Their mothers were sisters and they were born days apart. Yet, the cousins were as different as chalk and cheese.
The one with the spotlessly fair complexion was a bundle of enthusiasm and every teacher’s dream, while the other who was beautifully dusky was aloof and indifferent, her attitude screaming quiet defiance.
On the first day of school, as excited fifth graders who have transitioned into middle schoolers from the protected confines of primary school, my friends and I had the pleasant surprise of finding the cousins in the same class — our class.
However, the sisters did not share our enthusiasm for they went out of their way to steer clear of each other’s path.
While the bundle of enthusiasm steadily picked up a spot as the teacher’s pet, the indifferent one’s silent defiance — that the teachers were familiar with — had ballooned into a sense of cold standoffishness and resentment.
After her parents were summoned and after the teachers gave up trying to persuade her out of the shell of unrelenting silence that she had retreated into, she became the mute spectator who sat through every class unnoticed.
Then one day, we noticed her absence — the empty chair in the corner was cold devoid of its quiet occupant.
The sister with a zest for life had disappeared too. When she made a comeback a fortnight later, she appeared frail, jittery and shaken, living every moment through unending pain and perpetually at the brink of drowning into a flood of tears.
Even when our hearts went out to her and when our curiosity could hold no more, we kept the flood of questions that plagued our minds to ourselves because by then we knew that the empty chair in the corner would stay empty for the rest of the year and that the quietly defiant sister would never come back.
Our little minds could not fathom a reason enough to comprehend what could have led our unusually quiet classmate to take her life. Suicide was an unfamiliar territory and a strange word that suddenly stood dominating and looming dark in our mental dictionary.
We held hushed discussions in-between classes and during breaks after the lone sister was gently whisked away by the school counsellor.
Time heals wounds and the fog of loss and despair will evanesce to reveal the path of life ahead for us to move on.
The lone sister has moved on. Her enthusiasm is still infectious, but the gaping hole of loss remains for being the best and bringing out the best in her had been a curse big enough to shoulder the responsibility of the weight of another life — her dear sister’s life.
While we tread through the gravelled and otherwise unfair path of competition, comparison and disillusion between the tarred roads of happiness and joy, it is good to take a moment from our meticulously planned inert existence to immerse in a moment of solitude that will shake off the shroud of depression and angst and question your practical mind: Is a failure, an opportunity lost, a mistake, the unrelenting pressures that we forcefully succumb to and the many opinions and words that measure the value of our existence worthy of giving up on life itself?
You will be pleasantly surprised to realise that the answer will always be a NO!
This is an extract from a piece that was published in the Gulf News. For the full article please click here.
Good Morning! Wishing you all a very happy Sunday and a great week ahead.
The title of your post itself speaks a whole lot about living life, pranita…A sad tale to read…
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Yes, Deepika. A very sad tale that happened a long time ago but still remains fresh in my memories.
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It was so unfortunate that nobody could find what was going on in her mind.
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Yes, very unfortunate, Megala. A young life lost.
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Very nycly written
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Thank you very much!
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Ohhhh this is so heartbreaking! Life is so precious and each person so unique …wonder how this will reach as many!
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Yes! A life wasted. Life is indeed very precious.
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How true! Life can be so unfair and taken away that leaves a shock to the little minds at school, unable to comprehend. A power post!
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Glad you could comprehend the pain and our confusion at that age and time. Life can indeed be very unfair!
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Thank you for sharing such a touching story. A very real and powerful story that we all can learn from. Life is so precious.
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Absolutely! Life is indeed very precious. Thank you too for stopping by and leaving your feedback, Noel.😊
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How heartbreakingly sad, especially at such a young age 😕
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Yes! It’s terribly 😞
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Oh!! This is so painful. How could such a young life end in such despondency. A very poignant story.
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Yes, Siddhartha, it was sad, terribly sad. The events still say vivid in my mind’s eye. Depression can cloud our judgment and push us into boundaries that we would not want to cross.
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Heartbreaking indeed P. It happened then and sadly it happens today also. I think its high time we evaluate the kind of life and pressure we are burdening the young and innocent souls with.
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Yes, Radhika. Its sad. Putting your own children on a weighing scale and measuring them up to another child does hurt their feelings as much as it does when we are compared. We can raise confident children if we accept them for all that they are.
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