My name is Catherine car and this is season three of relatively the podcast all about potentially the longest relationships of
I'll be bringing siblings together to talk about the connections they have as adults, as well as what it was like growing up together. This week we're talking to Poorna Bell and Priya Joi . My name is Poorna Bell and I am the younger sister of Priya joi by four years I am Priya joi, and I am pornos older sister by four and a half years. I'm sorry, she got it out of me, oh, God, I need a bit
and I also talk to them separately to get a more private take on the relationship.
And I just remember, you know, sitting downstairs on the sofa, with my knees up to my chest and she just held me and I don't know that I would have wanted anyone else next to me. In that moment. There's something in you maybe on a cellular level, you sort of feel what that loss can feel like. And it's a taster sort of reminding you don't let each other go.
Brothers and sisters are never straightforward. Poorna and Priya, all pupils and pupils were born in Kent but spent a chunk of their childhood apart with prayer in India and porn in the UK. The pair are really close now and acknowledge they work at being friends as well as sisters providing support to each other through motherhood bereavement, and their respective careers. Prayers memoir or motherhood, race and identity is out next spring corners award winning book stronger is out in paperback now. We talk about all of that, about manky Jim Kitt about being a golf and about last minute packing. But Porter started by describing the time when Priya left to go overseas.
So I was around six when she left and I'm sure my parents would have had conversations with me before her going. But I think when you're that age, you don't really have much of a concept of time. So I definitely remember that period is just being one day she was there. And then she wasn't. And I didn't really understand why she wasn't there. I knew that she was in India, I just didn't understand why she was no longer around.
So I was eight, I had just turned eight, that summer. And this was around September, October. And the idea was that my mom's dad who had who was not very well at all my grandfather, he wants to spend more time with me. And I was supposed to go to India just for a year. And my mom, I think because I was going out of sort of infancy and becoming an older child. She wanted me to know what it was like to live in India to be in India, because we this was late 1970s, early 80s. In Maidstone in Kent. It was super white, a bit racist, where there was nothing Indian around us. And so mum really, really wanted me to have that. So the idea was that I would go for a year, but then that extended and I ended up living with my grandparents for four years, with my mom and my sister and my dad back in Maidstone.
I just remember. And it feels like it's quite deep and emotional in terms of just how much I missed her and especially leading up to when I knew we were going to be reunited. And my mother and I were going to move back to India and our father was going to join us a little bit later. And I just remember thinking, I just wanted her to love me. I know that that sounds ridiculous, but I just wanted her to just immediately love me and think I was the best thing in the world. And I just remember sort of picking out, you know, the presence I wanted to take to her, you know, with such careful precision. I think it was very Postman Pat heavy. It's a good reference. Yeah, and a lot of a lot of sweets. And I think that when I then saw her, you know, on the other side when I saw her in India, I mean, I can articulate this now, you know, in adult language, but it was as if I've been reunited with a part of me that had just been very fundamentally missing. You know, I was quite a tiny child. And I just remember, when you're sort of hugging each other, we all her arms around me. I just didn't want to ever let go of her or not be around her.
And then we lived there for another four years. The idea was my dad was going to join us, but he just couldn't for various reasons. So when I was 16, after eight years of being in India, we then all moved back to live in Kent altogether.
Wow, that's quite a factual retelling of something that must have a lot of feelings contained in it.
I tell it in such a factual way because when you tell the stories of your childhood and they are unusual, I think we often distil them down into these little nuggets. But beneath those nuggets are icebergs of emotion, I was a young child. And I mean, my daughter's about to turn eight. So this would be like me and my husband deciding to send her to India to live with my parents there, which feels unimaginable. It truly does. I mean, she's old enough to do a lot of things. But she's also so young.
As an adult, you say, you can make more sense of it? Of course we can, we can all make more sense of stuff when we're grown up and had the language in the frame of reference. But when you do think about it, do you feel sad or hurt or crossed that she was taken away from you? Or do you understand it totally, now logically, and it's something you can handle?
