Hush.... it's a secret!

When the twins were born, my mother was shown only one baby. The two of them were pointed out to her in the ICU only the next day as they lay under sickly yellow lights trying to fight jaundice. Happily enough, they survived and blossomed into two healthy happy bouncing babies. And that’s where any similarities ended. To put it in my mothers words who was repeating my aunts words. “One was a pleasure to see and the other was a joy to watch.” While Sumana sat around stolidly, batting her pretty long eyelashes dressed in perfect little frocks, smiling, gurgling, cooing, Nandini would be running around, constantly getting into trouble, disappearing and reappearing with torn frocks, mysterious scratches and cobwebs in her hair.
To put it in my own words; Its pouring with rain outside, Sumana will manage to make it home from school with nary a drop of water on her and not a crease out of place on her uniform, while Nandini will make it back home two hours later, after having spent the last hour in the blazing after-rain sunshine soaking wet and drenched to the skin.
They grew up into two different people something which my parents very actively encouraged by refusing to twin them, they never wore matching twin outfits, they went to the same school but were in different sections, they had different interests which were encouraged independently. Of course nature helped, and even on the surface the two of them are as different as they get. Nandini grew up into a 5 foot and something, big, curvy, dusky beauty, while Sumana is a 5 foot nothing petite, doll like girl. Forget about looking like twins, they don’t even look like distant second cousins, twice removed.
I have a theory, which is slowly becoming an unshakeable belief, that one of the “twins” is a changeling. Some hapless woman having given birth to a girl ..... again....... bribed the nurses to exchange her girl for a boy (only one baby was shown remember!). and so our family were born, Mummy (I was copying my cousin) and Naina and Me and the babies as I remember telling my parents while swinging from their legs. My Parents on the other hand remember my telling them to send one of the babies back to the hospital (I was trying to copy my cousin who had only one sister, disaster was averted when they asked me which baby to send back and I couldn’t decide.)
I tried telling my aunt this theory, and she flared up “every mother recognizes her child”. I disagree, my mother recognized the changeling as her daughter and that’s exactly what she has grown up to be. Every Day I thank god for the switch, because I can’t think of a life where I didn’t know either one of my beautiful sisters and didn’t have them to fight with and lean on. The switch theory means that no matter how far apart the three of us were born, we were meant to be sisters and would have found each other. It means that we owe so much to our parents for bringing us up to be happy and friends and it’s not a question of genes. That love runs thicker than blood. If the changelings biological mother reads this somewhere, keep your son, he’s yours, we’re keeping our sister.