My sister doesn’t remember when she learnt that she had had a near-death experience after her birth. The information came to her second-hand — through relatives who would come home and point at her and say, “This is the one who had the operation?” It slowly dawned on her that something must have gone horribly wrong.
My sister used to be a carefree person, who lived life on her terms and mostly went with the flow. Growing up, she didn’t give two hoots about academics or career; playing and having fun was the short and long-term goal. When she was 14, an insensitive cousin told her in passing, “We had prepared for your death, it’s just luck that you are alive.” This comment brought on a full-blown existential crisis and confrontation with parents.
Later, my mother narrated the whole incident — the medical condition, the surgery, and the reaction and support (sometimes lack) of relatives.
I am still not privy to the details, and the spaced-out teenager that I was, I never realised what my younger sister had gone through.
She was troubled with the question: if she had nearly escaped death at birth, what was the purpose for which she lived? Questions to which no one had or has answers. She recently told me she felt depressed then and added, “You know, a teenager doesn’t think those things. They shouldn’t.”
When we were young, teachers and relatives constantly compared how “different” my sister and I were. This along with news that “she wasn’t meant to exist” took her innocence away. She grew distant. There were fewer sunny days and many tantrums.
She learnt that there were people who had asked my parents to “not bother” as she was, after all, the second girl child. But my father (who once nearly fainted when I got lost in a tourist place) and my mother never gave up.
Over the years, my parents worked with her to resolve these issues. They helped me understand what she was going through. They told her there was a better world out there. She reached her lowest point when she was around sixteen, and then suddenly she made a full U-turn. She was back to being carefree and reckless.
When I asked her how she shed her “troubled child” persona, she said, “It was simple. I needed a change of environment and a change of identity. I stopped listening to what people had to say, and I tried a lot of different things. I still did not know what I wanted to do, but I knew what I did not want to do. And I knew, there was a purpose.”
She changed schools and blocked out unsolicited advice from nosy relatives. Sometimes I envy how she has trained herself to “not be serious about things out of your control”.
She now has an excellent academic and professional record. She parties hard, and has learnt to live life on her own terms again. Relatives don’t compare her with anyone, nor do they remember that they had written her off. They are proud of her, oblivious of the detrimental impact comparisons and insensitivity had on her childhood. She is so full of energy that my parents find it difficult to keep up with her.
From vivacious to downcast to vivacious, she has come a full circle. Only with one motto: you are your own master.
