Blood and Water

Blood is thicker than water, they say. Recently though, if you’re on certain parts of the internet, you’d know this phrasing is a misrepresentation of the entire phrase. Curiously, it is the opposite. I wonder who corrupted it. It might have been a good wit who switched the old to turn it into a new Aha! moment. Except it was too good an Aha! moment that it overshadowed and outlived its original source.

Which turned out to be this: The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.

I thought about this saying today because it was literally last week that I had this very nonchalant but enlightening conversation with my mother,

My mother, ladies and gentlemen, is a woman who turned to me one day and said: "Hey do you remember So-and-so?" To which I replied, "No that doesn’t ring a bell". She thought about it and said: "huh, must have been before you were born."

I mean… ya.

And so it was that we were cooking and I recalled one time when I was very little that my elder sister and I travelled from Aizawl to Rahsi Veng, Lunglei with Nu Nuseni, her brother and his new bride. No parents. No one else. None of us – not my mother, not my sister texting on her phone nearby, certainly not me – could remember why we travelled without mum and dad. My mother said: "we often let you kids travel alone; in retrospect, that was not very smart; good thing the world was safer then."

Ya, duh.

"Well, at least they were relatives", I said.

My mother looked startled. Ladies and gents, I say startled! The woman looked startled at this statement and she turned to my sister. 

My sister (again, my dear readers, my sister is the woman who when she was a kid was singularly observant and noticed that my parents were trying to save money by adulerating Frooti which my sister loved at the time. The costs of the mango was apparently hurting the purse. So the counterfeiting couple would save up her empty Frooti tetrapacks and inject regular watered down Kissan squash into them and present it to the kid. Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on how you look at it, this singularly observant kid was also extremely gullible. To the point that she would point to the empty tetrapacks and cheerfully tell guests and visitors: “those empty packs are there so that my parents can fool me!” Which they still did. It’s never knowledge alone is it? It’s how you use your knowledge!)

So my mother looked startled and my sister looked entirely nonplussed. “But surely you know we are not related by blood!” my mother finally said.

Which is how in the second week of March, 2026, I learned that the woman I had been calling Nu, as an extended Mother in the kinship terminology of the Mizo, all my loving life, was not related to me at all. Blood of the covenant, the kind of friendship that endures, like the one evidently between my mother and her dear friend, is apparently thicker than the water of the womb. Because, and I shall not name names here, there are closer blood ties and people I do call Nu, who I am not half or even a quarter as close to as I am to Nu Nuseni.

This is, by the way, the moment my sister chose to laugh at me and say: "You probably think Nu Thartei is a relative too!"

Yes, my dear audience, I had indeed, all my life upto the second week of March 2026, thought that Nu Thartei was a blood aunt. Since I don’t really know the specifics of how I am related to many people, I had just counted it off as one of those. When during my Foundational Training as an MCS, we were in Vairengte for a week, I had invited all 13 or so of my batchmates to Nu Thartei’s house for dinner, she had hosted us a lovely one. I had no idea I was inviting multiple friends over to dinner to my mother’s old, good friend. No idea at all. How lovely is that! I don’t even mean it sarcastically. I have thought about it since and I realise that I love the friendship ties that have become so strong they’ve transcended traditional kinship.

In contrast, I remember one day my dad decided to traumatize me and said something about my “Ni”, my paternal aunt, of a woman I had no knowledge of. Then he said: "oh ya, your grandfather had a pre-marital daughter; we were quite close once but then we moved from the village. I thought you knew." Heh?! I’d never heard her mentioned!

Or how on my mother’s side (this I have always known but also, sort of in the abstract way you know that an imaginary number 1 added to an imaginary number 1 is an imaginary number 2, or in the helpless, resigned way my dog looks at me when he sees a bucket of warm water and his shampoo bottle; there is nothing to be done except know it and bear with it), I have a Maybe Relative in Nagaland’s Mokokchung. 

This is because at one point, my maternal grandfather who was at the time in the Assam Police, was posted there and had a girlfriend who got pregnant. However, in his words, “it was time for me to leave so I told her to just name someone else and I left for Mizoram”. The ass, honestly. In college, I had asked Atu if there had ever been this scandal in her village. She tried to ask around but if that baby was ever carried to term, or if there is a Naga kid going around unknowingly being half-Mizo, we’d never know!

I am starting to think I might do well to construct a family tree. My family seems sus. Or the sitcom version of a Santa Barbara or The Bold and The Beautiful drama.