My sister and I are eerily alike – to the particularly blind, we could pass off as twins. It doesn’t help that we’re both writers, punny, particularly vocal ‘feminazis’ and love four-legged creatures.
Your nearest pop psychologist will probably be ready with a litany of reasons as to why we’re so alike – and why both of us so deeply resent being reminded of it. But because I’m the pop psychologist writing this piece, I’ll give you the one reason – our parents.
Like most other Indian parents, ours encourage competitiveness in their kids. In preparing us for the “big, bad world”, they fostered a sense of “me vs you” in the small world we grew up in. Both reasonably academically bright, artistically inclined, and into the extracurriculars, my sister and I were pitted against each other from the very beginning. The retort of “why can’t you be more like your sister?” was directed at whoever was on the out with my parents at that moment. This, with the slightly conflicting (but once again, typically Indian) mantra of, “At the end of the day, all you have is each other. It’s the two of you against the world.”
In their defense, like all parents, ours did the best they could. And to their credit, unhealthy levels of sibling rivalry aside, my sister and I have, by all accounts, turned out quite well. I mean, it could’ve been worse – the competitiveness they passed on could have turned us into a female version of the Ambani brothers. Thank god for small mercies.
Also read: Coping With Sibling Rivalry During Lockdown
As we grew up and developed our own world-views, moving away from home was merely a physical manifestation of us moving further from our parents. And while my relationship with my sister has gone through many phases – of barely-hidden jealousy, resentment over so easily being mistaken for one another, of eventually laughing over that and realising that we’re somehow even more alike than we thought, of being more empathetic towards one another – one thing has always remained constant. It always has been us against the world. Whether ‘the world’ was our parents, or ill-fated romantic partners who made the mistake of thinking we’d ever choose them over each other.
Of course, this was all ‘BP’, or ‘Before Pandemic’. In these ‘unprecedented times’, where all your time is spent within the same four walls, with the same person, it’s easy to grow to hate them. Or at the very least, be mildly annoyed by them. And if the person you’re spending lockdown with is someone you have a love-hate relationship with, while also having a begrudging sense of respect for – well, “lockdown ending violently isn’t unprecedented” (as my sister and I were both reminded by all our friends).
Strangely enough, it’s being under lockdown and managing a house together that made us realise how, as similar as we thought we were, we’re actually two halves of a whole. She finds cooking therapeutic, while I find nothing more satisfying than a clean house. I’m the planner, she’s the executor. We wake up early and cook together, eat our meals together, and “honey, how was your day?” over dinner.
We’re like the perfect married couple (including the ‘no sex’ part). My last thought on most nights is that there’s no one else I’d rather be locked down with.
My sister and I (lockdown edition) are finally people our parents are proud of. During the lockdown, we’ve stuck together for better or for worse. We’ve talked more, communicated more, empathised more, celebrated each other more. In lockdown, more than ever before, we’ve followed our parents’ mantra, quite literally – it is the two of us against the world.
Arnaz Irani is an ad-girl by day. Insomniac by night. Animal-loving, self-deprecating ‘feminazi’ 24×7.
Featured image credit: United Nations/Unsplash