My closest friend, my biggest enemy: can I make sense of my sister’s life and death?

When Arifa Akbar's artist sister died suddenly, she was left wondering why their relationship had been so fractious. Could a trove of sketchbooks reveal the truth?

My sister's illness was a mystery until the day before she died. In the spring of 2016, Fauzia was taken to hospital twice and each time she stayed in intensive care for days on end. Her doctors conducted tests, drew up hypotheses, disproved them, and called in more doctors until her medical team was engorged with expertise but no closer to a diagnosis.

The mystery remained even as we were told to gather around her bed in the ICU on 9 June 2016. After she had died, when my mother and I prised out the needles that the nurses hadn't taken from her neck and wrist, she continued to bleed. My mother, a British Pakistani Muslim who practises her faith quietly but assiduously, whispered the Qur'anic surah Yaseen in her right ear and told me she had seen a tiny black pearl slip out from under Fauzia's eyelid - a single jewel of a tear - which she had caught in the palm of her hand just before it disappeared, along with my sister's soul. It was a sign, she said, a parting gift from her firstborn child, who was also the first to die.