Make Up Forever

by Anu Kandikuppa

I haven’t broken completely with my sister, but we don’t get along well with each other. Actually we can barely speak one civil word to each other. She has a way of looking me up and down when we meet that makes me want to scream. Many people have a habit of examining other people without seeming to, but no one should have to suffer such a scrutiny from her own sister. Though my sister always checks me out thoroughly, she never pays me a compliment. Instead she makes some type of offhand remark such as, “Look how young your nail polish is.”

The evening she said this I was wearing a shade of nail polish called Eggplant that was almost black. I turned her remark over and over in my head and soon realized that she meant the color wasn’t appropriate for my age – I’m forty-five and she’s forty-nine. I filed away her gibe along with all the others she’s delivered me and became wooden and uncommunicative for the rest of the evening.

It’s a pity my sister and I aren’t close because we’re alike in so many ways. We’re hoarders and late risers, dog-lovers and book-readers, lazy and unambitious, though we both had big dreams. Now we’ve tucked away our dreams somewhere we won’t trip over them. She wanted to be a writer, and I wanted to be a model. She’d scribble away all the time in a little diary that I stole one day and, running up the stairs on swift goblin feet, hid on the terrace where the rain soaked it through. Though the loss of the diary must have hurt my sister, she didn’t cry at all. She hides her feelings as carefully as if she might be charged for having them.

Still I always hug my sister when we meet, and her plump, middle-aged shoulders fill my arms like pillows. For the moments we’re locked in embrace, I think how petty we’ve been and wonder why we’re afraid of being close to each other. I want to make up with her and forget the things we’ve done out of spite and bad judgment and feel sure she feels the same way – I’m her closest living relative after all. Yes, she has a husband and a child but no one can replace a person you’ve known your whole life. Someone you’ve seen sit around in smelly clothes until noon with the newspaper and heard bawl when the pair of blue sandals she’s been saving up for is sold out at the store. But I say nothing in case I’m wrong. I don’t want to be snubbed and see her myopic round eyes light up with joy.

We didn’t plan it this way, but we both ended up in the same city though in very different circumstances. She lives with her husband and daughter in a bungalow in a wealthy neighborhood, while I’m single and teach high school math and live in a one-bedroom flat near my school. Though she’s not warm to me in person, my sister texts me compulsively – breezy, keep-in-touch texts: how’s it going, what’re you up to. I suppose I’m on her list of things to do, between buy tomatoes and pay bills. She writes her texts in lower-case, without punctuation, but structures them like letters, beginning each with “hi” or “dear” and ending with “with love.” I once studied a sequence of my sister’s texts and found that she’ll send about ten hi texts before switching to dear. Soon after the dear texts begin, she’ll give me a call. Though I try not to read too much into her calls, each time I wonder if it means she cares more about me than she lets on.

On the phone my sister never asks me how I am or why I haven’t replied to her texts – there’s never any plain talk between us. Instead she prattles on in her high, childish voice about the vegetables she’s growing, the traffic and the servants, and always finishes by inviting me to her house. I always accept and go. I tell myself it’s because the food’s good in her house, but I suppose I feel an obscure compulsion as well. Though I’m only in my forties, I often think about dying and how it would feel to die on bad terms with my only sister. Whether her name and form will blink before my eyes and bar reflection of my (uneventful) life.

When I get to my sister’s house, we first engage in our perfunctory embrace after which she irritates me by looking me up and down. Because of this habit of hers, I feel compelled to dress extra carefully when I visit my sister. The last time I saw her, I wore a pair of black churidars, a grey embroidered crinkle-silk top, and long red bead earrings, uncommon pieces she’d never be able to identify the source of. I did my hair in loose waves and wore a plum-colored lipstick she’d never be able to carry off even if she wore lipstick.

I dressed like this even though it’s pointless to compete with my sister – compete for what? – because she takes no care of herself whatsoever. She’s put on weight and doesn’t color her hair. She has calluses on her palms and short, jagged fingernails. As for her clothes, I can only assume she dresses extra badly when I visit to show she’s not so foolish as to care about her looks, because I can’t imagine anyone going out looking like she does. The day I wore my grey kurta, she wore a brown cotton sari with a prim, high-necked blouse and a pair of silver hoops in her ears. She looked like a poor virtuous woman from the 70s. She stood looking at me, her arms slack, her jaw compressed unflatteringly, one shoulder lower than the other.

