I am the eldest child of the family, which meant every room found a way inside me.
My mother stored her unfinished life in the hollow behind my ribs. My father folded his fears into my school uniform pockets. My aunt tucked her regrets into the rice drum. As my uncle fed me sweets dense as wet cement, while I swallowed generations whole.
The house had a place for every burden.
The old mattresses grew mould in my loft. The steel trunk stored the wedding silks. The glass jars held mango pickle.
And me? I was to hold everything else.
Until I could no longer separate my life from their luggage.
As grammar goes, you cannot make everything plural by adding an ‘s’. Man becomes men. Tooth becomes teeth. And a person, when murdered becomes people.
So when they ask me where the girl they knew has gone, I tell them she was divided carefully, like prasad after prayer. By the time everyone was fed, there was nothing left of her.
i am the youngest child of the house, but this made me want to cry because i have adored my eldest sister…i still do. growing up, i didn’t realise what she bore, how she did it, or the weight of things. she carried it all. but when i was 14, she left the house for higher studies and she never really came back; she worked outside, and now, she’s married and has a family of her own in a different city. a month after she walked out of the house for the first time for her studies, i penned down the moments, whatever i could remember, of things and times i could and should have been easier on her. i was 14. i studied what troubled her, sat down, cried, and wrote a long list of things. i promised myself not to cry during her wedding and i did not. and just like that, my other elder sister (the middle child) left the house as well. i have seen them both leave. now, i am stuck in a limbo i guess, idk. but there are things people realise only at the precipice of losing, or when they have lost it completely.
thank you so much, Aadya 🥹❤️ sending you warm hugs from the youngest one who now knows the deep dark secrets the eldest, wisest ones hoard 🫂✨
This hit hard. The imagery of being the eldest child as the family’s storage space is painfully familiar, but that shift into grammar completely undid me: “a person, when murdered becomes people.” What a devastating way to describe the slow erosion of self through obligation and inheritance. And that final image of being divided like prasad until nothing remained of the girl herself… I’ll be thinking about it for a long time.