AT THE AIRPORT, MY SISTER hugs and kisses me. This is not unusual. Even friends hug and kiss at airports – hellos and goodbyes. My sister cries. Again, not unusual. My sister, unlike me, is a crier. When we were children, I scoffed at her tears, especially when I had made her cry. When we were adolescents, I railed at them, infuriated, when she used tears to manipulate gullible adults – our parents, other relatives, family friends. I grew out of scoffing and railing to view my sister’s tears as merely uncomfortable.
This time I don’t scoff. I’m not angry. I’m not uncomfortable. I am totally taken aback because the tears, the hugs and the kisses are followed by the words, ‘I love you, Sis.’
Now that is unusual. In nearly sixty years of sisterhood, we have gone through most of the stereotypes which define sibling relationship – admiration, emulation, dismissal, rivalry – and above all, conflict. For the first nearly two decades of our lives, my relationship with my sister was characterised more by fights and arguments, sly digs and insults, than by hugs, kisses and words of love.
How could it be otherwise when I, the newcomer, had arrived to usurp, if not all of the place she’d held alone in the hearts of our parents, if not all of the attention which had been hers alone for nearly two years, then at least some of it. How could it be otherwise when I was such chalk to her cheese? And when all around us, attention was constantly drawn to how nice the cheese was and how awful the chalk?
At first, I had a go at churning my chalk into cheese. It is what younger sisters do – emulate the elder, especially when the elder is so much admired. Our parents evinced as much appreciation for chalk as for cheese, quick to point out my good qualities, those which in their minds must balance out my sister’s – but those qualities of mine weren’t visible. Aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, saw a skinny, gawky ‘tomboy’. Nothing like the girl with round dimpled cheeks and chin, fair skin and shiny straight brown hair plus a ready smile and sweet temper, whose angelic picture many had on their dressers. Nobody wanted the photo of a girl who glowered at the camera like she’d much rather be doing something else, which I usually was – books I was reading, trees I was climbing, worms I was tormenting. These were important things. Having, however, seen the success of my sister’s photo, I once tried striking the same pose for Dad’s beloved Brownie camera. What that younger self didn’t realize was that what was a cute smile on the face of a pretty little girl was simply grotesque simpering on the face of a somewhat aesthetically challenged one. Nobody asked for my picture, nobody invited me to be their flower-girl, as my sister was so often asked to be.
Chalk could never be churned into cheese. It could however, be very good chalk. Before I started school, I learned to turn books into a barricade and words into weapons against, if not hostile, then at least not particularly kindly adults – and their mean children who, lacking the words ‘eccentric’, ‘odd’ or even ‘different’ called me ‘the mad thing.’ In time adults convinced themselves that I was ‘clever’ – if probably a bit mental. Which, it was said, was a relief, since my face would never be my fortune. At school my barricade and weapons were hard currency. At school, cute was good, but clever was better. I was no longer my sister’s awkward ugly sister. I was now the chosen one and she merely my sister. And without having been honed in the struggle for supremacy, she had no way to fight back, at least in the academic arena. She cried.
In time, though, she developed a sharp tongue and, being my sister, knew just the words that hurt most, the ones the unkind adults used. I responded to the sly digs with my fists and feet. She learned to fight back, however poorly. We drove our poor mother, trying to cope with the two little brothers we had by then, to distraction. Finally, one night, our mother threw us out into the backyard. For good measure, she took the axe she used to chop the wood for our stove and handed it to one of us. I don’t remember which. To the other she handed the huge breadknife.
‘Kill each other,’ she said. And with that she locked the door, switched off the yard light and every other light that could possibly lighten the pitch black of a Cape night that for once was moonless and star-less.
Our mother delighted in telling people the outcome of her solution to the problem of her quarrelling daughters as though it was a thought-through solution, rather than one born of total frustration and bone-weariness. Having heard silence outside for some time, she ventured out the front door and around the side of the house. She peered over the fence into the backyard. Two small figures were huddled up against the kitchen door, arms wrapped around each other, fast asleep.
Not all our fights were against each other. Noting how people outside our family were creating a potentially destructive sibling rivalry through praising one child at the expense of the other, our parents did the wise thing. After infant school, they sent us to different primary schools, though ones close enough for us to travel together and look after each other. I don’t think they interpreted looking out for each other in quite the way my sister or I did. Cute kids are envied kids. Cute kids have other cute kid rivals. Envy and rivalry are expressed in slaps and insults. Who knew that better than I? And who knew better than I that physical courage, except when she had her back against the wall and me in her face, was not my sister’s strongest trait. I had barely started at the school over the road from hers when I was called upon to use my fists in my sister’s defence.