I know how her shoulder got like that. When we were growing up, she would insist on walking for miles instead of taking a rickshaw or other paid transport – she’s always been thrifty – and her heavy bag weighed her shoulder down and made her lopsided. She’d force me to walk with her, though as soon I was old enough I’d wave down a rickshaw and scram. And as the rickshaw scuttled away in the way rickshaws do, she’d stand watching me, her jaw compressed in exactly the same way.

My sister has a great cook – her husband Anil is rich – but she always cooks for me herself when I visit. She can whip up great-tasting food quickly with just a few ingredients, many of them from her garden, and bustles about, talking non-stop, her hair in a bun the size of a raisin. She arranges the food beautifully, places the plate in front of me, and hovers, waiting for my praise. I take a leisurely bite and make a face, reach for the shaker and dust the food with salt to show it wasn’t perfect. I clean up my plate but don’t compliment her. I find it impossible to do anything to please her.

We got along better when we were younger. When she was in her teens, bossy and almost cute with her turned-up nose and buttoned-up mouth, I worshipped her and fawned on her. I’d sit for hours on hot afternoons drawing circles with my forefinger on the soles of her narrow feet while she napped, her little red radio glued to her ear because she didn’t want to share the music. In return for my services she’d take me for a haircut to the new salon or bequeath me an item of her clothing that I coveted. (I remember one hand-me-down vividly, a pair of black polka-dotted pants in a loose style called “parallels,” all the rage then, which I wore until they wore out.)

Things changed when I got older and it became clear I was going to be prettier than her. Actually, the word “pretty” in any degree can’t be applied to my sister. I filled out and my hair grew long and thick. She remained scrawny and had terrible hair, sparse and dry. People started saying they couldn’t believe we were sisters. I stopped wearing her hand-me-downs and bought smart sleeveless tops and wedge heels, things she’d never dreamed of wearing. I used body lotion, changed my earrings every day, and aspired to exciting careers, while she locked herself all weekend in the innermost room in the house with a hair mask on her head. She tried everything: egg yolk, green gram, fenugreek, castor oil, henna, mashed bananas. She ate pasty, pungent balls of Ayurvedic medicine and popped homeopathy pills out of tiny corked bottles. She swilled cups of milk mixed with raw eggs and ground almonds. Nothing helped. Now her hair’s sparse and gray, but she wears it just the way it is to deliver a complicated message of resignation, endurance, and piety.

She won’t tell me important things that happen in her life. When her daughter went to the U.S. for a Bachelor’s degree, she didn’t tell me about it. Instead I learned the news from a friend of hers who I ran into at the mall and who gave me a funny look when I said I didn’t know. The next time I went to see my sister, I tried to draw the information out of her. “Where’s Preeti?” I said. “Not here,” she said. “So many kids from twelfth grade at my school are going to America to study,” I said. “Really?” she said.

I was baffled. Did she think I’d never notice that Preeti was gone? Why was she being secretive? Then I understood. She was keeping her good news from me so that I didn’t jinx it. She thought me bad luck. She knew I’d been ambitious. When I couldn’t become a model, I wrote all sorts of entrance tests, CAT, GAT, PRAT, GMAT to try to go to America. After all that I became a teacher, an unmarried one.

Because my sister doesn’t tell me things, I don’t tell her things either. I haven’t told her about Rahul, who I met at a teachers’ conference and see after work over coffee, which we sip with careful airs of no expectations. I keep my lips zipped about Rahul when I’m with my sister. I hug my secret to me, which would have been nice except that I doubt its worth myself. In any case it’s better to withhold news than to reveal it. Keep your good news from people, and they can’t take it away from you. Tell people your good news, and they’ll soon convince you it’s of no consequence whatsoever.

Like when I told my sister about the essay I wrote that was published in the Times of India. I was embarrassed by the topic – it was about being a single woman in her forties – but excited to see my name in print. The article appeared prominently on the first page of the Culture section. I was sure my sister would see it and call me and shivered to think of how envious she’d be. She didn’t call me. The next time I was at her house I whipped out a copy of the article and placed it on the kitchen counter. She swiped it out of the way and went on talking about her French beans. My head turned to wood and my limbs became numb with the stress of waiting for her to read it. She didn’t read it and didn’t call about it in the following days. Weeks later, I saw the newspaper sitting in the same spot on the counter, curry stained and neglected, and took it away, feeling so small I can’t describe it.

