Nobody knows how to get under your skin quite as well as your sibling. Nobody. Today I found myself thinking about mine…
When my elder brother moved from his openly merry, openly irritating preteen days to an introverted teen phase, I would have to scratch a bit to get to the bhaiya inside. On sticky summer afternoons in Ahmedabad, our scientist parents would be at work in the lab and he would be holed away in his impenetrable room engrossed in his (to me) joyless pursuits. I’d look at the clock. I’d play with and put away all my dolls. The minutes would stretch like sticky, molten toffee. Not a sound from inside. What was a 8 year old girl looking for entertainment supposed to do? Go bhaiya-goading of course!
One day sticks out in my memory. I had let myself inside his room. He was crouching over a notebook as usual.
“Why are you here?”, he asked with a frown, not deigning to look up. It was code for get out.
I took a moment to contemplate the most incendiary and haughty response.
“I can come and go whenever I want.”
“You can’t”. He looked up and chose his jab. “You’re using up my oxygen. Get out!”
I stared at him in genuine disbelief, outraged at the accusation. Exhausting his oxygen? With hands on the waist of my frock, I began taking loud deep breaths and declared, “I’m going to use up ALL your oxygen then!!!”.
And then it was finally on!
In a matter of nanoseconds, I shot out and was caught like a rodent after a frenetic chase around the dining table. I had my tactics in place. What I lost in size, I made up for in technique. I would quickly grab his shirt from both sides of the stitches over the shoulder and pull at them until we heard exactly three stitches tear. Then it would be time to let go and run for dear life!
Pens would be thrown as distraction grenades, clothes would suffer tears, books would be held hostage until we were both sufficiently scratched, bruised and injured. We’d adhere to an unspoken code- neither would shed a tear or rat to the parents.
At his end, he would delight in effortlessly pushing me to my limits just for the laughs. My enthusiastic parents had somehow laid hands on a giant camcorder as far ago as 1995. He put it to good use- my escapades across the boundary wall were video recorded, not to dissuade me from wandering into a plot full of snakes & scorpions but to gloatingly hold evidence of my wrongdoings- just in case! He would gleefully entertain guests and relatives with my many misadventures, one of which resulted in my playmate (our maid’s 8 year old son) dangling from the terrace and greeting my parents’ car with the sight of a pair of scrawny legs flapping in mid-air! In my defence…. the said boy was older than me, I was only five, and …it wasn’t a particularly high terrace?!
I genuinely wondered if siblings were supposed to be people you loved or people you wanted to murder. It seemed like the latter, and the only reason to refrain was because it would upset my parents.
Growing up with him gave me plenty of self-defence training. Without ever stepping into a dojo, I learnt to swiftly defend myself from an O Soto Gari throw (he trained in school and needed practise, my consent was dispensable). I learned to be quiet as a cat despite my anklets and to always check the ceiling fan blades for slippers and door-tops for mugs of water.
Yet, here we are now. Imperceptibly, indiscernibly, things changed. One day he went off to college, and I found myself crying bitterly because the house seemed so empty without him. Our reunions held gruff acknowledgements of missing each other, and even a hug or two. Then I went off to college, he went off to work abroad, I got married, and we never shared a roof again. Life didn’t give us any warning sign before we went off on different tracks.
From fighting over the larger piece of chocolate (that 1 mm mattered), we went to thinking about each other before buying anything remotely interesting. In my third year at college, he bought me the coolest thing in the world- a gorgeous, ridiculously high tech Samsung Galaxy Nexus that brought me to the world of smartphones and propelled me to minor stardom amongst my besotted friends. It was, at the time, the most expensive gadget any of us in the family owned. He also gifted me a honey-comb for rakhi. Don’t ask.
Now that we’re thirty two and forty respectively, I know that we’re precious to each other. I’m sure there would still be room for the cat and mouse fights, but for the continents in between. He’s usually a voice over the phone but retains his power to irritate me even halfway across the world. I have lesser time owing to my super-energetic pre-schooler yet I cherish his agenda-less calls to tell me about the fun things he did with his family, a bunch of video recommendations or a list of all the new things my niece has been up to.
We’ve now fit into each other’s lives in the form of those late night calls with parenting discussions, food recipes, book recommendations and bucket-list additions. But we’ve also silently prayed for each other in our worst hours, defended each other before our parents, empathised with the other without having to know their side of the story and trusted each other blindly (sometimes even with our passwords!). What we have is not just friendship or companionship but ‘I’ve-got-your-back’-ship: a feeling that neither of us would have to face anything alone, that neither of us needs to worry about the what the clock says before dialling the other; that we’d understand what the other is going through without having to explain in mere words, that we’re bound by blood in a bond that can’t burn, tear or perish.
I’m not sure what parents think when they decide to have two children, but I would hope every child has what we did- whether with siblings, neighbours or friends. I wonder what experiences you’ve gone through with your sibling. If life has put you both in a good place, why not pick up the phone and call them?