My Sister, My Friend
A Grateful Heart, Day 20
When she was born, I was eight years old. She was my first little one and she had a charming, gamine grin even then, this sister of mine. She was happy with very little: but when that little was taken away, boy, could she holler! She is one of the slow-to-anger Scorpios: very pacifist, very collected, and dignified, unlike my Scorpio son, who goes from zero to hundred before one can open one’s mouth to explain. But once she loses it, one had better run for cover and hide in the nearest air raid shelter and pull it in after one.
She once famously told the man I live with, “I would have killed you.”
She had come to Mumbai after she had completed her MBBS, the Bachelors’ in Medicine, to stay with me for a few days. And my husband had parked the car in front of a very busy shopping center. I had gotten down to buy something and just when I was getting in, he moved the car. Suja was in the car, looking on in horror, convinced that I was going to fall, or be run over. When the car stopped, she waited till she had very solicitously helped me in, and then she turns to him, and says, completely deadpan, very serious, and with no inflection in her voice, “ If anything had happened to her, I would have killed you, you know.”
It is her birthday this month. Two weeks ago, she and my brother-in-law had gone to visit her son, my nephew, at Michigan Uni, and there was a small fence that had to be stepped over. My nephew jumped over, and not to be outdone, his mother did, too. And found herself sprawling in the grass on the other side, her elbow at an unnatural angle. She called me up to tell me that she had dislocated her elbow and fractured her knee, and she was laughing all the while, at herself, at the accident, at the thought of it.
She is brave, this woman I am fortunate to call my sister: in so many places, so many spaces, so many phases of her life, far too private and personal to mention here.
When I count my blessings, I count her thrice.
Stay blessed, Suja Sukumar. You are the best.
©️ 2021 Suma Narayan. All Rights Reserved.
This is a response to Ravyne Hawke’s prompt for the month of November, for her popular publication, ‘Promptly Written.’ Today is Day 20, of the Gratitude Challenge.
