My Sister Salma

My sister Salma and I did not always get along.

We were — and still are — completely different people. I don't mean different in the polite way adults say when they're trying to make peace at a family dinner. I mean genuinely, bafflingly, almost-comically different. The kind of different that makes you stare at each other across the breakfast table and wonder how two people raised in the same house, by the same parents, in the same neighbourhood in Buziga, could turn out so little alike.

We used to joke about it. One of us, we decided, had to be adopted.

It was never serious — or at least, we never said it seriously. But the joke had teeth. Salma was the messy one — always stirring up trouble, leaving a trail of chaos behind her, and somehow managing to make it look like my fault by the time our parents walked in. I was the one trying to explain what had actually happened while she stood there looking innocent. We argued about everything: whose turn it was, who broke what, who started it, who finished it. Standard sister warfare, except ours always had this extra layer of how are we even related.

What we did have in common — the thing that always brought us back together — was the kitchen.

We both loved it. Not in the same way, but with the same seriousness. I was the creative one — always experimenting, adding something that wasn't in the recipe, asking what if we tried this? Salma was the precise one. An amazing cook in her own right — patient, careful, the kind of person who could follow a recipe once and nail it every time after. Where I wanted to invent, she wanted to perfect. I'd hover and taste too early. She'd wait until the moment was right and produce something flawless.

I used to think that meant we were competing. I was wrong. We were just two people who loved the same room for different reasons.

What I didn't understand then — what took me years to understand — is that difference isn't distance. It's just difference.

We had the same house, the same parents, the same Friday evenings when our father told stories until we forgot to be annoyed with each other. We had chapati stolen off the pan before it cooled — usually by Salma, usually blamed on me. We had the adopted joke, which only works if you love someone enough to tease them about it.

We're still different. We still are. I don't think that changes. What changed is that I stopped treating it like a problem to solve and started treating it like a fact to enjoy — two versions of the same family, side by side in the same kitchen, occasionally baffled, always connected.

Salma will probably roll her eyes if she reads this. That's how I know it's true.

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This blog is full of recipes and stories from my kitchen. But some of the best stories aren't about food at all — they're about the people who taught you that love doesn't always look like agreement. Sometimes it looks like sharing a house with someone who is nothing like you, and choosing to stay anyway.