The story of this family starts as innocuously as many others do. There was the father and the mother, the brother and the sister. The father met the mother in college and they got married, and the mother left her beloved land to start a new life in a foreign country. They had a house and then a son, and two years later a daughter. Brother and sister played together and fought in equal measure. They were clever enough to do well in school and dabbled in sports. They were average children, part of an average family, and that suited everyone just fine. The father worked for a bank and the mother worked at home. There were holidays abroad – Disneyland, when they stayed with the father’s brother. Philippines and Hong Kong (when the father was posted to work there for short stints). India (to visit the mother’s family). It was a good life, a good family.
There was money to send the brother to the US for college. And two years later the sister followed. They attended good-name colleges, came home for the summer holidays with new opinions and Oreos. They brought back t-shirts with their college names printed in front, DVDs they burnt with downloaded songs and movies, Ziploc bags and Febreze for the mother. Caught up with friends also on vacation, talked about changes in their lives, the metamorphosis of classmates into savvy types, virginity lost, worldliness gained. They would lounge at home, allowing their parents to bask in the glow of a once-again full nest. If you saw the family at a restaurant you wouldn’t look at them again. Nothing extraordinary there.
And so, time passed. Brother and sister finished their four years of college and in the meantime, father retired and took up with a new bank and mother carried on in her role as the family anchor. The brother began at an excellent medical school and the sister, for the lack of anything better to do, flew to London for a masters degree. And it was here, in this time, that the crumbling began. There was no sudden event that collapsed the family and rendered their lives forever altered. No, it was a slow weathering of their old average life, gradually shaped into something new and – now when they look back – wholly unexpected.
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