BAZAAR

SoBAZAARThe bond between sisters goes beyond a sharedlove for the same Netflix show. AuthorJanice Pariat writes about how her sisterwill always be her best friend.``````MY SISTER AND I LOVE AND LOATHE EACH OTHER. Alternatingly. Oftenboth at the same time. I’ll never forgive her for picking a ight with me one Christmasmorning, she’ll never forgive me for peeking into her diary when I was 11, and she was 17.Yes, there’s a long ive-year gap between us, which has prompted her to call me, on morethan one occasion, an ‘accident’. She has also told me in meticulous detail howI was: a) Adopted b) Found in a gutter.Only my wailing (and our mother’s stern insistence) prompted her to retract her story.I’ve been told how when I was born, the irst thing my sister did was hide all her toys. It isthis generosity of spirit that has sustained our relationship all these years. We grew up inthe tea estates of desolate 1990s Assam, often having no one else for company but eachother. So we played—endless afternoons atop sun-drenched haystacks—and fought—Ithreatened her with scissors, she threw mugs of water at me—and watched Chitrahaar onDoordarshan in the evenings, or played cards or Ludo. I inherited her vast Enid Blytoncollection, her clothes, her love for lychees plucked fresh of the tree.For a few years, before being packed of to boardingschool, I attended Loreto Convent in Shillong, wheremy sister was a ‘senior’. How I longed to be like her.School head girl and basketball captain, a legendreally in our small hometown. She was cool andiesty, everything I thought I was not, and, moreimportantly, she was liked by every boy within a 10-mile radius. Even the one she bifed on the nose ata science fair (for saying something out of line abouther home-made volcano). All through my boardingschool years, when she was studying medicine atGuwahati, we wrote each other letters and sent eachother cards. We met during my holidays. We weregrowing up without our earlier proximity, but nowthere were other more ‘grown-up’ things to whisperabout. Boys, and boyfriends, and heartbreak, andmovies, and fashion. hanks to her I’m accustomedto bones from various parts of the human skeleton scattered around the bedroom. A skullonce, on the windowsill. A femur beneath the bed. I remember going through her copyof Dewhurst’s Textbook of Obstetrics and Gynaecology when I was 16, and vowing never tohave babies.She has two babies now—girls, who are as lovely as her, and bubbly and chatty, andwho I adore even though I don’t get to see them as often as I would like because they livewith their parents in a small seaside town in Wales. My sister is a GP in the UK, and I’ma writer, and she hasn’t always quite understood what it is I do exactly, or my utter all-encompassing love for language and literature and the acquisition of literary knowledge.When I still had dreams of higher studies, she asked in all in sincerity and puzzlement,“But who will read your PhD?”Good question. But she is my biggest, loudest, most ferocious champion, andfan—excited about my books, and my book events, from a tiny reading in the middleof nowhere with an audience of three to a busy session at Hay-on-Wye. We have beenthrough divorces and devastation, moving homes and moving countries, careerchanges and pet and parenting choices. We are both watching our parents growolder. here’s much joy and quiet pride for each other. She may have hidden the toys,but never the love. ■### &LOVINGLOATHING