Tale of Kozhikode City
In the youth Sarala was effervescent.
That was before she has had hallucinations.
Even before anyone noticed anything idiosyncratic about her.
Before she started being mute.
Before she began her energetic, never ceasing walk into and out of her,
through the long verandas of their house.
About her illness, I have had endless chance to hear about. But about her youth I haven't heard much.
Only that she has been the school leader in her times and was a smart girl.
She stayed with her brother's family and tried to love the people in her life. I, for that matter, belonged outside her area of concern. Because i was connected or rather not connected to her through her brother's marriage, a distant relative.
But I noticed her love for my cousins. She especially loved her sister's daughter. When we, kids, climbed over trees and fell for mangoes in many ways, Sarla thought it important to protect this cousin. We spent our vacation in joyous spirit in and around sarala occasionally wondered why she couldn't be happy and most of all I wondered why I couldn't be the object of her concern.
In this summer, at the beginning of my son's vacation and at the beginning of many many springs in my life, after long battles, I heard the story of her end, her miserable end. Sarala's death was more abandoned than her life, or it was the result of all her abandonment. She dies in a mental hospital. After having sent lots of letters to her brother's house for taking her back mentioning her healthy state of mind and complete recovery from madness, the hospital authorities might have abandoned her too. Her death didnt bring much tears, only a few sighs , perhaps. and a lot of sense of relief.
Sarala's marriage was a failure. The problem was that she loved her husband too much. It was the kind of love which was reflected in the way she addressed him, the way she remembered him in her own fence less louder tone. My youth had its imprints.
Her long words,
her longer than soul calls to her husband.
Desperate attempts to pull the doors open.
Doors perhaps to the kind of life she deserved.
She was imaginative and the world was too disconnected and wounded to give her any solace.
The road to hospitals and road to kozhikode city was always scorched. The environment of intolerable touch of insensitivity.
There are no holes of cool woods.
No fur of imagined feathers.
Torrid climate was ever present.
Even in Sarla's house, which was far from the city, harsh messenger waves of this insensitivity reached, to your dismay, almost everyday.
She felt it, waled endless and gave in one day.
The loneliness of a sensitive mind allowed to walk as many times as she wished, and the one locked in a cell where other people are no better in deceiving the world, might be different.
It can't be measured, though.
There aren't many instruments to measure them. The pain of a wounded mind, of body, I have seen many in hospitals.Unfortunately there aren't many tablets to be given as the pace of pain increases and decreases.
Melancholy is marketable. It, like the leaves-red, green and yellow, might be mellowing sometimes, ready to fall. But the nature of melancholy does not allow itself to be fallen from the minds.They cultivate it. Hospitals cultivate it. They cut it, to the size they want. and exhibit it. Market it. It has then the colour of freshness. It gets crowded and stays there. In a cell, melancholy might breed faster with no flights of dream. And in a cell melancholy made sarala commit suicide.