I think that we've spoken to my parents about it, and I can understand why the decision was made, I don't necessarily know that, you know, I would have made that decision. But I think that with your parents, there's an element of forgiveness, because you're expecting them to behave in the way that you would behave. And they had far fewer options, especially as first generation immigrants coming to the UK, from our family. So it's easy for me to judge it, you know, with my lens, but I just don't really feel that that's going to be useful or helpful. But despite that empathy that I might have, there is always going to be a part of me that feels fundamentally sad that we were apart, and that it has, you know, undoubtedly affected us in certain ways. And maybe if you kind of like, look at it from the other point of view, it's that we are incredibly, incredibly close as siblings, and it's hard to extract that to sort of look at that and think, Oh, well, would that have happened? Had we not been separated? But on balance? Absolutely. I wish that we hadn't been separated. I think that those kinds of decisions, I think has deep ramifications on you. And I also just think, you know, my parents generation, I don't think understood how deeply children feel things, I think that we are a lot more aware of it nowadays. So I think the the sort of the idea of being upset or even when, you know, for example, we moved back in 1992, and left our friends and family behind an Indian came to England, I think was a hard concept to grasp with my parents that it was something that affected us as much as it did. And that's no, you know, detriment to them. I just think that they weren't really aware.
It's also a sort of luxury to have those sorts of emotions. I think if you're considering your parents in their context, as first generation immigrants, perhaps the luxury of allowing those feelings when really you're acting for different impulses, if you see what I mean, it's hard to see that for your children.
This was also a time where families didn't really talk about things, not necessarily because I think they didn't want to just wasn't, I don't know, I don't think parents didn't often talk through decisions with their kids, I think in a way that maybe we do a lot more these days. It was difficult. But then when I moved to India, I was surrounded by love. I don't think I was unhappy in my school in England. But I was a very quiet, shy child. I don't remember loving it or being happy. And then I went to India and I was surrounded by tonnes of kids, I lived in a big apartment block with my grandparents, and there were 15 or 20 kids in that block. We all played together every day. And it was really communal. And it didn't feel as acute in that moment, as it has done when I thought about it since and then having had a child as well. And I can then appreciate what it must have felt like for my parents. So there is all these layers of understanding that open up, don't they when you grow up and you have kids and all of these things are new, then see you're these childhood memories that you just take for granted as part of yourself. It's felt a lot more painful as an adult, to be honest,
I can completely understand that. I think the shift in perspective that comes from growing up and seeing yourself as so small, when actually when you were small, you felt quite big and quite capable. Yes. Yeah, I think that's a funny telescoping of, of time that happens. And you think, Oh, I wasn't really big enough to do that. But I did it. And I thought I was big enough. But I wasn't. Yeah, and poor note also said, you know, the context of these decisions is very different as well, the context that you and your husband would make that kind of decision or obviously not it's very different to the context in which your parents were having to make that sort of decision.
That's right. I think it was a it was quite a different time there was much less support For parents, then my mum was still quite young, she was about 2425. When she had me, she was working very long hours, my dad was a young doctor. So he was working all around the country. And there was no other family in England at that time. And I think it felt like quite an impossible situation. When me and my mum have talked about this, it was It wasn't an easy decision. And and I suppose it's one of those things when we when she has talked to me about this over the years, it was tremendously difficult, and it's still, she still feels very emotional. That was 30 something years ago, you know, like 35 years ago?
Yeah, I can, I can Well, imagine time doesn't do much for memories like that, I don't think, no, it's very interesting. When I talk to siblings on this podcast, you've been separated for whatever reason, boarding school or bereavement or divorce, there does seem to be something in common with them with which you've sort of hinted out, which is kind of an intentionality as an adult, in working on the sibling relationship, because they know what it is to have had it denied for a while.
Wow, I'd never really thought about it in that way. But But I think you're absolutely right.
I think you, I'm not saying you value it more than other people, because I think people who, you know, in love with their siblings are lucky enough to have a good relationship, of course, they value it. But when you are forced to evaluate something, you kind of know its value on a different level.
I think so. I mean, I also think that it's the same with any relationship. And I include, you know, the one that you have with your parents, but especially so in a in a sibling relationship, where friendship is such a massively important part of that. But I think that sometimes that gets overtaken with, you know, the blood bond that you have, or the family bond that you have with each other. And I can completely see how there is an over reliance on that family bond to just, you know, carry that relationship through. But absolutely, it needs to be intentional. And you know, when I consider my relationship with prayer, over the years, of which there have been so many different phases and different life experiences that we've both been through, which have fundamentally changed. Well, it's fundamentally changed me at certain points as an individual, that relationship absolutely needs to be recalibrated and strengthened and nurtured because if it isn't, it's very, very easy. I think for misunderstandings to slip in. Once that distance starts to creep in. It makes it so much harder to I think bridge, that divide. And I say that from having seen that take place in other people's relationships with their siblings?
Absolutely. We did discuss whether and other siblings on this podcast have shared, whether being separated for whatever reason as siblings makes you slightly more intentional about your pond when you've grown up and realised what it is to be without your sibling.
