Word: Disgust

Word courtesy: My sister, who is currently disgusted by the summer heat, the sweat, the general audacity of June. All she wants is cold showers and watermelons.

The story I have with it:

Disgust as a feeling was born with my sister. Not through her. But the moment she arrived in this world.

My sister arrived almost a decade after me.

Destiny had troubled my mother with miscarriages in between, accounting for my sister’s delayed timeline of birth. By the time my sister finally arrived, I think the extended family had quietly concluded that my parents had accepted their lot. One child. Done. But, my mother especially always wanted 2 kids!

And then she came. On the Bengali New Year. An auspicious day, and it was a rebellious arrival indeed. She weighed 4.5 kilograms. Milky. Chubby. A headful of black, thick locks.

Finally, the news of this kid’s arrival was shared with family and friends, and it reached my father’s middle sister.

And that is where disgust enters this story.

This aunt was, by her own quiet reckoning, a woman of considerable standing. The proud mother of two sons. In the arithmetic of that generation, this placed her comfortably above my parents in some invisible ledger of worth and achievement.

When my father called to share the news of his second daughter’s birth, she did not offer congratulations.

She said, “Really? A girl again?”

Two words carrying the full weight of a worldview. Delivered not in anger but in something worse — casual dismissal. The kind that does not even bother to hide itself because it does not believe it needs to.

That was just the beginning.

What followed over the years was a sustained, almost dedicated campaign of low-grade cruelty. My sister’s chubby, luminous arrival did not soften anyone’s position. If anything, it seemed to sharpen it. Predictions were made, in the way certain relatives make predictions, with the confidence of people who have already decided the outcome. Two daughters, they said, would be my parents’ undoing. A burden. A future of worry and expense and ultimately, disappointment.

My sister, who today cannot tolerate June heat without filing a formal complaint to everyone in her vicinity, was the subject of these predictions before she could even walk.

Decades have passed.

My sister and I have, to the best of my knowledge, not committed any murders or robberies. Our parents remain, stubbornly, prosperous and well. The doom that was so confidently forecast has failed to materialise on any occasion.

There is, however, a small footnote worth mentioning.

Both of my aunt’s sons have since left home and shown little interest in looking after their parents. One did not complete high school.

But we are, of course, still the ones born with the X chromosome.

So the disgust, I am told, remains.

Some ledgers, it turns out, only update in one direction.