A Letter to the Sibling I Fought With

You broke my favourite toy when we were seven, and I want it on record that I have never fully forgiven you for it, even now, even though I could not tell you today what the toy actually was. What I remember is the fight, not the object - the shouting, the parent called in to arbitrate, the furious, absolute certainty that I was right and you were the worst person who had ever lived. I was seven. The stakes, in hindsight, were extremely low. It did not feel that way at the time.

We fought about almost everything, for years, with a commitment that in retrospect looks almost like dedication. Whose turn it was on the good chair. Who got the bigger piece. Who told on whom first, and whether that even counted given the circumstances, whatever the circumstances were that particular week. I genuinely believed, for a long stretch of my childhood, that you were placed on this earth specifically to make my life more difficult. I suspect you believed the same thing about me.

Somewhere in the years since, without either of us noticing the exact moment it happened, the fighting quietly stopped being the main event. I could not tell you when. There was no single conversation where we agreed to a truce. It just thinned out gradually, the way a habit fades when you stop needing it, and what was left underneath it - once all that noise cleared - turned out to be something closer to devotion than I ever expected to feel about the person who broke my favourite toy on purpose.

Here is what I actually want to say, in the plainest terms I have: I would still fight you over almost nothing, given the chance, because some habits never fully die and honestly I would not want them to. But I would also, without a single second of hesitation, stand between you and anyone or anything that actually threatened you. That is not a contradiction. That is, I have come to realise, exactly what the fighting was always training us for - a lifetime of knowing exactly how far the other person could be pushed, and loving them enough to never actually need to find out where the real line was.

I think the fights were never really about the toy, or the chair, or the remote. They were about two people learning, in the safest possible laboratory, how to be angry at someone and still trust completely that they were not going anywhere. You cannot practise that kind of trust with just anyone. You need someone who is stuck with you regardless, so you can afford to test it.

So, thank you - not despite the fighting, but including it. Thank you for being the person I was allowed to be furious at without ever once fearing it would cost me the relationship. Thirty years later, I still would not put money on either of us winning an argument gracefully. I would put everything I have on you being the first person who shows up if it ever actually mattered.

Some of this is easier to write than to say out loud across a dinner table, so this year, alongside the rakhi, I am giving you a personalised caricature of exactly one of those ridiculous fights we somehow have evidence of - because I think it deserves to be framed properly, not buried in an old phone. We earned that fight. I would like to remember it.