Yeah, that's true. Actually, I don't think I've ever thought about that till now. But I think we're quite reflective people in general. And we have thought about those years when we were not together. And then the years when we were together again, and also, just as being separated can be difficult, sometimes being reunited can be as well, because you can't just assume you're going to pick up where you left off just because you're family. So we've all had to negotiate those things over the years. And, and yes, somewhere I do think we've we've felt some sort of core memory of being separated and not wanting to intentionally ever be separated again. There's something in you maybe on a cellular level, you sort of feel what that loss can feel like. And it's a taster sort of reminding you don't let each other go I think
this season of relatively is sponsored by find my past the online home of the 1921 census. By 1921. People from all over the world had begun arriving in Britain to start new lives. People like the remarkable Dr. Harold moody, Jamaican born Dr. Moody graduated top of his class studying medicine at King's College London, and set up a practice working from home after struggling to find a job. Perhaps there's an inspiring story in your past, find out in the 1921 census exclusively available online at Find my past.co.uk. So if we could go rewind a little bit, you've come back from India and you're kind of displaced in your friendships and your schools and everything. Would you say that you were proper friends at that stage or did that come later for you in prayer?
No, we we definitely weren't. So are you Anyone who's who's got a sibling where you've got a four year divide for the oldest sibling there is what I imagine is the most irritating shadow that you will have your younger sibling, which was of course me.
I think I the shadow. But I remember when we were at school, we were going to school in Kent and I was about 1617. So she was about 12 or 13. And we used to walk up this hill to school, it was only about 15 minutes away. And I would often walk with a friend and I would make her trail behind us and it's so cool. Now in retrospect, but I just never let her walk with us. So she'd sort of like trudge, I don't know, 50 feet behind or something. And that's so mean. But
I don't remember it, but I'm sure she was fully justified in doing it. I'm sure I would have been walking very uncomfortably close to her that would necessitate distance measures. But, but there's absolutely no doubt about it, that I was unbelievably irritating about stuff like that. So I don't blame her at all. There's, there's no ill will harboured. I'll give great credit, you know, she, so she, she was very, like gentle and sweet as a child. And I would say that, you know, we had very different childhoods. So first of all, you know, a lot of prayers took place in India, whereas when we my teenage years took place in England, I was this, you know, sort of little brown goth who listen to alternative music and had posters all over my bedroom, and it used to scare her friends when they used to come over visits, she
was super skinny. And she used to just be covered from head to toe in black and various textures of black like lace and netting and lots of lots of black eyeliner and black eyeshadow and black bags. And yeah, it was like a black hole, her bedroom.
And I was just sort of trying to be a little bit rebellious and trying to break the rules and would smoke cigarettes, you know, in secret places and so on. And I don't think Priya is upbringing was like that. And I think there was a sort of one day where she found some cigarettes in my bag. And she was like, oh, you know, Whose are these? Are these yours? I'm going to tell mom and I just remember thinking you are the least cool person I have ever come across in my entire life. And I can't tell you anything, because you're basically gonna snitch.
I think I was born a nerd. I was born. And my daughter is very similar. We both have this inherent. I don't know, blueprint of the rules for everything are kind of laid in stone. And so the idea that she would lie about cigarettes, oh, my God, what? I think she just had so much much of a disregard for Well, this is how things are supposed to be. But I'm just going to do what I want. And probably there's also an older sister younger sibling dynamic in there as well. The older one, especially in Indian families, older children are expected almost sometimes a substitute for parents, which has its own hang ups and all of the other stuff. But but older kids are given a huge amount of responsibility in making sure that your younger siblings are okay. So while I'm not going to suggest that I wasn't being uncool, I felt like I had this real responsibility to make sure that she was okay and nothing bad ever happened to us. So though that always weighed on me a lot. When I remember as a when I was quite young,
you know, that relationship very fundamentally changed when I think I was 17. And she was 21. And we both went to India for a family trip, just the two of us. I think we got drunk on the plane, we talked about loads of things. And that just continued. And I think that's when, to me anyway, our relationship switched over into this as my ally. You know, this is this is the person that I can count on and rely on. But he's also older than me, and so is hopefully more sensible than me, and who I can turn to for advice and support when I need it.
So it's like the battle lines were redrawn. It wasn't kind of you versus Priya and your parents it was you and Priya versus the world. Maybe? Yes.