Most children, when confronted with the threat, ‘I’ll fetch my sister for you!’ expect to be challenged by their victim’s older, bigger, stronger sister, not a younger sister, smaller and skinnier than any of my sister’s enemies. Their laughter died down when I demonstrated swiftly that while they were learning the gentle art of simpering, I was acquiring the much less gentle craft of street-fighting. For several weeks after I’d entered my new school I crossed the road to pick up my sister at hers – and to mete out punishment to her enemies. Those weeks kept her physically safe for the rest of her primary school years – with a few top ups here and there – though not safe from me. Nobody messed with my sister, except me.
My sister looked with equal disfavour on outsiders who hurt me. That was her place, not theirs. She delighted in my fights with those I could beat up physically and giggled when I slyly insulted adults with words they didn’t understand and, when they chose to regard what I’d said as something rather clever, even clapped and asked me to repeat it, she laughed outright. Since most of my digs were in self-defence, our parents only pulled us up half-heartedly. With one exception. We were not allowed to make fun of a man we were taught to call ‘Uncle Aubrey’ – ‘Uncle’ being a title bestowed on every adult male just as every adult female was an ‘Aunty’.
Uncle Aubrey was the local hairdresser. Every woman’s friend. Every man’s defensive sneer. The butt of every knowing adolescent’s jokes. Uncle Aubrey was a mincing limp-wristed fop, called a ‘moffie’ behind his back, the derogatory term for less than macho men. He was only welcome in most homes when women and children (barring older boys) were alone at home. When I grew up, I realised that was out of fear that he was gay and might in some way taint the manhood of the master of the house and all his male children. He was our mother’s friend and as such, was always welcome in our house. We were, after all, the weird family who read books and newspapers, talked politics and had at least one half-mad child. It would be our dad, if anybody, who wasn’t scared Uncle Aubrey might ‘do something’ to him. Seriously.
Uncle Aubrey, our father admonished, had more than enough insults every day of his life. He didn’t need cheek from us. And true, we’d seen the nudging and winking from adults when Uncle Aubrey went down the street, seen boys following him, mincing along, limp-wristed and squeaky-voiced in perfect parody. We got the idea that it would be kind of like making fun of someone for being blind, deaf or dumb i.e. punishing someone for something they were and couldn’t help, rather than for something they did.
Unfortunately, Uncle Aubrey didn’t reciprocate. To this scented, powdered man, constantly conscious of his lightness of complexion, augmented by face-powder, my mother was blessed to have a daughter like my sister and to be pitied for having me, a scruffy skinny brown girl, barefoot and in ragged shorts for the most part, long plaits flying all over. He petted and fondled my sister, oohed and aahed over her, did her hair, would have put make up on her, if my mother let him. She was his little doll. He brought her presents, always finding some excuse for not bringing me anything until our mother forbade bringing her anything if I didn’t get a present too. When he persisted, our poor mother, torn between having both children deprived of gifts she couldn’t afford, and letting at least one have them, put them away and afterwards divided what could be divided.
One year we’d both been eyeing some Easter Eggs in the local shop window. We knew our parents could never afford them. They’d have to buy four eggs of equivalent value, for by now we had two younger brothers. There’d be just the string of marshmallow filled little eggs for all to share. Come Easter Sunday, Uncle Aubrey appeared. Wreathed in smiles, he presented my sister with a large box, beautifully wrapped. Our mother protested. He knew the rules. Unless it was a birthday, either both her girls had to be given gifts or neither.
‘Oh, don’t worry,’ said Uncle Aubrey, waving an elegant hand. ‘I’ve got something for her.’ Then he turned to my sister and urged her to open her present.
Inside was the beautiful cup and saucer set she’d so admired, gold-rimmed and patterned with ballerinas. In the cup was an enormous chocolate egg. Eyes brimming, mouth smiling, my sister flung her arms around Uncle Aubrey and thanked him.
Our mother eyed him expectantly. From his bag, he brought out another parcel, plainly wrapped in brown paper, but large enough for me to hope that it contained the egg-cup shaped bedside clock I wanted, with, of course, an egg the same size as my sister’s inside. Layer after layer of wrapping came away in my hands until I found, when all were stripped, a string of marshmallow-filled little eggs. I looked at Uncle Aubrey. He smiled innocently. Stricken that I’d let myself be fooled into a false hope, I opened my mouth to vent my anger but my sister got there first.
