So
BAZAAR
The bond between sisters goes beyond a shared
love for the same Netflix show. Author
Janice Pariat writes about how her sister
will always be her best friend.MY SISTER AND I LOVE AND LOATHE EACH OTHER. Alternatingly. Often
both at the same time. I’ll never forgive her for picking a ight with me one Christmas
morning, 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 more
than one occasion, an ‘accident’. She has also told me in meticulous detail how
I 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 is
this generosity of spirit that has sustained our relationship all these years. We grew up in
the tea estates of desolate 1990s Assam, often having no one else for company but each
other. So we played—endless afternoons atop sun-drenched haystacks—and fought—I
threatened her with scissors, she threw mugs of water at me—and watched Chitrahaar on
Doordarshan in the evenings, or played cards or Ludo. I inherited her vast Enid Blyton
collection, her clothes, her love for lychees plucked fresh of the tree.
For a few years, before being packed of to boarding
school, I attended Loreto Convent in Shillong, where
my sister was a ‘senior’. How I longed to be like her.
School head girl and basketball captain, a legend
really in our small hometown. She was cool and
iesty, everything I thought I was not, and, more
importantly, she was liked by every boy within a 10-
mile radius. Even the one she bifed on the nose at
a science fair (for saying something out of line about
her home-made volcano). All through my boarding
school years, when she was studying medicine at
Guwahati, we wrote each other letters and sent each
other cards. We met during my holidays. We were
growing up without our earlier proximity, but now
there were other more ‘grown-up’ things to whisper
about. Boys, and boyfriends, and heartbreak, and
movies, and fashion. hanks to her I’m accustomed
to bones from various parts of the human skeleton scattered around the bedroom. A skull
once, on the windowsill. A femur beneath the bed. I remember going through her copy
of Dewhurst’s Textbook of Obstetrics and Gynaecology when I was 16, and vowing never to
have babies.
She has two babies now—girls, who are as lovely as her, and bubbly and chatty, and
who I adore even though I don’t get to see them as often as I would like because they live
with their parents in a small seaside town in Wales. My sister is a GP in the UK, and I’m
a 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, and
fan—excited about my books, and my book events, from a tiny reading in the middle
of nowhere with an audience of three to a busy session at Hay-on-Wye. We have been
through divorces and devastation, moving homes and moving countries, career
changes and pet and parenting choices. We are both watching our parents grow
older. here’s much joy and quiet pride for each other. She may have hidden the toys,
but never the love. ■&
LOVING
LOATHING