Live, Love, Fight

What’s a little rivalry among siblings? It is a child’s earliest experience of working out his place in the family.

IN a suburban home in Shah Alam, there is a battle brewing. The air is thick with it. Four small ‘ fighters’ are vying for territory, and the littlest one is on a mission. Standing below two feet tall, he’s a scrappy ‘ soldier’ who wants to know one thing: “Where are the penguins?” “They’re in here,” his older sister Maya, five, replies, rifling through a box of toys.

But just as quickly as the penguins are brought up, they’re soon discarded. Crisis averted, tension defused. Two- year- olds have short attention spans, and cheeky little Kyle is no different.

The four siblings split into pairs: Tristan, nine, and Zachary, seven, play with their Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in a corner, while less than a foot away, Maya and Kyle connect Thomas the Tank Engine trains into long lines.

Lost in their imaginary worlds, there is a comfortable truce of sorts. Like other siblings, the Wee children engage in friendly skirmishes throughout the day, fighting over toys, books, games and mummy’s attention.

According to an article by the University of Michigan, “sibling rivalry is the jealousy, competition and fighting between brothers and sisters.”

It’s also as old as families themselves, as old as Cain and Abel, and Cinderella and her infamous stepsisters. Chances are we’ve all experienced the petty jealousies and playful roughhousing of sibling relationships. After all, how many molehills have been made into mountains because of a lost toy?

For the Wee siblings, nightfall brings peace.

“At night, they’re peaceful because they need each other. They’re all afraid of the dark!” their mother Sasha Povananthiran, 38, says with a laugh.

While they may sleep in the same room and cling to each other in the darkness, they can be territorial and possessive come daybreak.

“They’re okay with sharing if they’re in the mood. They know what belongs to them. Kyle loves his Sesame Street stuff, Maya wants to keep her own things,” she smiles, contemplating her brood.

In a world where alliances can be made and broken in a matter of minutes, eldest child Tristan easily takes charge as pack leader. He confesses to some irritation at his siblings’ stubbornness, but is very protective of them nonetheless.

“I don’t have a favourite. They’re all my favourites,” he says. “Sometimes, well maybe all the time, I look out for them,” he adds lovingly, in big- brother mode.

“It’s all about the attention, I think, at the end of the day,” Sasha says. “There’s just some childish competition now. I think the rivalry will start when they’re older, when they start to compete academically.”

Growing out of it

Ganesan Chellappah and Kartigesan Chellappah, both 28, are identical twins. They sport identical outfits, identical goatees and identical ear piercings. They’re identical, it seems, from the very top of their shaved heads to the soles of their feet.

Until closer inspection, that is... Ganesan has wider eyes and a slightly longer nose; Kartigesan has almondshaped eyes and a gummier grin.

When they were younger, they shared the same squabbles over belongings as the Wees. Also from a family with four children, they’re sandwiched in the middle, with an older brother and a younger sister.

“We fought over toys. Sometimes he would take my toys, so I’d get angry,” Ganesan recalls of their earliest quarrels.

“But then we always ganged up against our older brother when we fought,” Kartigesan says, nodding his head impishly at the memory.

You would imagine that sharing a womb, a room and the same physical appearance would be cause for more friction, but not for these twins. Perhaps it’s because they were given the same amount of parental attention, so there was never any cause for rivalry. Or perhaps it’s because they simply grew out of any child- hood jealousies.

As adults, they’re past the stage of irritating each other, having forged a bond based on mutual love and respect.

Adolescence, however, was rife with its usual trials.

“Do you know how many times I was caned because of him?” Ganesan asks in mock anger, eyebrows comically arched.

Kartigesan guffaws in return, gleefully unrepentant.

“One time, he ponteng and the teacher thought it was me. So the next day at assembly, I was caned in front of the whole school. And he was laughing with his friends!” Ganesan recalls.

But it was during those tumultuous years that they discovered their greatest passion: music, specifically Indian classical music. The twins are professional musicians who studied in India, graduating from Annamalai University with degrees in music.

It’s telling that they specialised in instruments – Ganesan plays the thavil ( a drum) and Kartigesan the nadaswaram ( a wind instrument) – that are meant to be played together, as a musical pair.

A classical music aficionado, their father urged the twins to pursue their musical dreams. Although there was an initial dispute over who would learn which instrument – they both leaned towards the thavil – Ganesan jokes that Kartigesan had “no choice” but to take up the nadaswaram.

Years later, Kartigesan, the younger twin by a minute, insists that everything worked out for the best.

When they put on an impromptu show in their living room, the two are in their element: the air is immediately filled with an enchanting tune, big and blasting, as the twins sway to the beat, in perfect synchrony.

It’s apparent that it’s this cooperation, this harmony, that is the bedrock of their relationship. Like two sides of a coin, they complement each other, personally and professionally.

“Even as musicians, if he plays better than me, I want to improve and play as well as him,” Ganesan explains.

For the twins, being siblings is not about one- upmanship, where there is a constant game of upstaging the other. Instead, if there is rivalry, it’s competitive camaraderie more than anything else.

“Maybe when we were younger, we were jealous of each other, over silly things like toys, but now we support each other,” Ganesan says.

Parenting matters

In the cases of the Wee children and the Chellappah twins, good parenting factors into the healthy relationships they have with their siblings.

“It’s parenting itself – what the parents say, how they resolve conflicts – that plays the largest role in sibling rivalry,” Universiti Putra Malaysia ( UPM) consultant clinical psychologist Dr Zubaidah Jamil Osman says.

“Good parents are able to pick up on the problems between their children. They don’t take sides and they know how to resolve fights,” she explains further.

Dr Zubaidah says that the source of sibling rivalry is often children feeling threatened or even rejected by other siblings or a new arrival.

She says that parents should accept each child’s unique abilities, and avoid frequent comparisons between children. While parents may not be aware of the damage they can cause by holding up a favoured child as an example, Dr Zubaidah says that children are more perceptive than parents think.

However, she says that in correct doses, sibling rivalry can be healthy.

“Sibling rivalry, depending on its intensity, can actually be a good thing. Conflicts happen for a reason. As long as the competition is healthy and supportive, it can be good because it helps siblings to understand each other better.” And the really good news? If parents verbalise to their children early on that they are all special and have the same value, they can reduce hostile sibling rivalry.

“Instead of seeing siblings as rivals, the children can support each other. You can take a negative and make it positive,” she concludes.