Episode 1: The Unfelt Connections
Sun was born into a family where she was not accepted with warm hugs and love; rather, she was showered with hate and curses. The child was named Sun, but while growing up she never felt like a sun; all she could think of was being a gloomy rain who only brought despair in everyone’s life. The moment she was born, her mother had to face endless criticism just because of her. And she always felt that everything bad that happened to her parents, she was responsible for them.
Yet she was, is, and will always be grateful to have such great parents. It was her mother who always protected her from all the negative people and their curses. And, no matter what other people said, she adored her daughter and gave her so much love. Her mother had to face many hardships to make sure that her daughter gets all the love, good teachings, education, and everything she deserves so that she becomes a good human being and never depends on anyone.
Sun saw how she was treated differently from others in the family. She never felt wanted in the family. From childhood, she had no idea what was her fault that she was hated so much and cursed, and people wanted her to die. Incidents that add to her question, “Why her?” are many, but among them, two such incidents go like this: One day her grandmother took the blanket off her to have it themselves; the cold breeze felt like a slap on the few-month-old baby’s delicate face.
Sun’s grandfather passed a comment about how Sun was “a monster; why does she need to have so much food? Even a monster does not have so much food; feed her rice starch; that’s all she needs.” Just because her mother asked her grandfather to buy some baby food for her, as she was hungry and crying profusely. And her mother cannot go to the market leaving sun alone.
Sun grew up to be a person who always gave love and respect to her elders and everyone else around her, just as her mother taught her, without wanting anything in return. We can say that she has many relatives, but none of them truly were hers. She never felt any connection with them. She kept wondering, “What was her fault? How could she change it?” But she found no answer except for a clue that she was a girl. However, if only being a girl was her fault, then why did her other two female elder cousins receive favorable treatment? Why did they receive the affection and love that she didn’t?
She went to a boarding school at the age of 5 to be protected from bad surrounding influences. Even there, she never received love or friendship. She was bullied a lot, and all these changed her drastically. The kid who was always jolly, made friends easily, talked a lot, and was smart became someone who was not recognizable.
A day came when she had to see a psychiatrist, and her parents were warned, “Take her out of that place. Something’s going on inside her. If you don’t take necessary action, the next step for her is mental asylum.”
One day, she saw a kid going back to her home because she injured herself accidentally, and Sun thought she could also go home if she got hurt, but she was scared. She had no idea what to do; she wanted to run away or do something to herself just to go back home. And she was just a 5-year-old kid. This thought still scares her. None of her grandparents or uncles or aunts went to meet her, but when it came to their grandson, they went every Sunday to meet him and even cooked for him.
It was the first Bengali New Year after she shifted to Kolkata and went to meet her grandparents and take their blessings. She saw how her grandparents gave new dresses to their other grandchildren but not her. She was very upset and went crying to her room and told her papa, “Grandma gave everyone a new dress but not me. Why? Am I a bad granddaughter?” Her papa rushed to the market and bought her a new dress.
Even her papa noticed how his parents and others treated her daughter, but he never said anything to them. Rather, he tried his best to make the relations better. But all his efforts went in vain. As nothing could change the fact that his daughter will never get love from her grandparents or anyone. The only thing Sun wanted was LOVE. Is it too much to ask for? Is she too difficult to love? A question that still hurts a 22-year-old Sun.
Our Purple World 