Yet my sister’s capable of showing affection. You should see how she behaves with Preeti and Anil, with whom she makes an odd pair. He’s tall and cheerful and wears his thick hair long. She’s a whole foot shorter than him. He’s very fit, while she’s let herself go completely. When I first met Anil, I refused to believe a man like him would choose to marry my sister. I was sure there was a Reason he had to marry her – I thought this even though it was 1997 and we live in a conservative society. I was terrified I’d attract Anil away from my sister with my swollen braid and my tiny waist and be blamed for it forever, but nothing like it happened. In fact Anil was almost avuncular towards me.

I can’t understand my sister’s hold over her husband. Then and now, she controls him completely. He does what she tells him to. When she wanted to live in a house, he bought a house. When she wanted to move into a flat, they moved into a flat. I had no idea families could be this tight, behave like one organism. Even when my sister and Preeti and Anil are talking they sound like they’re cuddling. Their voices become high and childish, and each of them knows what the other is going to say before she starts speaking.

On the other hand I’m rather quiet, so my sister’s always saying, “Why so serious?” and reminding me that she used to call me Ms. Grumpy. Small talk distresses me. If I must talk I would rather talk about serious matters, even if things got ugly. I’d like to ask my sister, “Why are you so cool towards me? What are you afraid of?” I’d like to ask her why she didn’t stop me from making a jumble of my life. I’d like to ask her if she’s okay dying on bad terms with me.

If she has similar questions for me, she never gives a sign of it.

***

I have a recurring fantasy about how my sister and I will make up with each other. There will be an occasion, maybe her daughter’s wedding, which will be a big affair when it happens. Rooms will be booked in a five-star hotel. A wedding planner will be engaged.

Weddings make me sad and anxious. There is the pressure of walking in alone and looking cheerful. There is the pressure of looking good. It’s a matter of pride for me that I look as good as I do at forty-five. Though I make it look easy, it’s not easy. I spend half an hour on my face every morning. I apply three creams in a certain order. Then I apply foundation and powder and eyeliner and mascara. I fill in my eyebrows with pencil so they look thick. I keep my tricks to myself and share nothing with my sister. I go out of my way to avoid using even a powder compact in front of her, because I don’t want her to know the brand I use. Instead I lock myself in the bathroom to powder my face. It’s a fact: I’d rather help a perfect stranger than my sister.

I go up to the hotel suite reserved for the ladies and find my sister standing at the far end surrounded by her friends. They’re all women like her, terrible dressers and non-stop talkers. I once looked through my sister’s contact book – she still keeps a physical book – and found it packed with names and numbers written in her upbeat, upward-sloping, round letters. She’d list as many as four numbers for each person as if to make sure she could find the person when she wanted to.

We share our customary hug and draw apart. We’ve never looked like sisters, but we haven’t even aged similarly. Her eyelashes have fallen off, and she’s become apple-shaped and developed rings around her neck like the rings around a tree trunk. I become aware of a new advantage I have over her: I have no jowls, not a hint of them. I’m years away from having jowls while she’s acquired a tiny pair in the weeks since I’ve seen her. They quiver as she looks at me friendlily as if she’s just been introduced to me.

She’s wearing a silk sari in honor of the wedding, but her blouse is as prim and armor-like as ever. At the back it rises all the way to her hairline and goes all the way down to her petticoat. In the front it grazes her collarbones. Not a sliver of her back or midriff show. On a young girl, such a blouse would indicate a becoming modesty, but it only makes my sister look stiff. Her hair’s screwed into its usual raisin-sized ball, and her parting winds its usual broad course across her scalp and pours like the delta of a major river into her forehead.

“Glad you could come early,” she says. “You’ve plenty of time to get ready, but I’m going get dressed and go down to see to things.”

She’s trying to speak normally, but I hear the strain in her voice and see the skin flaking on her inflamed forehead. Her nose is red and shiny and quivers like a rabbit’s. Her pores are like craters and her scalp gleams through her hair like the moon winking between branches. She looks tired and old and in need of understanding. The stress of the wedding, I suppose. Giving away a child. The fifties upon her. How does it feel to be almost fifty and have never earned a penny? How does it feel to be fifty, a grandmother soon, and have lived in the same town your whole life? To know you’ve run out of time to experience another kind of life? Behave with dignity. Correct your mistakes.

All my hard feelings fall away. It should be that easy, to turn things around between sisters. Anything can be forgiven. It’s not productive to wait for the perfect moment to make things better. To think, each time an opportunity arises, that you’ll take the next one. It didn’t matter which of us made the first move. Later, when we’re talking nineteen to the dozen, we wouldn’t remember who’d done it, who had had the greater need.

I would make the first move. I would be the one to end the bickering, terminate the production of bile. Peace and love forever. Please, let it be.

