My sister is a few feet ahead of me. We are both well behind the sherpas, our guide and the two (experienced) strangers also on the hike. Exhausted, she takes a seat on a nearby rock. I sit next to her. The trace amount of cocaine from the coca leaf tea that got us up this morning has worn off and she can feel her airways half closed – the altitude and exercise unfriendly to our shared asthma.
I pull out an inhaler and take a puff; nothing comes out. I try again. Still nothing.
A bad way to learn that inhalers don’t work in the freezing cold at sixteen-thousand feet.
-
I wasn’t surprised when my sister convinced our mother to send us to Peru without supervision. Yes, she was only eighteen years old, and I was just a couple months above fifteen.
But she has always had that skill to talk for hours and to use those hours to convince anyone of anything. Her commitment to speaking has to have come from the day she was born. She was born silent and a little blue. The doctor had to coax a cry out of her. An event by which she earned her name: Mauna – Sanskrit for silence. Something she’s taken as a challenge ever since.
And by eighteen she was an experienced traveler.
Starting when she was three years old, my parents would take her to and from India frequently. She became comfortable with the labyrinth airports. O’Hare, Heathrow, New Delhi, Dubai, Dulles became familiar places. She became comfortable with the titanic airplanes. Daydreaming in her window seat as my dad would tell her:
“This flight is in a Boeing Triple Seven.”
“Uh huh.”
“It’s the first plane to be designed entirely on a computer - the first one to be designed one hundred percent digitally. It’s also the first plane to have an LCD display. The, A330, the A340, and the A320 all had CRT displays.”
“Oh.”
She says that as a three-year-old before getting on one of those jumbo jets, she had a realization. Our family was about to head back to the States, and Mauna was told that she couldn’t bring home the goat she had been playing with. “I thought to myself: wow, life is different here than it is there.”
This is the first story she tells me when asked to describe the major events in her life. Not moving to 10 different houses in her first 13 years, not getting into college or medical school, not the birth of her little brother, but this.
A goat.
-
After a few deep breaths to calm our inflamed lungs, my sister gets up from the rock. She’s tall, the tallest in my family until I passed her. Her dark brown hair is tied up in a ponytail, loose from the day’s trek. And her lips have become a deep red; now severely sunburnt, they are chapped and peeling. A light blue shirt and a white North Face rain jacket are struggling to keep her warm – too thin for the altitude. And white sneakers – too soft for the hike through the rocky terrain – cover the fuzzy pink socks underneath. Still, she looks back from ahead and smiles.
“I am big, and he is small,” she thinks to herself. “I’m in charge. I need to take care of him. If this kid needs another pair of socks, I need to get him another damn pair of socks.”
She was in charge. Part of the paperwork our mom had to fill out for us to travel together was to make my sister my legal guardian for three weeks.
-
Six years later, things aren’t much different. Though dark folds now surround her tired med-school eyes and I look nearly the same age as her, she still holds the same view. I am big, and he is small. And she is just as quick to give me advice about the world as she was when I was in middle school. Growing up with two immigrant parents, she felt blindsided by every cultural difference she didn’t know. “I was kind of a dumb kid and shit would blow my mind,” so she needed to tell me everything.
When she learned something interesting in class, she would teach me as soon as she got home. When I wanted to start dressing nicer, she taught me what clothes to buy. When she went to Debutant balls, she came home and taught me proper etiquette. When our dog started getting periods, she taught me about that too.
-
While she’s turned around looking at me with her goofy grin, I see a nosebleed dribble down her chin. The elevation broke a vessel in her nostril and, though it was harmless, the blood was dripping on her clothes. I pulled out the wrinkled handkerchief I kept in my back pocket and handed it to her. She held her head back and stained the handkerchief red. She still keeps that red stained tissue in her box of travel memories.
She was exhausted and sunburnt. But back was just as bad as forward, so she kept on. At that point, she was so committed to this that by the time we reached the top of the mountain, she blew right past the peak, not taking in the strange figure of Jesus at the top. She regrets this now. In that moment, though, it wasn’t worth it. But I stopped to look. He was draped with patterned rags travelers had left behind. Dozens of multicolored scarves, faded from rain and sun made his torso thick. The only feature of the icon still recognizable was his face, protected in a glass box.
The way down was so much easier.
Maybe it was the lack of oxygen in the air or the lost blood from her nose but the world around her changed. The other side was full of life. It was a marked difference from the cragged rocks and rough boulders that filled the way up. The trees grew gnarled and tortured. The bark peeled and flaked. Wet from dew and colored bright red, they looked bloody and beaten. The weeds around them were saturated with green – glowing with chlorophyl. She was silent.
