Vasudha Pande

Nothing makes you feel more secure than the warm, glowing knowledge that you’ll always be loved without having to love someone back, she always said. And I always knew she would end up being a mess. I never warned her because I envied her.

Let her suffer, I thought, let her get hurt.

She was the violent child in the family: kicking the dog for no reason, upsetting tables, breaking china, biting guests, pulling girls’ hair at school, spitting all over the swings at the park, and uprooting mother’s herb garden just because she felt like it. I was the quiet one. I used to hide in corners and under furniture. All my childhood was spent in trying to find ways to avoid her. Mother never understood this. Father did. Mother always used to say that I was a bit strange. Look at that girl, she’d say to father, she never makes a sound. It’s as if she doesn’t exist at all! Father would grunt, look at me lovingly, and disappear behind his huge, kind smile. He was the first man who really understood me. And perhaps the only one. He was also the only man who never understood my younger sister. Yet it was she who cried hardest at his funeral. I held her close, taking comfort in the thought that she did love him, after all. She pushed me away. I’ll never know why.

She was the one who cried hardest at father’s funeral. Or pretended to, anyway.

That was the day I became mother’s favourite daughter. She suddenly started loving me. I was the kind one. The obedient one. The quiet one. The shy one. And, most importantly, the one that never tried to upstage her. I was more worthy of being loved than the ungrateful monster that had been breaking her china for years.

Being loved by a woman changed me.

A woman’s love is completely different from a man’s. It shows you the correct way to put make-up on. It spends an entire day scouring the city with you for the perfect dress to wear on your first date. It rocks you to sleep when you have had a bad day. It stays up all night listening to you talk about your latest crush, and interrupts you at the right time to ask interesting questions. It cuddles up in bed with you to watch sappy movies. It instantly knows what you want to say from the look on your face when you’re too overcome to speak. It understands that a child needs a parent’s time. It knows that all anyone ever needs is a little understanding and some time.

A woman’s love was all I needed. It helped me fall in love with myself. With this newfound self-love came courage. I stopped hiding from my younger sister. She continued to smash things, and people. I watched it all from a distance. I could see where she was going. I knew she’d find herself surrounded by broken pieces of her own life someday. But I said nothing. I knew she would hurt herself, and stop someday. I waited for that day.

She was the aggressive one in the family. And I was the one who had developed a taste for sitting quietly in a corner and watching ungrateful brutes destroy themselves.

I waited for her to destroy herself. I had to avenge my mother, the woman who found me worthy of her love. I had to avenge her. And all I needed to do was to sit patiently and watch.

She finally found her match: a man who, like her, was perfectly capable of destroying his own little world. And hers, too. She moved in with him. I visited her regularly, eager to know how much time she had left.

I’ll never know how he managed to break her. Or she, him. I never tried to find out.

I woke one fine morning and was told that she had disappeared without a trace.

He says she went off and killed herself. Mother says she simply ran away. I’m the only one who knows what really happened. I had seen it coming all along.

…

Note on the structure:
There are three main intertwined threads: (a) the younger sister’s story, (b) the elder sister’s thoughts and her description — and interpretation — of situations, and (c) the elder sister’s premonition. The sisters’ childhood events are described in more detail as compared to later ones because the narrator (elder sister) didn’t bother to find out what was going on in her younger sister’s life — she was merely interested in watching her destroy herself. All three threads merge in the end (not very successfully, I may add — but I hope to remedy this in subsequent revisions).