On a typical Sunday morning, anybody who is awake at sunrise can hear doors slamming and muffled yells emanating from our house. The inmates actually witness these 'Sunday Skirmishes' first-hand, but over the years, their former zeal has abated, and they are content to vicariously experience them under their bedclothes. 

My opponent finally slams the door to her room. Not to be outdone, I follow suit, and sit fuming in my room. Our awesome ability to maintain these regular fights doesn't alter the fact that my opponent is one of the people with whom my DNA is closely linked. Also, that doesn't alter the fact that we are continuously on the warpath with one-another. But the unfortunate reality is that she is my sister.

I have often wondered about this quirk of Fate. Siblings are usually our worst enemies, enemies you've got to compete with, hate, share things with, and most difficult of all ' love. When my sister and I aren't at loggerheads with each other (which is not very often), we are usually re-enacting scenes from pugilistic movies like 'Ali' or 'Jung'. Very often, our parents hear screams at bedtimes, caused by the discovery of incapacitated cockroaches in my sister's bed or water-balloons in mine. Having suffered our antics for nearly eighteen years, they take no notice and continue reading or watching TV while my sister and I bring the house down. We had to be given separate rooms early in life, when it was realized that we 'unconsciously' tended to push each other off the bed at night. 

An age difference of two years has hardly helped the matter. People mistaking us for twins falls just short of skyrocketing our volatile tempers. And whenever I make the mistake of 'borrowing' my cognate rival's clothes (without her permission, of course), I invariably find mine hanging from the top most branch of the mango tree in the backyard. 

Being the younger of the two, I bear the brunt of my existence. Using my sister's old books, clothes and the like is no fun at all. And when I tell the others that my sister is not the cherubic angel she appears to be, I am snubbed. My only consolation is that people don't believe her either when she tells them that I'm an insane monster in reality. 

These incidents apart, when I try to prove to her that I'm not the 'insane monster' I'm deemed to be by helping her, I'm once again colossally misunderstood. When I painted the longitudinal section of a dissected frog from her biology book onto her SUPW placemats, instead of being pleased as I had expected her to be, my sister warned me not to try and help her again, and decorated the remaining placemats with pictures of bananas, apples and grapes. I still maintain that the dissected frog looked more attractive. 

When people talk of loving their siblings in spite of their differences, I'm not so sure. All I know is that if somebody tried to mess with me, my sister would be at my side, ready to give them a dose of her famous punch-shots. And I in turn wouldn't stand for anyone speaking anything against her. I guess that it is a weird definition of our 'sisterly love', but that's the way it is with us. We support each other if our parents are raining down on one of us, we laugh together at inside jokes and even help one another in our respective waterloo subjects. 

But that still doesn't stop me from eating her share of the chocolates.