For My Sister

A poem about my best friend.

© Janani Mohan, my sister. This is my wedding, but it might as well have been hers because she planned all of it.

She became my best friend when I was six and she was four. Before that, I think the age gap was too large. My parents frequently remind me, when we’re all around the dinner table and joking about life, that when they brought her home from the hospital, I asked them to return her.

When we were pre-teens, we were homeschooled by our mother. We spent every waking moment together, from hobbies and extracurriculars to library runs. We played in the garden for hours and ruined my mom’s china and clothes.

Then I became a teen and worked at CERN in particle physics. She came to Switzerland with me. I went to UC Berkeley for undergrad; later she would too. We got the same undergrad degree, befriending the same professors. When I went to law school, she followed me to D.C.

We’ve been on all the same trips and to most of the same countries. We have inside jokes about our inside jokes about our inside jokes. We’ve watched the same movies and have the same friends. We spend hours a day, every day, together.

Yet, now, Janani is most often my coworker. She calls me “Akka” in private still (it’s Kannada for older sister), but it’s “Isvari” often. We work together at Dweebs Global, an organization growing so quickly and keeping us so busy that I’m up at midnight on Friday sending emails…