Half blood
"Are you going?" she asked her brother softly through the phone; partly due to reverence and partly due to –
"Where? To my half-sister's janazaah?"
"Yea," she scraped up those words from her overloaded but currently, fuzzy, brain-vault hemisphere. Felt like Daphne from Scooby Doo looking for her glasses in a larger-than-life library, curtained in the weight of cobwebs. Like a twig groaning: DANGER! OVER CAPACITY but who can ever hear the twig?
She noticed the emphasis on the word, half. Like the italic you see in books, a slanted word indicating you to stress on it.
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Their baby sister drowned but all her brother could still feel was resentment. He resented the now DEAD baby girl because their father left their family for her mother. But how is it, the little girl's fault? Their father did reconcile and live with them all together like one, blended family, which was greatly uncomfortable at first but later felt normal. Like something inconspicuous – that's just always been. Like, a constant.
He wished his father was more constant in their lives. But so did she. He wished the father loved their mother like what love should be like – constant, consistent, like an anchor holding the ship.
But what even is constant? Except uncertainty; except death. Her thoughts trailed on. She was still holding the phone drowning out his excuses with her stream of consciousness. Stream of consciousness always delighted her because she was inspired by Virginia Woolf.
"Why am I thinking of Virginia Woolf in delight?" she thought to herself, guilty to feel an ounce of happiness. "My baby sister is no more." I should be feeling every intensity of that poem by WH Auden, the one that was in the movie, Four Weddings, and a Funeral.
"So, I will go next weekend. Her mother will be cooking her famous biryani-"
Biryani. How can one be thinking of yummy food when their sister is gone? What does blood even mean? Isn't it supposed to carry your DNA and make you similar? How can her full bloodied brother with the same mom and same dad be thinking of the amazing biriyani right now?
Supposedly hated her for being so devoutly loyal to our mother but where is his loyalty to her now. She shuddered at the hypocrisy of her brother. "Brother," she thought to herself. She hung up finally when he said bye and felt her temperature rise. It was a clear psychological reaction to his bullshit.
She entered the shower to lower her temperature. She wanted to go to a lab and research on this, "blood is thicker than water" saying. What half. Her sister, period. Love isn't half.
She thought of when her father came over to tell her the news because her father knew her. Knew that she was all in love.
"We need to tell bhaiya" she remembered telling her father.
"I sent him a text." Her father responded matter-of-factly like reading out the news, like the newsreader he was.
She would've protested to a dry text notifying about someone's death, but she just heard her sister died that day. She made her favourite earl grey, but it tasted so bland. She remembered all this as she sat under the shower and wondered how her brother could think of biriyani when her favourite earl grey turned bland.
The sunset was supposedly pink and pretty that evening according to social media posts, but she doesn't remember feeling how pretty it was. Nothing felt pretty. She walked at the park she always walked at and saw all the new, colourful flowers embracing Spring and they felt like plastic fakes. Like plastic people, like anything and anyone that's a façade, a lie, a scam.
She turned off the shower knob and watched the water go down, and down, and down and down the drain, taking a part of her that she won't ever retrieve. Despite "she's in a better place". Despite "whatever Allah does is for good"; despite time.
Despite years and years and years of time passing by, she'd always have that scar of this loss that no one can see or feel except her. This loss of her half-blood sister.
This story is part of a collection developed in a creative writing workshop run by Shazia Omar. If you would like to join the next workshop, please email her: [email protected]