She rounded on Uncle Aubrey. ‘I hate you,’ she spat out, slamming her gift, fortunately still in its box, down on the sofa. ‘You… moffie!’
I gasped at her use of the forbidden word, specifically banned by our dad. But my sister wasn’t finished.
‘I’m sick of you,’ she went on. ‘I’m sick of hearing you say that I don’t have to be clever because I’m pretty. I’m sick of you saying it’s a good thing my sister’s clever because her looks will never be her fortune. You are such a racist and a …’ she ran out of words and turned to me. ‘You tell him!’
‘Hypocrite?’ I asked her.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That. We don’t make fun of you because you’re the way you are but you don’t like my sister because of the way she is. And you’re such a coward,’ – no help needed from me this time – ‘You’re too scared to say it in front of mummy and daddy! But we’re not deaf.’
‘Or stupid.’ I added.
Without a word, Uncle Aubrey turned and walked out. He must not have been listening when our mother told the story about the axe and the knife. Whilst my sister and I might, in our mother’s words, fight like cat and dog, neither of us would allow the other to suffer at any other hands, though it be Mother Nature’s dark night or Uncle Aubrey’s petty racism.
When he’d gone, my mother put the present in the cabinet which, nearly half a century later, my sister’s son would inherit – with the cup and saucer still amongst our mother’s other trinkets. I don’t remember eating the chocolate. I guess it was given away.
My sister was already an established presence when I entered high school. This time neither of us found the comparisons people inevitably made, particularly odious. We each had our ‘thing.’ Hers was having a good time, boys, music, games, smoking up on the football field. Mine was concentrating on getting the grades I needed for where I was headed. To my recollection, neither of us was ever called upon to defend the other.
The squabbles between us abated but never quite died down. She wanted our room painted pink, with pink bedspreads and curtains. I favoured green. Our mother settled the argument by making us paint two walls green and two pink. My sister had a pink spread and I a green one. Our mother found mottled pink and green curtains and carpet. The room was enough to make anyone throw up. Neither of us would admit to hating the décor but that we had to live with until she married. I kept the room just as it was.
Our mother complained with mock bitterness that the day one daughter married she lost both. ‘Kill each other when they live together but can’t live without each other,’ she intoned.
Hanging out at my sister’s place lasted only a few months until her path took her to parenthood and mine took me to university and political activism. True, I loved her children and played aunt when I had time. True, she lent her home for secret forbidden meetings. Essentially though, my friends were my comrades, hers were her fellow young parents. Then came the big divide. I crossed the ocean. The gulf widened as much physically as it had intellectually, occupationally, emotionally, politically, socially, for the previous few years.
There were no sister fights as we passed into middle age. It’s hard to fight with someone whose life is so different from yours that there aren’t even issues common enough to differ on, and with whom, in any event, you exchange only cards on Eid and birthdays, the occasional letter, a few calls per year. Equally, it’s hard to be close to someone across six thousand miles and an ocean.
Then the apartheid regime began to totter. I went home. I took my sister the gift she’d yearned for. A niece to put an end to her complaints that she’d made her siblings aunt and uncles in our teens yet remained nobody’s aunt. It was love at first sight on both sides. Ignoring her three grandparents, whom she had met before, my infant daughter held out her plump arms to my sister. My sister scooped her up and wouldn’t let go. On our next visit to Cape Town, we stayed with my sister. Every night my toddler crept out of my bed to snuggle between my sister and her husband. It was a sign of things to come. For the next eighteen years, I lived with a girl just like my sister, pretty, coquettish, a lover of nail polish, makeup, hair dye and fashionable clothes. The same girl comfortably embodied the things my sister had never been – activist, sportswoman, book-lover. Both of my parents’ daughters rolled into one.
The fights with my sister began again, but this time not against her, alongside her. This time not in her defence but in defence of our parents. A threat to them needed someone tough to sort it out. She called me. I sorted it out, long distance. A few years later came the dreaded call in the middle of the night – our father had had a stroke. My sister needed me to do battle with the pathetic healthcare system. She needed me to persuade our mother to accept paid help in caring for him. I flew over. Doctors and hospitals, I could sort out. Our mother I couldn’t. The best I could do was make my trips home more frequent and offer myself as mum’s assistant, relieving the siblings for some much-needed time with their own families. Often, I stayed with my sister rather than my parents. I thought she was just doing the usual Cape thing – argue about who was going to host the visitor(s). Looking back, that was the start of a new relationship which I completely missed. In my defence, I can only say that I was intent on spending almost all my time in Cape Town with my parents.
Ten years later our father died. Growing up, we had our mother to deal not only with household tasks and childrearing, but also with family formalities and administration. What she couldn’t handle in the latter category fell to me. I left home and my siblings matured yet still mum would appeal to me to sort out this or that. I wrote letters and emails, I made long-distance calls.
Now with our mother sunk in dementia, it fell to my father’s children to arrange his funeral. I happened to be the only one of us in the house when he died. I held on just long enough for my siblings to arrive before sliding into a cluster of epileptic fits. My shocked and grieving siblings had hours to inform the wider family and community of our dad’s death and at the same time arrange the funeral – the secular formalities as well as the religious rites. And there was I, not just useless, but adding to their burden.
They acquitted themselves admirably, despite their pain. In the thirty years of my exile ‘the boys’ had grown to be men with their own children, responsible jobs and respect in the community. Our sister had grown into a capable woman. Together they did what had to be done, relieving me of all responsibility, ensuring I was as cared for as our mother.
I had seen my sister cry on the attack, cry in self-defence, cry to ward off all ills, cry for the real injuries to herself or others as well as the imagined ones, even ones in movies. I had never seen her dissolve into pure devastation. I had never been totally devastated myself. I cried like a child. I wanted my dad. I wanted my mum. I got my sister. She wrapped me in her arms and I held on. Two lost children adrift.
The funeral over, there were the Seven Nights Prayers to be arranged. Our sister announced that, contrary to tradition, prayers would be said at her house, not our parents’ home. Not because she was eldest, but, she said, because our dad loved her best.
Thirty years ago, I would have been furious. I would have argued bitterly that I was the one whom everyone said looked most like him, made him proudest, stood shoulder to shoulder with him in struggle. I was his daughter so much more than she was. Thirty years ago, I’d have made her cry. Forty years ago, I’d probably have hit her. I didn’t argue with either her proposal or her reason. Nor did ‘the boys’. Each of us had his or her own place in our father’s heart, in his regard. Each of us knew his or her place. With that we were content. Outrageous as it might seem to outsiders for one of a man’s children to assert that she was more loved than her siblings, it was true. We were all parents. We understood the powerful tug of that first child on any parent’s heart. In a tiny secret part of my heart lies an unspoken reason for not having a second child – a fierce resentment, jealousy even, that some as yet unconceived stranger might want to displace my beloved daughter or share all that is hers. If my father felt the same way about my sister – first born, first to say ‘dadda’, first to bestow infant smiles on him, first to toddle and fall into his arms, who was I to argue? None of us could hold the same magic for him as she did.
A fortnight later I was on a plane, bound for my own little family in the place I’d called home for three decades. The airport farewells held change and no change. The older of my two brothers colonized most of an airport restaurant as usual and threw an impromptu farewell party. My younger brother came tearing across the departure hall, late as usual, grinning all over his face, kids in tow. Those were, I think, the only things unchanged.
The airport itself had changed, not only its name from that of colonizer to mother city, but had modernized and become a busy international airport, the users of which were as much black as white. The people coming to see me off had changed. Grown nephews and nieces, and some little ones, sat in the place of my grandmother, my mother-in-law, my aunts and uncles who had packed our first goodbye to homeland.
The most painful change of course, lay in the absence of my parents. I’d said goodbye to our father at his graveside. There was no rough tobacco-smelling cheek laid against mine at the airport, no kiss on my forehead and a gruff admonishment to take care of myself and my husband and daughter. I’d said goodbye to my mother at her bedside. The airport would be too stressful for her. We sang golden oldies together. She remembered all the words and the tunes. She didn’t remember to tell me that she loved me.
Instead of our mother, it was my sister clinging to me tearfully at the airport, whispering in my ear, ‘I love you. Remember to call.’
I called every week, as I used to call our parents. Over the next two years we fought together to care for our mother, each in his or her own way. Then the second dreaded call came. Our mother had gone to join our father. We dealt with it as we had before. Together.
I still call my sister every week. She tells me she loves me. I say that I love her. And I do. My sister. Not fighting against me. Not fighting with me. Fighting for me. Holding me against the darkness left by our parents’ departure.
Now that is unusual. In nearly sixty years of sisterhood, we have gone through most of the stereotypes which define sibling relationship – admiration, emulation, dismissal, rivalry – and above all, conflict. For the first nearly two decades of our lives, my relationship with my sister was characterised more by fights and arguments, sly digs and insults, than by hugs, kisses and words of love.
How could it be otherwise when I, the newcomer, had arrived to usurp, if not all of the place she’d held alone in the hearts of our parents, if not all of the attention which had been hers alone for nearly two years, then at least some of it. How could it be otherwise when I was such chalk to her cheese? And when all around us, attention was constantly drawn to how nice the cheese was and how awful the chalk?
At first, I had a go at churning my chalk into cheese. It is what younger sisters do – emulate the elder, especially when the elder is so much admired. Our parents evinced as much appreciation for chalk as for cheese, quick to point out my good qualities, those which in their minds must balance out my sister’s – but those qualities of mine weren’t visible. Aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, saw a skinny, gawky ‘tomboy’. Nothing like the girl with round dimpled cheeks and chin, fair skin and shiny straight brown hair plus a ready smile and sweet temper, whose angelic picture many had on their dressers. Nobody wanted the photo of a girl who glowered at the camera like she’d much rather be doing something else, which I usually was – books I was reading, trees I was climbing, worms I was tormenting. These were important things. Having, however, seen the success of my sister’s photo, I once tried striking the same pose for Dad’s beloved Brownie camera. What that younger self didn’t realize was that what was a cute smile on the face of a pretty little girl was simply grotesque simpering on the face of a somewhat aesthetically challenged one. Nobody asked for my picture, nobody invited me to be their flower-girl, as my sister was so often asked to be.
Chalk could never be churned into cheese. It could however, be very good chalk. Before I started school, I learned to turn books into a barricade and words into weapons against, if not hostile, then at least not particularly kindly adults – and their mean children who, lacking the words ‘eccentric’, ‘odd’ or even ‘different’ called me ‘the mad thing.’ In time adults convinced themselves that I was ‘clever’ – if probably a bit mental. Which, it was said, was a relief, since my face would never be my fortune. At school my barricade and weapons were hard currency. At school, cute was good, but clever was better. I was no longer my sister’s awkward ugly sister. I was now the chosen one and she merely my sister. And without having been honed in the struggle for supremacy, she had no way to fight back, at least in the academic arena. She cried.
In time, though, she developed a sharp tongue and, being my sister, knew just the words that hurt most, the ones the unkind adults used. I responded to the sly digs with my fists and feet. She learned to fight back, however poorly. We drove our poor mother, trying to cope with the two little brothers we had by then, to distraction. Finally, one night, our mother threw us out into the backyard. For good measure, she took the axe she used to chop the wood for our stove and handed it to one of us. I don’t remember which. To the other she handed the huge breadknife.
‘Kill each other,’ she said. And with that she locked the door, switched off the yard light and every other light that could possibly lighten the pitch black of a Cape night that for once was moonless and star-less.
Our mother delighted in telling people the outcome of her solution to the problem of her quarrelling daughters as though it was a thought-through solution, rather than one born of total frustration and bone-weariness. Having heard silence outside for some time, she ventured out the front door and around the side of the house. She peered over the fence into the backyard. Two small figures were huddled up against the kitchen door, arms wrapped around each other, fast asleep.
Not all our fights were against each other. Noting how people outside our family were creating a potentially destructive sibling rivalry through praising one child at the expense of the other, our parents did the wise thing. After infant school, they sent us to different primary schools, though ones close enough for us to travel together and look after each other. I don’t think they interpreted looking out for each other in quite the way my sister or I did. Cute kids are envied kids. Cute kids have other cute kid rivals. Envy and rivalry are expressed in slaps and insults. Who knew that better than I? And who knew better than I that physical courage, except when she had her back against the wall and me in her face, was not my sister’s strongest trait. I had barely started at the school over the road from hers when I was called upon to use my fists in my sister’s defence.
Most children, when confronted with the threat, ‘I’ll fetch my sister for you!’ expect to be challenged by their victim’s older, bigger, stronger sister, not a younger sister, smaller and skinnier than any of my sister’s enemies. Their laughter died down when I demonstrated swiftly that while they were learning the gentle art of simpering, I was acquiring the much less gentle craft of street-fighting. For several weeks after I’d entered my new school I crossed the road to pick up my sister at hers – and to mete out punishment to her enemies. Those weeks kept her physically safe for the rest of her primary school years – with a few top ups here and there – though not safe from me. Nobody messed with my sister, except me.
My sister looked with equal disfavour on outsiders who hurt me. That was her place, not theirs. She delighted in my fights with those I could beat up physically and giggled when I slyly insulted adults with words they didn’t understand and, when they chose to regard what I’d said as something rather clever, even clapped and asked me to repeat it, she laughed outright. Since most of my digs were in self-defence, our parents only pulled us up half-heartedly. With one exception. We were not allowed to make fun of a man we were taught to call ‘Uncle Aubrey’ – ‘Uncle’ being a title bestowed on every adult male just as every adult female was an ‘Aunty’.
Uncle Aubrey was the local hairdresser. Every woman’s friend. Every man’s defensive sneer. The butt of every knowing adolescent’s jokes. Uncle Aubrey was a mincing limp-wristed fop, called a ‘moffie’ behind his back, the derogatory term for less than macho men. He was only welcome in most homes when women and children (barring older boys) were alone at home. When I grew up, I realised that was out of fear that he was gay and might in some way taint the manhood of the master of the house and all his male children. He was our mother’s friend and as such, was always welcome in our house. We were, after all, the weird family who read books and newspapers, talked politics and had at least one half-mad child. It would be our dad, if anybody, who wasn’t scared Uncle Aubrey might ‘do something’ to him. Seriously.
Uncle Aubrey, our father admonished, had more than enough insults every day of his life. He didn’t need cheek from us. And true, we’d seen the nudging and winking from adults when Uncle Aubrey went down the street, seen boys following him, mincing along, limp-wristed and squeaky-voiced in perfect parody. We got the idea that it would be kind of like making fun of someone for being blind, deaf or dumb i.e. punishing someone for something they were and couldn’t help, rather than for something they did.
Unfortunately, Uncle Aubrey didn’t reciprocate. To this scented, powdered man, constantly conscious of his lightness of complexion, augmented by face-powder, my mother was blessed to have a daughter like my sister and to be pitied for having me, a scruffy skinny brown girl, barefoot and in ragged shorts for the most part, long plaits flying all over. He petted and fondled my sister, oohed and aahed over her, did her hair, would have put make up on her, if my mother let him. She was his little doll. He brought her presents, always finding some excuse for not bringing me anything until our mother forbade bringing her anything if I didn’t get a present too. When he persisted, our poor mother, torn between having both children deprived of gifts she couldn’t afford, and letting at least one have them, put them away and afterwards divided what could be divided.
One year we’d both been eyeing some Easter Eggs in the local shop window. We knew our parents could never afford them. They’d have to buy four eggs of equivalent value, for by now we had two younger brothers. There’d be just the string of marshmallow filled little eggs for all to share. Come Easter Sunday, Uncle Aubrey appeared. Wreathed in smiles, he presented my sister with a large box, beautifully wrapped. Our mother protested. He knew the rules. Unless it was a birthday, either both her girls had to be given gifts or neither.
‘Oh, don’t worry,’ said Uncle Aubrey, waving an elegant hand. ‘I’ve got something for her.’ Then he turned to my sister and urged her to open her present.
Inside was the beautiful cup and saucer set she’d so admired, gold-rimmed and patterned with ballerinas. In the cup was an enormous chocolate egg. Eyes brimming, mouth smiling, my sister flung her arms around Uncle Aubrey and thanked him.
Our mother eyed him expectantly. From his bag, he brought out another parcel, plainly wrapped in brown paper, but large enough for me to hope that it contained the egg-cup shaped bedside clock I wanted, with, of course, an egg the same size as my sister’s inside. Layer after layer of wrapping came away in my hands until I found, when all were stripped, a string of marshmallow-filled little eggs. I looked at Uncle Aubrey. He smiled innocently. Stricken that I’d let myself be fooled into a false hope, I opened my mouth to vent my anger but my sister got there first.
She rounded on Uncle Aubrey. ‘I hate you,’ she spat out, slamming her gift, fortunately still in its box, down on the sofa. ‘You… moffie!’
I gasped at her use of the forbidden word, specifically banned by our dad. But my sister wasn’t finished.
‘I’m sick of you,’ she went on. ‘I’m sick of hearing you say that I don’t have to be clever because I’m pretty. I’m sick of you saying it’s a good thing my sister’s clever because her looks will never be her fortune. You are such a racist and a …’ she ran out of words and turned to me. ‘You tell him!’
‘Hypocrite?’ I asked her.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That. We don’t make fun of you because you’re the way you are but you don’t like my sister because of the way she is. And you’re such a coward,’ – no help needed from me this time – ‘You’re too scared to say it in front of mummy and daddy! But we’re not deaf.’
‘Or stupid.’ I added.
Without a word, Uncle Aubrey turned and walked out. He must not have been listening when our mother told the story about the axe and the knife. Whilst my sister and I might, in our mother’s words, fight like cat and dog, neither of us would allow the other to suffer at any other hands, though it be Mother Nature’s dark night or Uncle Aubrey’s petty racism.
When he’d gone, my mother put the present in the cabinet which, nearly half a century later, my sister’s son would inherit – with the cup and saucer still amongst our mother’s other trinkets. I don’t remember eating the chocolate. I guess it was given away.
My sister was already an established presence when I entered high school. This time neither of us found the comparisons people inevitably made, particularly odious. We each had our ‘thing.’ Hers was having a good time, boys, music, games, smoking up on the football field. Mine was concentrating on getting the grades I needed for where I was headed. To my recollection, neither of us was ever called upon to defend the other.
The squabbles between us abated but never quite died down. She wanted our room painted pink, with pink bedspreads and curtains. I favoured green. Our mother settled the argument by making us paint two walls green and two pink. My sister had a pink spread and I a green one. Our mother found mottled pink and green curtains and carpet. The room was enough to make anyone throw up. Neither of us would admit to hating the décor but that we had to live with until she married. I kept the room just as it was.
Our mother complained with mock bitterness that the day one daughter married she lost both. ‘Kill each other when they live together but can’t live without each other,’ she intoned.
Hanging out at my sister’s place lasted only a few months until her path took her to parenthood and mine took me to university and political activism. True, I loved her children and played aunt when I had time. True, she lent her home for secret forbidden meetings. Essentially though, my friends were my comrades, hers were her fellow young parents. Then came the big divide. I crossed the ocean. The gulf widened as much physically as it had intellectually, occupationally, emotionally, politically, socially, for the previous few years.
There were no sister fights as we passed into middle age. It’s hard to fight with someone whose life is so different from yours that there aren’t even issues common enough to differ on, and with whom, in any event, you exchange only cards on Eid and birthdays, the occasional letter, a few calls per year. Equally, it’s hard to be close to someone across six thousand miles and an ocean.
Then the apartheid regime began to totter. I went home. I took my sister the gift she’d yearned for. A niece to put an end to her complaints that she’d made her siblings aunt and uncles in our teens yet remained nobody’s aunt. It was love at first sight on both sides. Ignoring her three grandparents, whom she had met before, my infant daughter held out her plump arms to my sister. My sister scooped her up and wouldn’t let go. On our next visit to Cape Town, we stayed with my sister. Every night my toddler crept out of my bed to snuggle between my sister and her husband. It was a sign of things to come. For the next eighteen years, I lived with a girl just like my sister, pretty, coquettish, a lover of nail polish, makeup, hair dye and fashionable clothes. The same girl comfortably embodied the things my sister had never been – activist, sportswoman, book-lover. Both of my parents’ daughters rolled into one.
The fights with my sister began again, but this time not against her, alongside her. This time not in her defence but in defence of our parents. A threat to them needed someone tough to sort it out. She called me. I sorted it out, long distance. A few years later came the dreaded call in the middle of the night – our father had had a stroke. My sister needed me to do battle with the pathetic healthcare system. She needed me to persuade our mother to accept paid help in caring for him. I flew over. Doctors and hospitals, I could sort out. Our mother I couldn’t. The best I could do was make my trips home more frequent and offer myself as mum’s assistant, relieving the siblings for some much-needed time with their own families. Often, I stayed with my sister rather than my parents. I thought she was just doing the usual Cape thing – argue about who was going to host the visitor(s). Looking back, that was the start of a new relationship which I completely missed. In my defence, I can only say that I was intent on spending almost all my time in Cape Town with my parents.
Ten years later our father died. Growing up, we had our mother to deal not only with household tasks and childrearing, but also with family formalities and administration. What she couldn’t handle in the latter category fell to me. I left home and my siblings matured yet still mum would appeal to me to sort out this or that. I wrote letters and emails, I made long-distance calls.
Now with our mother sunk in dementia, it fell to my father’s children to arrange his funeral. I happened to be the only one of us in the house when he died. I held on just long enough for my siblings to arrive before sliding into a cluster of epileptic fits. My shocked and grieving siblings had hours to inform the wider family and community of our dad’s death and at the same time arrange the funeral – the secular formalities as well as the religious rites. And there was I, not just useless, but adding to their burden.
They acquitted themselves admirably, despite their pain. In the thirty years of my exile ‘the boys’ had grown to be men with their own children, responsible jobs and respect in the community. Our sister had grown into a capable woman. Together they did what had to be done, relieving me of all responsibility, ensuring I was as cared for as our mother.
I had seen my sister cry on the attack, cry in self-defence, cry to ward off all ills, cry for the real injuries to herself or others as well as the imagined ones, even ones in movies. I had never seen her dissolve into pure devastation. I had never been totally devastated myself. I cried like a child. I wanted my dad. I wanted my mum. I got my sister. She wrapped me in her arms and I held on. Two lost children adrift.
The funeral over, there were the Seven Nights Prayers to be arranged. Our sister announced that, contrary to tradition, prayers would be said at her house, not our parents’ home. Not because she was eldest, but, she said, because our dad loved her best.
Thirty years ago, I would have been furious. I would have argued bitterly that I was the one whom everyone said looked most like him, made him proudest, stood shoulder to shoulder with him in struggle. I was his daughter so much more than she was. Thirty years ago, I’d have made her cry. Forty years ago, I’d probably have hit her. I didn’t argue with either her proposal or her reason. Nor did ‘the boys’. Each of us had his or her own place in our father’s heart, in his regard. Each of us knew his or her place. With that we were content. Outrageous as it might seem to outsiders for one of a man’s children to assert that she was more loved than her siblings, it was true. We were all parents. We understood the powerful tug of that first child on any parent’s heart. In a tiny secret part of my heart lies an unspoken reason for not having a second child – a fierce resentment, jealousy even, that some as yet unconceived stranger might want to displace my beloved daughter or share all that is hers. If my father felt the same way about my sister – first born, first to say ‘dadda’, first to bestow infant smiles on him, first to toddle and fall into his arms, who was I to argue? None of us could hold the same magic for him as she did.
A fortnight later I was on a plane, bound for my own little family in the place I’d called home for three decades. The airport farewells held change and no change. The older of my two brothers colonized most of an airport restaurant as usual and threw an impromptu farewell party. My younger brother came tearing across the departure hall, late as usual, grinning all over his face, kids in tow. Those were, I think, the only things unchanged.
The airport itself had changed, not only its name from that of colonizer to mother city, but had modernized and become a busy international airport, the users of which were as much black as white. The people coming to see me off had changed. Grown nephews and nieces, and some little ones, sat in the place of my grandmother, my mother-in-law, my aunts and uncles who had packed our first goodbye to homeland.
The most painful change of course, lay in the absence of my parents. I’d said goodbye to our father at his graveside. There was no rough tobacco-smelling cheek laid against mine at the airport, no kiss on my forehead and a gruff admonishment to take care of myself and my husband and daughter. I’d said goodbye to my mother at her bedside. The airport would be too stressful for her. We sang golden oldies together. She remembered all the words and the tunes. She didn’t remember to tell me that she loved me.
Instead of our mother, it was my sister clinging to me tearfully at the airport, whispering in my ear, ‘I love you. Remember to call.’
I called every week, as I used to call our parents. Over the next two years we fought together to care for our mother, each in his or her own way. Then the second dreaded call came. Our mother had gone to join our father. We dealt with it as we had before. Together.
I still call my sister every week. She tells me she loves me. I say that I love her. And I do. My sister. Not fighting against me. Not fighting with me. Fighting for me. Holding me against the darkness left by our parents’ departure.
Born in Cape Town, South Africa under apartheid, Shereen Pandit became a lawyer, lecturer, political activist and trade unionist. Exiled in the UK, she completed a PhD in law, continued her activism and began writing. Her work has been published in the UK and elsewhere, in English and translation. She has won prizes including the Booktrust London Award and been shortlisted for others including the CBA Short Story Prize. Her work was read on stage and broadcast on radio in the USA and is used in European schools.
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