The Beach Tour (Part 2)

 

The Beach Tour (Part 2)

Being continued from part 1.....

Neela was left shell shocked in the unbearable loss. This time she didn’t cry for the missed opportunity of fulfilling her intense desire to visit a sea. She cried her heart out, mourning the death of her father. Not only Neela, but also the other members of the family couldn’t help crying in the limitless waves of pain, infinite helplessness against the fate, and the grueling uncertainty they were going to face with the loss of only earning member in the family.

For the next few days, they keep thinking how a person, so dear to them with all his appearance; a person at a specific age and with a distinguishable physique and identity, with all his love, passion, responsibilities, dreams, just gone away out of the border line of all living things, to somewhere inexplicable to human mind. When a dear one left for the after-world, leaving all the illusion of the world behind, to somewhere as blurred as the mental image of a sea in Neela’s mind, the surviving members of the family can’t do anything other than shedding tears. 

Shedding tears was nothing new to Neela. She used to cry a lot after being rebuked or bashed by her parents, after quarreling with her friends, after being upset with her father for his frequent failure in keeping promises of the dream trip to the sea. She used to cry in the stomach pains. She knew how it feels when she gets hurt in an accidental fall or cuts her fingers by a knife. She even knows the salty taste of bloods dipping out of the fresh cuts. At this earlier age, she had already learned to distinguish the physical pains from the mental pains with her obscure and self-made definitions. But, the pains she feels after the death of her father was entirely different and inexplicable to her innocent mind.       

After the death of Neela’s father, the whole family migrated to her maternal uncle’s home in a small town far away from Calcutta. Her mother didn’t want to take her marriageable daughter to such a place. She wanted to rent a small house and stay until her marriage. But her brothers didn’t want to bear the expenses involved.

It takes a day long train journey to get to her uncle’s home. The small town remains the same. The home in the south of an age-old pond beside a mango orchard was looking unchanged too. But, this time, the behavior of her uncles, aunts and the cousins as well got apparently changed a lot. No more welcome notes, or the festive moods from her suddenly changed relatives. They cried for her father too, but even after that no one offers her foods or other things with the love and affection she used to get in her earlier visits. She wasn’t sure, if she should cry or not for the changes she was feeling.

However, it didn’t take long to understand she no longer needed to decide all by herself whether to cry or not. Tears naturally started to stream down her face with the physical pains she was required to undertake in the household chores she had never imagined of doing at her father’s home. And with the mental sufferings she was going through as a neglected, unwelcomed and marriageable girl stamped as a burden to her uncle’s family.

With the radical changes of the surroundings, Neela got to learn to keep calm with her dirty and torn-out dresses comparing to those of her cousins; with the quality and amount of food she and her little brothers were given; with the discrimination of treatment she and her family members would receive; with the dresses and foods her brothers were sent to school and with the Big void of love and affections she would hardly care about as long as her father was alive.

Soon enough, one of her younger brothers succumbed to malaria fever and her mother got stuck into a bed with partial paralysis, probably followed by a stroke no one was ever aware of. But, luckily enough she was married off to Hospital Assistant in a nearby town, with all the promises of a new life, a renewed beginning and a rekindled identity.

Neela was no longer living on the mercy of someone else merely as a helpless refugee. Now, she had a family of her own with the right over everything with her lost sense of belongingness. Her husband seemed to be happy with her and as her in-laws. But, her tears never left her. In the lingering silence at night, tears kept rolling down from her eyes. In the past, she knew the reasons of her crying. She used to cry either for an emotional outburst or the pains from being physically hurt. But, now, she could no longer realize the reasons of her uncontrolled pathos. She couldn’t figure out how the images of her long-lost past life tried to reconnect. She had a life with lots of promises; she had a life in a big city with a sea of homes foaming around her; she had a vision of the vastness of a sea in her tender mind; she had a dream to walk along a sea shore and connect her mental image of a sea with the real one.  It was beyond her understanding that the life her soul was really belonged to was going away miles deep down her heart. And without an answer known to her, she had to remain silent whenever she was asked to tell the reasons behind her crying.      

One fine morning, a woman from the next door visited her home. She had lately made a pilgrimage in Puri. And as soon as she started talking about how exciting it was to take the sea bathing, Neela burst into tears with a salty taste of blood in her heart.