As kids we were inseparable. We looked as similar as our names: Neeta and Neelu. Our bond was so close that when people asked us, “If one of you gets hurt, can the other one feel it?” I thought, “Good question.”
We shared a room until we were 14. Our high school basketball coach used to call us “Nee-whatever” or “N-squared.” We were doubles partners on the tennis team, co-editors of the yearbook, first and second place at the county science fair, teenage overachievers on our own tandem bike. We had a healthy sense of competition that pushed us to one-up each other but usually got us to the same place.
At college, we split—creating new lives at opposite ends of the country. She settled on Dartmouth’s Green and I at Stanford’s Oval. (In a twist of Res Ed fate, I spent my freshman year in Donner with six other twin-halves.) I don’t remember our separation as a stressful one. Learning to live apart was a new assignment for Neelu and me, but college was about transition, growth and identity development for everybody.
Still, she stuck glow-in-the-dark stars on her ceiling in Hanover just as I did in Palo Alto. We gave each other word magnets for our dorm fridges. One year, unknowingly, we sent our dad the same birthday card. We were both premed.
On a fateful day sophomore year, one of my drawmates came to find me at Green Library. Neelu had been in a serious ski accident. She had fallen on heavy snow, crushing five vertebrae and landing upside down with her head against a ski equipment pole.
It would be hours before I would know she wasn’t paralyzed.
Those hours were terrifying. I was scared for how her life was going to change and confused about what I was supposed to do. My parents were already flying out to New Hampshire. I couldn’t reach them. I couldn’t talk to her. I felt betrayed by the institution of twinship—where was my twin premonition? I should have been able to warn her. My back was supposed to hurt.
In the weeks and months that followed, I found my role. Initially, it was in gestures like sitting on the phone with Neelu until she fell asleep at night or, when we could be together, in kneading the scar tissue in her back. It was in fully accepting her convalescent’s changed circumstances and being with her as she accommodated them. Thankfully, she had a full recovery. I’m an inch taller and haven’t skied since.
We graduated from college on the same day. I got Mom; she got Dad. She moved out to the Bay Area soon after, and we had one year of sharing the same room again. But Neelu’s brush with mortality had changed things. She stepped off our path, finding human geography and economics as subjects more true to her curiosity. She paused to reconsider our twins’ competition. It was no longer about achievement, but rather about who had the more creative, balanced life.
I moved to New York for medical school, but Neelu went to Los Angeles for business school. She runs a yoga company in L.A. now, and I’m going through residency in San Francisco.
Having a twin gives one the rare chance to see one’s “what if” life played out. On a bleary-eyed morning after tending to almost-dying patients all night, I have dreamed of a simple, quiet, day job. Squeezing fresh juice at a stand on a sunny island where birds, not pagers, chirp. Or running a natural-foods grocery store on a country road with time to read novels on the back porch. My sister lives a life more like that: her days are marked by meditation in the morning, strategic planning in the afternoon and rock-climbing at the gym before dinner.
At those moments, it is not jealousy I feel but rather awareness that there is more to my life than 80-hour work weeks and the conviction that I will reclaim the other pieces as soon as I want. Learning how to become a doctor is a choice, and I can change my mind. Knowing that makes all the difference.
Neelu’s injury was hers alone to feel, but we’ve both gained from her recovery. It defined us as individuals. Now we are more honest to our own passions. In having someone almost like me, I’ve figured out more of who I am.
NEETA JAIN, ’99, is an internal medicine resident at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco.
