TL;DR
Sixty copy-ready messages for a brother or sister who lives somewhere else — in English, Hindi (Devanagari) and romanized Hinglish. They are sorted by the shape of the distance, because the brother who took a job in Gurgaon, the sister who married into a family in Nashik and the sibling three years into a degree in Melbourne are all "far away" and none of them needs the same message. There is also a section for the hardest version: the sibling who has gone quiet, where the distance is not geography at all.
Siblings need a different register
Romantic long-distance has a script. Sibling long-distance does not, which is why most people default to forwarding a good-morning image and calling it contact.
Two things are true about brothers and sisters that are not true about anyone else you miss. First, you have a shared archive nobody else can access — the old house, the school van, the specific way your mother says both your names when she is angry. Second, sentimentality between siblings usually gets deflected, because that is the rule you both grew up with.
So the messages that actually land are specific rather than sweet. A line about the terrace beats a line about love. Where the sweet version is what you mean, we have written it plainly below, and you should send it — just expect a "kya hua, sab theek hai?" in reply.
Same country, different city: the one who moved for work
Bengaluru, Gurgaon, Pune, Hyderabad. A flight away, home for Diwali and maybe one wedding, and slowly becoming a guest in a house they grew up in.
Different countries, waiting on a date: the sibling abroad
A master's in Ontario. A first job in Dubai. Three years in, with a return date that keeps sliding by a semester.
No date on the calendar
The sister who married out of the city and now lives inside somebody else's routine. The brother posted somewhere indefinite. The sibling who drifted and neither of you can name the year it started.
भाई-बहन के लिए, हिंदी में
Copies as two lines — romanized above, Devanagari below. Paste whichever one your keyboard is friendlier with; on WhatsApp, most families read the romanized one faster.
Hinglish one-liners
For the sibling who would rather die than receive a paragraph.
When they've gone quiet
Not for a bad week. For the sibling who has stopped answering, and you do not know whether it is depression, a marriage, money, or something they think you would judge.
Make it yours: the one edit
Copy a line, then change exactly one detail before you send it.
"Passed your old school today" becomes "passed St. Xavier's today and the guard is still the same man". "Something happened today that only you would find funny" becomes "Chintu's mother has entered a second argument with the milkman". "Your city suits you" becomes "Whitefield suits you and I still hate it".
Siblings are the hardest audience for a generic message and the easiest for a specific one, because your shared archive is enormous. One retrieved detail does the work of ten sentences of feeling.
"Siblings send each other the fewest real messages of anyone in a family," says Lovely's founder. "Not because they care less. Because there's no occasion built for it, and nobody wants to be the first one to be sincere."
When a copied line isn't enough
Three cases where you should put the phone down and do something else.
When you haven't actually called in nine days. A good message on top of nine days of silence reads as an obligation being discharged. Call first.
When "I miss you" is standing in for an apology. Siblings carry old accounts — a wedding you skipped, money that never came back, something said in front of the family that you both pretended to forget. If that is what is sitting under the silence, name it. The message can come after.
When they are the one who is not okay. If a sibling has gone quiet for months, is far from home, or is going through something they cannot say out loud on a family call, a text is a small tool. Two better ones: a phone call with no complaint in it, and something they can open again at 2 AM when the house they live in is asleep. That second thing is what the If You Ever Feel Alone page is built for — open-when envelopes labelled by moment, a hug counter, a pep-talk machine, ₹49 and about ten minutes to write.
If the sibling is abroad and this is their first year, our messages for someone who is homesick are written for exactly that month. And if you cannot get there in person — a wedding, an illness, a bad week — what to send when you can't visit lists what actually arrives, with nothing shipped.
Frequently asked questions
What do you text a brother or sister who lives far away?
Text the small thing rather than the big one. Siblings almost never respond well to declarations, but they respond immediately to a photo of the old house, a reference to something only the two of you remember, or a plain "ghar aana, bahut time ho gaya". Specific beats sentimental with siblings, every time.
What is a good miss you message for a sister who lives in another city?
Something that acknowledges her life there rather than only your side of the distance: "Your city suits you and I still hate that you're in it" does more than a generic missing-you line. If she married out of the city, avoid framing her home as a place she was taken to — she lives there now, and messages that ignore that land badly.
How do you tell your brother you miss him without it being awkward?
Use the register the two of you already speak in. A joke with one honest sentence attached usually gets through where a paragraph does not — "the house is unbearably quiet and I hate it, anyway send money" is a real message. If you want to say the whole thing, say it once, plainly, and do not apologise for it afterwards.
What do you send a sibling who is studying abroad?
Send the ordinary news from home and ask specific questions about their week. Siblings abroad get plenty of pride from parents and very little normal conversation, so being the person who reports that the neighbour's dog is fat now is a more valuable role than being another voice saying congratulations.
What if my brother or sister does not reply to messages?
Keep the messages small and unpressured, and stop making each one a test. Many siblings go quiet during hard stretches rather than during good ones. If the silence has run for months and something feels wrong, call instead of texting — and say plainly that you are not calling to complain about the silence.