That was a real moment where I think we saw each other as peers. I pretty sure we shared a room and we talked about lots of things and there were lots of things I told her that had happened over my childhood and our shared childhood that she didn't know or maybe I'd wanted to not share with her or shield her from and, and it was a real kind of opening up to each other, which is the basis for any friendship, I think, and that made us friends as well as Sisters?
Yeah, I think there's that sort of beautiful moment where I know what happened with me and my sisters. But there's that beautiful moment where someone shares their perspective on your shared childhood shared insofar as it was, I know yours was slightly different. And you're like, Oh, I realise you saw it like that, or? Yes, that's exactly the same as me. And it's so bonding.
Totally Yes. And, and I think also it, it always helps to see a situation from someone else's point of view, someone else who was kind of going through in the same way, because if you ever speak to your parent about situation, they have a radically different perspective, inevitably, but hearing my sibling talk about certain things, or talk about how she felt, I think when I left for India, which we'd never, we'd never really spoken about, I didn't even know what she felt or how much she was aware of that was massively bonding. I think because we'd gone through these unusual experiences together,
it was sort of that sort of sensation, where I just felt like I had kind of found this other part of me that that had been missing for a bit, you know, that I hadn't had around me for a while, you know, without being too dramatic, you just feel like, you're kind of in the trenches a little bit, you know, trying to figure out life, and especially when you grow up in, you know, a South Asian family, and you're just wondering whether you're the only one who's thinking a certain way or feeling a certain way, and then you're like, Oh, my God, no, I have this person alongside me who has gone through similar experiences is going through similar experiences. It very much, I think, maybe made me feel a lot less alone.
And something you said earlier, I did read an article that you wrote about your relationship with sisters that quoted a text message that Priya sent you, which I thought was really beautiful. And you kind of talked about it earlier about this idea that you can venture to places that your sibling hasn't been, but you have to somehow still, while if you're lucky, you somehow still are able to make that relationship flex and bend and grow, despite these different experiences. And I think she wrote something like that to you after your book was published, am I right?
She did. She is a beautiful writer. And she she put it so poignantly, I think the word she used was there are realms that we've been to that the other hasn't. And I think that what it requires, really, is that you know that the other has maybe gone through an experience, whether that's bereavement, whether that's motherhood that the other hasn't. But actually, sometimes that stuff doesn't matter. Because what you're really looking for, I think in that relationship, is you just want the other person to listen to you and to try and understand. And even if they can't fully understand it to empathise, you know, she, I learned so much about motherhood from her and just, you know, the things that would not even occur to me of what it must be like to be a mother and the pressures that you might face or the things that you might be contending with. And I think vice versa in terms of aspects of my life that I talked to her about, but I think it's about listening to each other. And I think it's just not just making assumptions of how they might be feeling about something.
I read an article that Paul wrote about your relationship in which she had transcribed a text, which you wrote to her after her book was published. Do you remember writing that?
I do hope I was so proud of her. Her floral emotional talking about I'm the suburb weeper in this, in this in this family very much. We've had wildly different experiences in so many ways. I've been divorced, she lost her husband. I was very sick when I was in my late 20s. You know we've we've all lived in different countries. And we've we've had very different experiences and those experiences could have taken us further away from each other. I think we've always managed to hold on to this kind of tether between us that I think we've always held on to when things have gone become really tough when we've maybe not understood the other person very well. We always hold on to this bond as something unbreakable.
You mentioned bereavement Of course you've written a lot about your husband, Rob, and I wonder if you could tell me what role your sister played after he took his life seven years ago, please.
So prayer was actually in my parents house when I got the phone calls for Rob died in New Zealand. And because we were going through a separation I had decided to spend a few days that my parents and Priya had come over Have a with my niece who was then so tiny, she was about, you know, 10 months old. Because she just came over to support me and knew that I was going through a tough time. And I think she was supposed to stay a couple of nights. And that might we got the call.
I was lying downstairs in the bedroom with my daughter who was only about three or four months, I think at that time, she was really tiny, she wasn't sleeping. And I heard this really, I heard a whale as like a really primaeval kind of sob that came from upstairs. And I knew in that moment, I didn't know what had happened. I didn't know what else had been happening. But I knew that something really, truly terrible had happened.
And I just remember, you know, sitting downstairs on the sofa, with my knees up to my chest, and she just held me and I don't know that I would have wanted anyone else next to me in that moment. And she didn't, you know, she didn't talk at me. She didn't try and make me feel better. She just was there.
