The Other Side of Relationships

At the tender age of 4, my younger brother went through an emergency surgery for perforation of the Meckel’s diverticulum – a rare condition which back then was even more difficult to diagnose and treat. He spent a good 3 months in the hospital recovering not just from the life-threatening condition but also from multiple post-surgical complications. While those 3 months were the darkest period for my family, for the 8 years old me in particular, these were the very months when I struck a remarkably strong bond with my father. Considering the fact that my mother was constantly by my brother’s side, completely oblivious to everything else around her, and understandably so, my father had to take it upon himself to look after me in addition to working at his job as a professor.

While there were days when he had to leave me with my mother at the hospital in the morning and bring me back home in the evening, there were days when I tagged along with him to his college and spent the day in his office going through books on physics & astronomy. This is the time when passion for reading just about anything & everything took seed in my head. There were times when I got tired of reading and would roam about the college corridors sneaking into libraries and laboratories needing no permission since the college authorities were well aware of the disaster that had struck my family. This is the time when I was enamoured by the microscopes in the Microbiology laboratory and the students were very happy to show me the bacteria that inspired me to get a double Masters in Microbiology many years later.

What I loved the most however, was the time that I spent with my father though, who left no stone unturned to keep me distracted from the tragedy that had befallen us and made every attempt to keep me happy. This is what made those days the most enjoyable ones of my life and I still wonder about the gruesome irony of it. While on the one hand, he had to make monetary arrangements for the surgery & medicines, the fact that my brother had a slim chance of survival was visibly weighing down heavily on his heart but he still looked after my each & every need. He cooked for me, braided my long hair, took me out, tucked me to bed, and comforted me when I would erratically breakdown on sudden realization of reality.

Fortunately for my brother, and sadly for me, those days never came back. But, little did we know that although we had successfully pulled my brother out of certain death, complete recovery would take many painstakingly long years of post-operative care, strong medications, a couple of more surgeries and a compromised immune system which meant, a complete loss of childhood for him, and because of him, for me. And those subsequent years, brought the two of us closer than ever. As an elder sister, I became fiercely protective of him. And what I realized during those years is that bonds that are forged during periods of extreme adversity, are the ones that create strong relationships. ?

Over the years, I have observed many such examples where the bad days brought me closer to certain people with many of whom I share a strong bond to this day. The relationship between my mother, brother, sister and I was the strongest after my father died. It is worthwhile to notice who are those people who stand by you during your darkest hours – they are the ones who you will eventually strike a strong relationship with.

Many years later, one of my teams that I was leading was thrown into a frenzy due to missed targets and extreme customer dissatisfaction which, if not addressed on time could have resulted in the loss of the business. The situation was exactly like one of Murphy’s laws – if anything can go wrong, it will. Absolutely nothing was working! And when we hit rock bottom, everyone came together to tackle the problem. A diverse group of ordinary individuals created one extraordinary team to pull ourselves out of the dire situation and the victory that we tasted when we achieved the seemingly impossible, cannot be compared with any other success that I have achieved so far. That one team still remains the closest to my heart and after all these years, I can still feel the goosebumps when we realized that we had won the war – one battle at a time.

Moral of the story is – it takes bad days to create good relationships. You laugh the loudest with the people who have cried with you. You stay the longest with people who have been with you in your dark space and walked with you when you thought you were alone. The good side of life will never show you who your true friends are – its always the other side.