The year was 1996. The internet did not exist in our house. Television had limited hours. Entertainment, in other words, had to be found wherever you could get it. Fortunately for us, we had Swati.
To understand this story fully, you need to understand the family architecture. There were three of us sisters, and Swati was the middle one — which, if you know anything about birth order theory, is already a rich starting point. I was the eldest, which came with a certain authority and the responsibility of setting an example that I exercised selectively and at my own convenience. The youngest had the charm. And the middle child, conventional wisdom suggests, has to carve out her own identity through sheer force of personality. Swati had elected to do this through academic excellence and, as it would turn out, an extraordinarily vivid relationship with her own body's minor fluctuations.
She was preparing for her Class 12 board exams — those terrifying, all-consuming, life-defining examinations that every Indian school student approaches with the energy of someone preparing for actual war. The school term was technically over. She only went in for preliminary exams and mock tests. The rest of the time, she studied at home with the grim, focused intensity of someone who had made a personal pact with achievement itself.
Of the three of us, she was unquestionably the hardest working. While I — the eldest, and considerably more philosophical about the relationship between effort and outcome — treated studying as something to be approached cautiously and avoided where possible, and our youngest sister treated it as an optional activity to be negotiated around, Swati treated it as a vocation. A calling. A thing you did until your head went tight.
And that is precisely where our story begins.
It was sometime past midnight. Swati had been at her desk for hours, surrounded by textbooks and colour-coded notes, powering through the darkness on willpower and ambition alone. Somewhere around the witching hour, something began to feel wrong. Her head felt strange. Heavy. Tight — the specific word she settled on with great conviction, as though she had consulted a medical dictionary and found it the most clinically precise term available.
She paced the room for a while, which did not help. She pressed her fingers to her temples, which also did not help. She stared at her textbooks, which definitely did not help and may, in fact, have been the original cause of the problem.
Finally, unable to tolerate the injustice of this mysterious cranial tightness a moment longer, she made her decision. She walked down the hall to my parents' bedroom, opened the door, and — in a move that displayed quite extraordinary confidence for a middle child — switched on the overhead light.
For those who have never woken a sleeping person with a sudden overhead light at midnight: it is not a gentle experience. It is, in fact, deeply unpleasant. My mother surfaced from sleep the way a person surfaces when something has gone badly wrong, blinking against the sudden brightness, taking in the sight of Swati standing in the doorway looking tragic and unwell and, crucially, entirely physically intact.
"My head is tight," Swati announced, her voice wobbling with the particular emotion of someone who has concluded they are suffering greatly. "And I am not feeling well."
She was, by all accounts, on the verge of tears.
Now, my mother is many wonderful things. She is sharp, capable, fiercely intelligent, and had navigated the chaos of raising three daughters with remarkable composure. What she has never been, and has never pretended to be, is the soft, cooing, warm-compress-on-the-forehead type of mother. She is practical. Brilliantly, efficiently, sometimes startlingly practical.
Add to this baseline practicality the fact that she had just been woken from a deep sleep by a blinding overhead light in the middle of the night, and what followed was perhaps inevitable.
Without fully opening her eyes, my mother processed the situation, arrived at her conclusion, and delivered her medical verdict.
"However tight your head feels," she said, with the serene authority of a woman who had not signed up for this, "go to the bathroom, switch on the light, and stand there. See if it loosens."
Then she fell directly back asleep.
Swati stood in the doorway for a moment, processing what had just transpired. Then she went to the bathroom. Whether she stood there in the light dutifully waiting for her head to loosen is information she has never voluntarily shared with the family. I have always assumed she did, because Swati was, above all else, a conscientious follower of instructions — even absurd ones delivered by a half-asleep mother at midnight.
I laughed about this for weeks. I have, in fact, never stopped laughing about it. It has become the kind of family story I trot out at every gathering, at every reunion, at every occasion where Swati is present and momentarily off her guard — and I intend to keep doing so indefinitely.
But the universe, gloriously, was not finished with us. Because Swati's body had further concerns it wished to raise with the household.
A few days later, she became convinced that she was cold. Not cold in the ordinary sense — not I should put on a jumper cold. Cold in a more clinical, systemic, troubling sense. Colder than everyone else in the house. Colder, possibly, than was medically advisable. Cold in a way that warranted not just attention, but documentation.
She found the household thermometer.
What followed was a data collection exercise of quite astonishing ambition. Swati took her temperature. She recorded it. She took it again. She frowned at the numbers. Then, displaying what could genuinely be described as scientific initiative — every experiment needs a control group — she began offering to take everyone else's temperature for comparison purposes.
She moved through the house with her thermometer like a very small, very concerned public health official, building her evidence base. I submitted with the amused tolerance befitting an eldest sister who has seen things. Our youngest submitted because she was told to. My parents submitted because resistance seemed to only make things worse and the thermometer had already appeared at two consecutive meals.
"See," Swati would say, presenting her findings with the gravity of a research scientist briefing a sceptical committee. "Mine is lower."
By fractions of a degree. Within ranges entirely consistent with normal human variation. Measured on a thermometer that had been rattling around the back of a drawer for years and was not, in any meaningful sense, a precision instrument.
She was going cold, she maintained. The data supported it. She remained open to alternative interpretations but had not yet encountered any that she found convincing.
Eventually — because she was persistent and because the thermometer kept reappearing at mealtimes — my father did what any sensible parent does in the face of relentless, data-driven lobbying. He picked up the phone and called Dr. Joglekar.
Dr. Joglekar was our family physician, a man of evident experience and considerable patience. He arrived within the hour, checked her vitals with quiet efficiency, and delivered his verdict. Temperature: normal. Blood pressure: normal. Pulse: normal. General condition: the robust, unremarkable picture of a perfectly healthy young woman who had been studying too hard.
He put down his equipment, looked at Swati, and told her off. Calmly, clearly, and without apparent malice, but definitively. There was nothing wrong with her. She had alarmed the household, conscripted her entire family into a temperature-monitoring programme, and summoned a physician in the evening over a head that was not measurably tight and a body that was not, by any clinical standard, going cold.
Swati received this assessment with the expression of someone who respected the medical profession but was reserving the right to remain privately unconvinced.
I received it with pure, unbridled joy.
This was 1996. There was no internet. No social media. No streaming, no scrolling, no infinite content to disappear into. What we had, in those long evenings during board exam season, was each other — and occasionally, magnificently, we had Swati and her symptoms.
In hindsight, of course, it's easy to see what was really happening. She was the middle child, the most studious of the three of us, carrying the weight of enormous exams entirely on her own terms. She was exhausted and anxious, and her mind — so trained to analyse, to monitor, to track and record — had simply turned its considerable attention inward and started catastrophising. The tight head was stress. The cold was probably just the night air and too little sleep. The thermometer was a coping mechanism that happened to also be extremely entertaining for everyone else, and for me in particular.
But in a house with no internet and limited television, a midnight bathroom prescription and a roving household temperature study were, genuinely, the finest entertainment I had all year. Better than anything on television. Better than anything I could have arranged myself. Completely free, endlessly repeatable in the retelling, and right there in my own home.
I still bring it up at every family gathering. Swati, who went on to be the most accomplished of all of us — which I acknowledge with great generosity as the eldest — still does not find it quite as funny as I do.
Her head, for what it's worth, did eventually loosen.