One August weekend, I accompanied my older sister to the mall that housed one of her shops. Unlike me, she is an early bird who loves to arrive early so she can soak in the atmosphere of dawn. Living with her was an everyday reminder to not only get a head start on the day and be punctual, but also to show up—and be present—even when it was hard to justify.
I admire my sister; I put in the extra work to not disappoint her. She is my hero, the one who has stood by me and brought me up since the death of our parents. Way older than I am, she could easily pass for my mother—and in many ways, she has been one. She cared for me before and after our parents’ death, as much as she had cared for them during their trying times.
My sister came in the early years of our parents’ marriage, as a mere expectation of a new marital contract. I, in contrast, came as a symbol of resurrection, to give—and receive—life to parents whose fragile intimacy had been deadened by years of poverty and horror. I was both proof of a rekindled inseparability and the straw that broke the camel’s back. It was my birth and the unthinkable burden of caretaking that eventually led them to their deaths: My mother died bringing me into the world, and my father, unable to bear the forevermore absence of his wife, followed soon after, leaving my sister to navigate a rigid system of relatives and strangers while fighting to keep us together. Not that my sister shares much about that history; she tries to shield me from the horrors of years past as much as reveal them to me in manageable chunks. Such is her empathy: as needed.
Snaking our way through the early morning traffic, racing against time and daylight, made me reflect on my sister’s penchant for commuting in the early hours every day. The travel was punctuated with multiple police checkpoints, as well as the strong convictions of the many others who, by chance or necessity, conviction or circumstance, needed to be out and about that early. It was rare, but there were predawns when the roads would be clear and justified for commuting. Those were the times when the end justified the means, and life, as a result of being out by daybreak, became predictable. They were also the exceptions, ones that my sister, older and set in her ways, was totally unbothered by.
A few minutes after arriving at the mall, we stepped out of the early light into the dark corridors of the interior. I was cramped up from the long ride down, but my sister, ever the determined, strode off into the distance. Her shop was a long stretch from the entrance, almost at the tail end of the corridor. She paused now and again to look back and urge me to hurry up. When I finally caught up for good, she muttered something to me in sotto voce. “What did you say?” I asked, clutching her hand—and attention—mind-swing, desperate for clarity. She looked at me instructively, as if to offer mercy, and said, “You have to send the elevator back down.”
My sister is reserved and laconic. It’s much more of a condition than it is a trait. All those years of loss and responsibility had taken their toll on her. But it also gave her a lot. Now in her reflective years, she talks her age: punchlines and cryptic observations that rarely offer full explanations. She sets the pace and invites you to chart your own course, even when you didn’t ask for an invitation in the first place. Once, when we witnessed a car speeding by, she’d said to me that “one does not go to heaven because they know the way.” Why do they go then?
She embodies the panoramic conditioning that could easily pass for an emotional state. Her formality is that of a nightwatchman who, having seen something odd on one of his patrols, becomes permanently vigilant for life. I couldn’t say for sure that she’d enjoyed the joys of childhood or lived fully as one; the burden of responsibilities, one she didn’t define as such, was always a staple of her life. As the story goes, she seemed to have been born that way: as a child, she was weirdly introspective, precocious, something of an outlier.
Her admonitions mirror her manner of speaking: she leaves doors open for serendipity—and confusion. For someone I’ve always assumed didn’t speak very much because she was otherwise thinking a lot, very little comes out of her mouth. If we’d had reason to lie about her inability to speak, we wouldn’t have needed to lie. Her favorite saying after a salvo of questioning is “It is your duty to figure these things out.”
The shop we were headed to first was Shop 40B, the one on the ground floor, her magnum opus. This was the first one she opened almost a decade ago, the one that represented the summation of everything she’d worked toward. Years later, as I was coming of age, she made me understand that Shop 40B was her independence, her reinvention, and the one that was going to usher in our planned future. I had no doubt; her convictions became mine, even as I was rarely around to lend a helping hand. I was away per her instructions and funding getting the needed education, exposure, and a life of mine. She never missed a beat in my sponsoring or faltered in monitoring my progression. She was my sentinel who was more interested in knowing and course-correcting early, rather than micromanaging my daily choices or undermining my growing autonomy.
As I walked beside her, pondering about her statement, I felt a mix of curiosity, confusion, and nervousness. I knew that for my sister, failure wasn’t an option, and I was supposed to get it one way or another—or at least attempt to; I fell back in my steps to try to peep the answer from her body language, knowing even as I did it that this was futile. At some point, she notices the lag and stops to inquire with a bit of a coy smile, acknowledging that she was one step ahead of my motives. I searched her eyes for answers and pleaded with my countenance. She shook her head and said “Not in that way,” before turning away, moving gallantly as if she’d just plunged the world into psychosis.
I inquired about the elevator speech from her again as we continued walking down the long corridor of the mall. She went further this time: “If and when you get atop a sufficient station in life, no matter how high up, you have to send the elevator back down as soon as you can.” I held on to the metaphor then and understood her just a bit better. I grunted and pondered as the mall came alive. Faded music drifted in from somewhere above; the escalators rumbled into motion; the smell of food wafted through the air; daylight streamed into the recesses of the interior. The mall, as I knew it, was operational. So was my mind in that moment of epiphany about what my sister meant all along. It was simple: she was asking me to never forget to extend a hand to those who needed it whenever I am able to.
Faced with a possible way out of the dilemma of my sister’s making, I sought to shore up my defenses should I fail. I searched for a plausible backup to the explanation at hand. Again, I tried to lure my sister into my orbit, hoping she might leave a hint or even falter. I acted naive and emphasized the literal as a way to throw her off. I told her that the essence of elevators was not so much their carriage but their movement and ability to be where they’re needed.
“Doesn’t mean invention’s dead,” she said.
“Maybe it’s stalled.”
“On the surface and in the relative sense of the word, yes.”
“So there are things everyday passengers don’t see?”
“You’re getting close.”
Was I? Or had I then dug far beyond the surface and complicated my understanding further?
Some minutes later, we arrived at Shop 40B unscathed and opened up the shop for good. Time for philosophical rigmarole was over, or so I thought, until my sister beckoned me
“So?” she asked
“I have a theory.”
“Walk me through it while I open up.”
“It’s about—” I paused, hesitant
“Go on. There are no wrong answers.”
I found relief in her accommodation and began piecing together my theory. The shop opened up to an enchantment of glamour, like the curtain rising at the Comédie-Française. It cast back and laid bare the material evidence of my sister’s success and perhaps her line of thought. I felt a jolt of crystallization and surmised that my sister, after clambering out of the hellhole she was conceived in, had gotten to a sufficient height to develop the sentiment of helping others beneath her station. Her conviction was rooted in her history, personality, and temperament. “If and when you get atop a sufficient station in life, no matter how high up, you have to send the elevator back down as soon as you can.” Hers was the hand of God, and she wanted me to know it, to imbibe such belief. I understood her and I trusted her, at the perennial detriment of mechanical elevators.
I told my sister what I thought she meant—about extending a hand to those who need it when I can. She nodded, looking elated and proud; she affirmed my understanding, then placed her hand gently on my shoulder, letting me know that my unraveling was spot on, but also that she’d succeeded in my upbringing. “But what about actual elevators?” I asked. She looked at me and shrugged. “What about them? You still send them back down. It’s courtesy.”