What happens when the exam results are announced? One child’s marks travel far. They reach an aunt in Delhi the same evening, a neighbor on the stairs the next morning, a wedding party eight months later. The other child’s marks loiter in the house. No one lies about them. No one carries them anywhere either. The favorite child isn’t announced. But the ranking is subtly listed.
Parents deny it. Children keep the receipts.
How Children Know The Ranking
Ask an Indian parent whether they have a favorite child and the answer arrives in the same shape every time, with the same mild offense behind it. We love them all equally. Ask each child separately, and it takes two seconds. Every sibling knows who it is. They have always known.
The ranking shows itself through small gestures and actions. Whose plate gets the second helping without anyone asking. Who is defended in an argument before the facts have been established. Whose party gets the bigger cake. The name spoken first, the name spoken with a sigh.
No single instance proves anything, and that’s exactly why the system lasts. Children don’t need it spelled out. They sniff out behavior patterns and interpret actions, recognizing favoritism. It’s a daily experiment where records are maintained, and by the age of ten, findings are conclusive.
What The Ranking Costs Children
The assumption is that favoritism damages one child. In fact, it damages every child involved.
The favorite child grows up in debt, keeping up their worth: the marks, the job; keeping the marriage presentable. Being preferred is never unconditional and everyone in the house negotiates the terms. The other children grow up running an audit that never ends. Why not me? What was the difference? What is the difference still?
One child becomes a machine that can’t rest. The other becomes an accountant who can’t stop scrutinizing.
Favoritism is the first inequality most of us ever experience. Right in our homes.
The wound of being unfavored and second-best is raw and deep, especially when envy and love are directed at the same person. You resent someone you also grew up adoring. This feeling doesn’t fade with age. At forty it simply has better manners. It shows up at weddings, at property discussions, at hospital bedsides, in the four minutes it takes a family to decide which sibling will stay the night.
The Siblings Who Keep Score
My novel Cobra Orchard doesn’t sugarcoat the reality of children who weren’t their mother’s first choice and never got over it. They didn’t hate their siblings for being cruel. They hated them for being preferred, which is harder to forgive, as no one has truly done anything wrong.
They grow into adults who are sums of this childhood score. It makes them dangerous and unforgiving. Not because they hold power. But because they are certain that they are owed a timeless apology.
I wrote these characters without contempt and with no excuses. Wounds that old deserve a witness, even when they turn venomous.
A family can survive cruelty. It rarely survives such scheming.
Who is your favorite? The question parents will never answer honestly, whether your family has a favorite child or not, and whether you are it. If you still carry the answer with you, what has it cost you?
If you want more answers, explore Cobra Orchard and meet the siblings who didn’t stop keeping score.
Indian families can’t differentiate between love and control. Favoritism is how that confusion picks a winner.
Who was the favorite in your family? You don’t have to name them below. You already did, in your head.
Three women. Two timelines. One curse that refuses to die. Set in the shadow-drenched villages of Uttar Pradesh, India — across the 1970s and the early 2000s.
Cobra Orchard is a psychological thriller about secrets buried so deep, even the earth forgot them. Read Cobra Orchard on Amazon Kindle and Amazon Prime Paperback.
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Terveen Gill is a writer who has always been drawn to the uncomfortable truth hiding beneath ordinary lives. A Times of India and Chandigarh Literary Society award-winning short story writer, she is also a graphic novel script writer, indie filmmaker, and a former engineer.
Her debut psychological thriller Cobra Orchard is the culmination of that instinct: a dark, immersive novel about three women, a sinister guru, and secrets buried so deep they have begun to rot.
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