I release her

This is a penance. In many ways, I need to find peace. I have committed a gruesome murder! It was a painfully slow punishment that I meted out to a person who waylaid me at an early age, killed me, and made a monster out of me. The rebel that grew out of a sleepy village and a sleepier family was the creation of this person who invited my wrath until a few moments ago. Yes, the deed was committed over a lifetime. Every chance I got to wreck her, tarnish her, dismember her, I did with great elan, pride and precision. Today that person is barely alive! But I want to make peace after the horridly continuous crime I committed.  

I wrote a one-act play when I was 12 years old. The inspiration was Vilakku Vangaam, a translated work of a Bengali Novelist, Bimal Mithra. A voracious reading habit inculcated by my father had already initiated me into the world of words and books, especially literature. 

My nosy aunt who many of you, when you know her tricks and tantrums, may consider her nothing more than a social threat chanced upon my humble attempt. She not only read it but made a disaster out of what I thought was the baby step to becoming a Somerset Maugham or Charles Dickens or the least, Woodhouse. My ambition was mercilessly torched by the words that went beyond my family! She had taken my play to half the town and made mincemeat of my ambitious attempt to become a child prodigy in literature. For the next few years, I hid my face while attending family events. I feared those eyes who smiled at me were ridiculing me. I promised myself I would never put myself again on a pedestal where I would be judged for a small grammatical error. And I stopped writing. My creative space became a dimly lit corner. I hated every word that I read asking myself why I couldn't produce anything even remotely like that. 

I hated my aunt. In many ways, I still do. I know I need closure and need to find a way to release her too, from the burden. I wanted to pluck her eyes and her nose ring whenever I saw her. A part of me wished her dead many a time in my life. Well, part of me lay there bleeding and dying slowly since the day her evil eyes had befallen upon my one act. All my acts thereafter had been stalled and it had stunted my confidence. A decade later I wrote articles for my college magazine. But none of them appeared under my name, but my friends. They were expressions that came out of a person whose confidence to stand up had been affected and was still hurting. 

I wrote with the anonymous title for a long time until one such attempt, a small poem written in a free verse caught the eye of Aswathi Thirunal Gowri Lakshmi Bhai, the princess of Travancore. She invited me to her abode, asking me to write an affidavit saying that the poem was mine. With shivering hands, I wrote that. She then told me I could write and I should. Today hundreds of articles, poems, a novel, and a few movie scripts later, I have to say I am ready to lose the shadowy gaze of my aunt who kept following me all these years. And I also want to say sorry for her for all those abuses I hurled at her in the dark, all the colourful words I described her with. I waited all these years for an apology from her which never came. I reminded her a couple of times, that her act of mocking a child writer was no constructive criticism but plain daylight murder. Some people don't realise their folly even in their deathbeds. But I certainly want to give her the closure today. 

I didn't become a messiah of virtue overnight, but I have learnt that I no longer need that burden. I release her from the debt of an apology and I hereby grant her closure. 

Sujil Chandra Bose