My sister came to town for 3 days. Laddu walked in through the door, smartly dressed wheeling a fancy red travelling bag in tow. She looked all grown up, almost a reminder of what she was but yet not quite so. We hugged. A strong sense of deja-vu tingled my body as I smelled her long silky hair that were damp with 'Bombay heat' while the 'Delhi winter' lurked in the under-notes.
The smart professional woman who had walked through the door in her click clacking heels metamorphosed into a noisy adolescent as the decibels skyrocketed with rising excitement (true blue Punjabi style). This transformation I was to see repeatedly over the next 3 days of her stay as she oscillated freely between the assistant fashion editor she is and the younger sister she was.
For the duration of her stay we both retired to the world gone past our shoulders and turned into siblings with the four year age gap who were joined at the hip. That it once was so, everybody was aware of but that it will once again be the same no one had antcipated. Laddu and my love for each other; was almost a family legend. We did everything together and shared every part of our lives. Our first kisses, the first romance, the heartbreaks, the secrets; we were thick like thieves.
Where had that time vanished, I'd wondered. Over the years she passed out from school, got in to a fancy college to pursue her fashion studies, got a steady boyfriend and became an adult while in another part of the world I was growing through a similar process minus my first bestfriend. I missed her and she often figured in my stories but away from one another's gaze we were consistently moving away from people we once were and turning into people we were to become.
We chit chatted every night as though time was short and the stories to reminisce far too many. We wanted to pull out and air every one of those moments that rested in the dark cool stoorage of memory covered in dust and cobwebs. We laughed and cried as I told her about the time when she was spanking new, brought from the hospital with a heavy heart because another daughter was added to the family while my mother had risked the pregnancy so late in life to add a son to her family of two daughters. I was a 4 year old then and I hated her from the darkest bottom of envy that only children are capable of. A) Everyone seemed to want to hold her, touch her and carry her around while till then I was the object of the household adoration. B) I was asked to flush her potty as soon as she came from the hospital. If my memory serves me right; that was the blackest stinkiest potty I ever saw. I glared at my mother who sat nursing her indifferently expecting me to do as I was told. I got an opportunity to avenge myself a couple days later. As she slept fitfully in her crib one afternoon, I dropped a heavy paper weight on her head with the intent of killing her.
Something happened though in the sultry afternoons of the 1987 July that I fail to comprehend but the girl I deliberately tried to harm many times over, became my best-est friend. Something happened again 23 years later last Friday when she walked in again in my life.
Your love with will the heart remain
till all its hopes are bye.
like spring rose blossoms still retain
their fragrance till they die.
