You remain mesmerised for a long time after reading a novel, particularly, when you identify yourself with a character inside it. Once I get into the groove, I start living as a character, talking to the others in the book, start thinking like the person and even cry in grief or laugh in delight. In the end I come out of it with enough things to think about to silence my anguish.

Last week I read “Love is a four letter word” by Claire Calman. I could really connect with a character called Bella. She had lost her fiancé in an accident after which Bella starts having problems with going on with her life because she doesn’t want to hear the ‘L’ word again and she no longer has faith in it. As the story moves, she meets a perfect person who is ready to spend his life with her and so does Bella. Thereafter the artist in her comes out; she laughs with her heart, loves from her soul and even starts understanding the impossibly difficult mind of her mother. All becomes perfect in her life and then, in a second, she loses the guy only because of her problem to open up to him. This is where I could bond with Bella. I lose because I cannot open up and express myself. