Sibling Rivalry

My cousin and I grew up together in Delhi; our Mothers were good friends so as families we met very often. Our dolls used to spend the week at each other's houses, we used to make 'Fanta' by powdering orange drops and then mixing it with Soda, we used to cook food in toy utensils over a candle flame, we used to play 'Beauty Parlor' with our dolls where we would be the beauticians and our dolls at the receiving end of our experimentations. She introduced me to the forbidden Star comics, which were a pictorial representation of a romantic story. Then the kiss seemed a repulsive thing - imagine a man and woman exchanging saliva - YUCK! However curiosity about this man woman thing (however yucky it seemed) made us consume quite a few of this disreputable literature before we were caught.

She was the darling of the colony, everybody knew her, and even my Mother would comment that she is such a bright and lively girl. "Why can’t you be more like her?" She would say. While my cousin's mother would say how quiet, reserved and polite I was and she would say "Why cant you be more like your cousin?" and bemoan the various imagined faults that her daughter had. We were oblivious to all these comparisons as we were very young. Later she moved away to Pune and we wrote each other long letters writing about inconsequential things.

My cousin and her parents visited us at times; she grew up to be a raving beauty with umpteen boyfriends. She used to tell me about some of them and their declarations of undying love while her mother complained to my mother about the pitfalls of having a beautiful teenaged daughter who is addicted to flirting. I was the fat bespectacled serious and studious teen who boys did not talk to or looked at so my mother had no such worries. My mother would say "Isn't she beautiful? She has grown up to be so pretty!" while her mother would say "I wish my daughter was more like your daughter? She is so mentally stable and serious about studies".

Somewhere down the line I would hear that how well my cousin draws and sketches, how good she is at writing poetry and so on. I am sure she also heard many of my imagined or real talents from her mother. Perhaps the jealousy crept in somewhere and started showing up. I still remember the first incident where I was thrilled that I solved the Rubik's cube puzzle, my cousin too wanted a shot at it and said she needed to concentrate and went to her room - alone. Voila! She came out with a solved Rubik's cube, however on closer inspection, I found that all stickers had been tampered with and had been moved around to 'solve' the puzzle. She probably felt that she would be compared to me yet again so she felt the need to prove herself in any which way she could.

Somehow things were never quite the same after that and to this very day, after so many years we still are uncomfortable around each other, we may not show it but its there. The other day she invited us for lunch, my Mother waxed eloquent about her artistic capabilities and the way she had decorated her house while I mentally hemmed and hawed and yawned. May be she did but I have this mental block not to recognize anything that she did and to this day I think that she is the most ordinary looking girl in this world while everybody around me thinks she is model material.

Its just one of those things one cannot change...