And I remember talking Lila up into bed, and then going to find porn and we sat on the sofa together and just held each other and talked and it was really surreal as times of grief, I think often our there's a there's a sort of a buffering when your mind and your body are trying to process the fact that that person isn't in the world anymore. But you can't somehow process it because it seems to it seems to impossible to unfeasible that someone who existed now doesn't exist in the physical realm anymore. And I remember moments of I desperately wanted to go with her to New Zealand and I would have done but Leila was so tiny. I just it was just impossible. And it really, it really wrenched at me.
And she just kind of very unusually, because, you know, this isn't something Priya would normally do. She just took charge. And she just said, someone has to go with her. You should cannot go on her own. And at the time, I just remember thinking, Well, you know, I'm not a baby, I can go on my own.
This was the only if I could have done anything for my sister, I would have wanted to go with her. And I couldn't help I thought about all the different options. I thought maybe I could take Leila with me. And then maybe taking a three month hold. And that kind of journey was not the best idea. So I had to very reluctantly you know, decide not to go and her best friend Mel went with her.
I am forever grateful to Priya for pushing that through. Because I do not know what my state of mind would have been at the end of a 24 hour flight. Or of just thinking about everything without someone there to distract me or just to help me with things. And in that period, she was everything I needed from my big sister, and I'm feeling quite emotional while I say this now. But yeah, she just protected me and looked after me. And I love her. I wonder how you would describe briefly her character please.
Oh, four night, it's just this one like her. She is funny. She's determined. I think she doesn't see barriers to things. She decides she wants to do something. And she goes and does it. She's super grounded. And I don't think she ever takes herself too seriously. And she's really fun to be around.
So tell me a little bit about how you would describe her character briefly, please.
I would say that she is one of the most hardworking people that I know. I would describe her as strong, fiery. She will always stand up for what she thinks is right. She prepares she will have prepared for this podcast far more thoroughly than I never would have done.
It shows older siblings. Yeah, I know.
But also one of the funniest people that I know. And even though when she is doing big sister stuff like I don't know, try new things or telling me about something new. And I'm very resistant to it like clockwork, about a year after. You know, she started a new trend I then kind of harp on like trailing after her like the quintessential little sister.
Can you give me an example of something that you've been like, honestly, and then you've gotten bored.
So so many things. I mean, one of the things that pops into my head is around investing in good fitness where because you know if you go to a gym, it makes you feel a lot better.
She used to wear I don't know like it was sort Have our granddad's oversized t shirt or something is horrendous. This massive men's t shirt I think jogging bottoms and like mismatched socks, and that was what she used to wear then yeah, and I was in my nice kind of workout gear.
And if you wanted to wind her up How could you do that still today that sort of button you could press that would just make us you read instantly.
Oh, I still do this. So every time I have to undertake a trip, I pack I packed my suitcase at the last minute and I will troll her with pictures of my empty suitcase and a countdown of when my flights about to leave and it's it makes I go absolutely mad. But I love it.
We call that danger packing in our family.
Oh my god yes. Why does that get I feel irritated what I'm hearing is now why I get very anxious when it comes to travelling and flying getting very close to the time and not being ready and prepared. And so porn feeds into that by just sending me these pictures go go I've gone to the airport two hours ha I haven't I don't know where my passport is or something and it just makes me really stressed I don't know why it's not rational
we voice know each other about five or six times a day and Catherine
sounds really mad would you say
your second job is you know we're talking a minimum five to seven minute download
and it's something that started in lockdown actually because we were putting on was in lockdown by yourself and I was with my husband and daughter but all of us I think we're feeling a bit alone and isolated and we started it then and then it just kind of carried on imagine a constant two way channel that's over between two people. Thoughts and Feelings are just flowing down it
thank you to Pune and to Priya, thank you too for listening.
Everyone when I got married I thought it would be absolutely hilarious. I use that term very sarcastically to shorten my name two pools, which obviously sounds like poop L which is the word for dustbin and French and then that has now become a sort of a nickname for everyone else. So Priya is preambles Lila her daughter is labels. Pupils is really cute. It's really not Katherine. I'm sorry. She got it out of me.
Oh god I knew.
I'd also like to say a huge thank you to our sponsors for this season of relatively fine my past for digging into their extraordinary records and uncovering surprising and often revelatory family stories Find My past is the only place online where you can access the 1921 census. So if you want to start your family tree or add colour to what you know already, then find my past or co.uk is the place to do it. Thank you to Tony to ticker him for letting us use her amazing song. This is a pocket Production and Sound Design is by Nick Carter at mix sonics.com
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