurd as saying we know everything about the sky. You never see the same sky twice, you never see the same person twice. Closeness is merely a handshake between our own demons and someone else’s. A friendship between the shadows, an attachment between the unlit corners of our beings, the parts that make us ashamed, guilty, afraid.
Being an older sibling (especially one with a slightly bigger age gap) grants you unsolicited albeit partial access into the life and sentiments of being a parent. Only another older sibling will understand the sentiment. After years of resistance, I have finally accepted my demi-mother’s role in my sister’s life and she has too, I believe. In fact, I laugh with her saying she’s partially the reason why I knew very early on that I have no penchant to be a parent. It was as though I had already felt (and continue to feel to this day) a fair share of what can only be assumed to be motherly sentiments and truth be told, it wasn’t (and still isn’t) particularly alluring. She laughs along.
Our resistance to change could also be about remembering where we come from and holding such emotion and memory so close that it suffocates us on some camouflaged level. For some of us, that’s all we have. Especially for those of us whose lives have changed dramatically over the course of many years where we were forced to deal with arduous life battles such as death and grief which impelled us to find our own warped and separate ways out of sorrow and misery. During my blissful childhood, such a sojourn with my sister on the streets of Paris was not even a dream. It was farther than a dream. On the days that we spent under the blazing Trivandrum sun, where we spent balmy summer months sucking on pieces of tamarind or nibbling on slices of raw mango, I don’t recall either one of us making plans or building flimsy castles in the wind about exploring faraway lands together let alone making new lives there. We were happy right where we were, I like to believe. Content with everything we had. We had no plans. Maybe we didn’t know any better, who is to say? Yet, many years later we found ourselves walking past boulangeries and cute brasseries, crossing roads before the light turned green in true Parisian fashion. Life seldom works out as planned. Everything changes, everything transforms. Even then I found myself pretending we were the same children lazing on our grandparents’ bed. Pretending not to see all the different people we had become, all the different changes that life had bathed us in, all the storms we had weathered on our own purely because it is harder to fathom that those children had died. They didn’t exist anymore. It is much harder to accept that we are all born anew with every new day that dawns, with new experiences, with every new place we set foot on. We are all strangers starting afresh. It is hard to meet strangers, but it is easier to pretend, it is easier to push ourselves back into the bud that was home to us long before we bloomed.
Someone once wrote: “we look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.” Maybe it is true. In fact, when I try to conjure up an image of my father, the first face that is see is from when he was young. An unwrinkled, smiling face blissfully unaware of worry and drudgery, oblivious to a foretelling that his road would end sooner than any of us anticipated. Same goes with my mother. I see her young face; a face younger than I am today. Smiling, the apples of her cheeks glowing, the viscose black of her hair wet after her evening shower. Images from the past. Maybe we do in fact look at the world and its people only once, in our childhood. Or right at the beginning. After that, everything and everyone else that we encounter is measured with that single expired yardstick.
Spending time with my sister these past couple of weeks made me reflect on this characteristic that forms a basic part of our existence. The way we get territorial about the somebodies who belong to us. Our eternal fear of being left behind to fend for ourselves, of being alone. Walking around the streets of Paris with my sister and absorbing all that she had transformed into taught me more about myself than it did about her. It made want to loosen up a bit, to allow space and time for both of us to grow further, to transform into people we haven’t met yet. To walk our paths, to pick up new experiences, to make new mistakes. There was only one thing more transcendent than watching the colossal metal frame of the Tower sparkle against the velvet night sky on my sister’s birthday. And that was watching tears stream down her face, for I know exactly what she was thinking. I knew it was gratitude for all the tiny things that life continues to speckle our paths with. I knew it was an acknowledgement that we had come a long way from home. She was still the same child with the button face on our grandparents’ bed. Those were the same hands, those were same black eyes, I could see. That is when I knew for certain that nothing, absolutely nothing had changed and that the two of us will always hold hands – as friends, as strangers, as sisters.
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“Summer begins in childhood and curiously remains there. “! Loved this wording so much! Your writing always brings back memories of home❤️
This piece speaks to the very heart of me. I love the emotion it delivers. Like my younger and only sister often tells me…..”there’s no me without you Aka”…….. there’s no you without her ♥️