“Why don’t I help you dress?” I say. “It’s your day too. I’ll apply some simple make-up. I’ll make sure you don’t look drastically different.”

For most pairs of sisters my suggestion would have been the most natural thing in the world, would not even need to be uttered. Sisters shop together and dress together and gossip together. Sisters drink from the same bottle and fall asleep in the same bed after talking all night. The last time my sister stayed with me, years ago when there was a power outage and the trams were down, I lay awake all night listening to her alien breathing sounds.

There is the possibility that she’ll refuse me and say, “Don’t bother. Nothing can make me look nice.” Or, “I’ll never put paint on my face like you.” Instead she says simply, “If you want to.”

I feel disproportionately happy, euphoric. I’m finally going to do something for my sister. Years of tension disappear. We’ve behaved like foolish children. My news about Rahul comes rushing to my tongue, and I know I’ll tell her about him before we’re done. Her congratulations will finally make him seem real.

She’s laid out her sari on the bed, a leaf-green silk with a gold border, and another armor of a blouse. Her sandals are in a corner, the heel of the left sandal scuffed on the left and the heel of the right scuffed on the right in accordance with the way she walks. There is her bag, beaded as a concession to the wedding but well used. For jewelry she’s going to wear a single string of pearls and matching earrings, pieces she’s owned since before she was married. Even when fifty cameras are going to record her for posterity, my sister is going to dress just so. But everything about her is suddenly lovable.

She wraps her sari around herself expertly and sits at the dressing table. The bright lights cast her wrinkles in deep relief – they’re going to be hard to camouflage. I begin untying her tiny bun. The intimacy of touching her scalp, playing with her wispy hair, makes my fingers go stiff. Already it’s not working as I thought it would. She seems nervous, and there are too many people around.

Bits and pieces come back to me, things that have always bothered me. In 1998, when I was studying for a Masters degree, my sister came to the city with Anil, a trip I learned about much later – and only from a photograph on her sideboard. “When did you visit this temple?” I asked. “I don’t remember,” she said, but the date on the photo gave her away. Over time a new photo appeared next to it, of the family near snow-capped mountains not present anywhere in our country. Another trip I wasn’t told about.

There is more.

I never got to know what happened to our mother’s jewelry when she died. When I was a kid, my sister made so much fun of my singing that I never sang another note. She was never going to let me near her precious daughter today, her wedding day. She thought me bad luck.

More than half of my sister’s hair is gray, coarse and curly as gray hair gets. Several come off in my hand – I suppress my distaste and let the strands float to the ground. We rarely touch each other except for our perfunctory hug. If we reach for a pitcher at the same time, she draws her hand back quickly. If I walk past her to the sink, she shrinks towards the counter.

There’s no time to color her hair, but I have root cover in my bag. I press the tip on her roots and pull it down the strands, section by section.

“Why don’t we try a side pony?” I say. “It’ll look cute. And let’s change your parting. You’ve worn it like this for so long it’s become broad.” I make a deep side parting and bring what’s there of her hair to the other side. I find a gold hair tie and twist it multiple times around her ponytail, slip in barrettes to keep stray hairs in check.

Immediately she looks ten years younger. I see her eyes sharpen in recognition of the difference, and she smiles in delight but says nothing.

There’s a knock on the door, and Anil walks in. “Sorry,” he says. “I should have waited.” He speaks deferentially, as he always does around my sister, and twitches his shoulders nervously.

“Hi,” he says to me. I feel my sister’s body tense beneath my fingers. She looks from him to me and me to him, her face blank.

Anil’s hairline has receded an inch. “Long time since I saw you,” he says, and I realize I haven’t met him for at least a year. How is this possible when I’ve met my sister several times in that interval? It’s because he’s always out of town when she invites me.

How did I not see this before – that my sister goes to great lengths to keep her husband from me?

Preeti walks in, her cheeks plump with baby fat, ranting about her hairdresser’s inept handling of her coiffure. Now my sister’s all smiles, consoling her daughter. The three of them cluster together and chatter in a language I can’t understand even though I know the words. I’m forgotten. They slap each other on the back, a family habit, and screech with laughter. I look at myself in the mirror above my sister’s ponytailed head and notice I’m wearing a small uncertain smile. I’m wishing I was somewhere else.

~

Anu Kandikuppa worked as an economics consultant for many years before she began to write fiction. Anu has short stories and flash fiction published or forthcoming in The Florida Review, Salt Hill, The Normal School, Juked, Jellyfish Review, and other journals, and her work has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Anu holds an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Her website is www.anukandikuppa.com