I stood in the corridor of a Delhi hospital watching the live feed of a Colonoscopy in progress. My sister; the love of my life, the red in my painting, the bread on my plate; was in the exam room getting a Colonoscopy. For the first few minutes of the procedure, everything had looked as it should as the probe made its way through a moist, pink passage into her large intestine. And then came the moment – you know the kind which splits your life into “before” and “after”, that moment came for us when the probe found an obstruction in her colon, the size of a child’s fist, blocking almost the entire passageway. The probe stopped, it couldn’t proceed any further.

My sister often used to say that she & I were born twice – first the biological way, a few years apart from each other; and a second time, the day our mom died leaving her two teenage daughters behind, we were re-born as spiritually conjoined twins, forged to look after each other.  Even though we grew up in a two-parent household, we found ourselves suddenly parentless the day our mom passed away; our father consumed with his own grief and incapable of handling two teenage daughters; and soon after saddled with a step-mother who was so loving to us that the day she arrived in our lives, my sister and I magically turned into “Cinderellas”! It was an abnormal way of growing up in India at the time – no one other than us had lost a parent to death or divorce, we knew no other children with step-parents, every family seemed to be a picture-perfect postcard of parental love and devotion, it was as if they were all trying their damndest to star in a Bollywood movie; you know the kind where the entire family dances together on the same fucking beat? We were the odd ones out.  Our family was the only messed up one we knew. We were the special ones, but in all the wrong ways. Into this chaos, my sister and I were re-born, alone but together, unloved but loved – by each other. We had always been close but our shared grief and struggles of the years that followed made us one whole person, that is, until death did us part.

When she woke up after the Colonoscopy and after I had helped her shit out little specs of blood from the wounds caused by the biopsy; her first but not the last experience of shitting blood, I told my sister they had found a “mass”, a “growth” in her colon – the word “tumor” stuck in my throat for unknown reasons. I shouldn’t have bothered, she was not fazed. She was not the type to be fazed. She was not fazed when her biopsy came back a couple days later as positive for cancer.  She was not fazed when she was told she needed several blood transfusions to help her prepare for potential surgery. “Be Positive!”, she would say, when asked about her blood group, with a naughty glint in her eye and a cheeky grin on her face; her gorgeous dimples deepening on her gorgeous face. No, she was not fazed through any of that. And honestly, neither was I, at the time. We were not fazed when we were given the schedule for her Chemotherapy sessions. “I will shave my hair too and we will both look cool, like Samantha and Smith in ‘Sex and The City’”, I joked with her when she mentioned she might lose her long, lustrous hair to Chemo. “We will both be ‘Bald and Beautiful!’”, she had quipped back. We had laughed & laughed, with her in my arms, both of us lying together in her hospital bed that was designed for only one person, laughed until she had spasms of pain in her gut, those awful & literally gut-wrenching spasms that wrecked havoc on her increasingly frail body. Ever since our mom died, we had shared everything – our grief of losing the one person who had selflessly devoted her life to us, and we shared our dreams; of flying to America; the land of opportunity, of traveling across oceans, of studying film, of becoming the first “Sister Directors” the world had ever seen, and of finding “the brothers” who were made especially for “the sisters”! We would say that we were two halves of a whole – both 50-50. We shared everything 50-50. But when it came to the most important battle of her life, that hypothesis failed miserably – I could neither split her cancer 50-50, nor share her physical trauma 50-50; she went through all of it on her own, while I stood on the outside watching helplessly.

Extended family members; well-meaning relatives who had never given two hoots to our well-being all those years we had lived in India, struggling to survive in a motherless, struggling, broken family, now suddenly came out of the woodwork, visiting us in the hospital, asking us how & why it took us so long to find out my sister had cancer, and especially when we now lived in America. I would wince with guilt & shame, as I repeated the same answer – my sister had never exhibited the classic symptoms of colon cancer, no bleeding from the rectum etc., she had had trouble digesting milk for the previous year which an American doctor had diagnosed as a simple case of “lactose intolerance” and recommended Lactaid that she took for several crucial months as the cancer grew in her gut. More recently another American doctor had recommended an endoscopy which had come out normal. He had mentioned Colonoscopy in passing, but had also said he didn’t expect to find much since there had been no history of cancer in our family and my sister was a healthy young woman in her 30s. So, technically our genetics fucked her, in the wrong way. And so did the fractured American Medical System that misdiagnosed her twice.

Yet – while this was the truth, it was not the whole truth.  The whole truth was that we could have pushed the doctors more to investigate if something was seriously wrong with her, especially when she started feeling tired and losing weight, but we hadn’t. Why the hell not? Because we believed with our might & souls that we were special.  Like Harry Potter – our favorite fictional character, whose mother had given her life protecting him, and in death, watched over him and shielded him from harm. His story was our story. We were Harry in flesh and blood. We had learnt how to light our Petronus through years of darkness. And believed that like Harry’s mother, our own watched over us and would shield us from any real harm.

I thought of her – J.K.Rowling I mean, as I sat outside the ICU when the phone rang. One of my childhood friends answered the phone. I didn’t have to be told what was said. I knew. Over the past few weeks, I had first fought with death, then prayed at his door, then begged at his feet to spare my sister’s life. But the asshole wanted her like a cat in heat. So he took her. And all I was left was a hole in my heart the shape of her gorgeous face and a lifetime of coulda-woulda-shouldas.

And the thought that somehow it was all J.K.Rowling’s fault.

Swati is a sister, storyteller, a filmmaker, an environmentalist and a first generation immigrant to the United States. She can be reached via Linkedin and swati@TiredAndBeatup.com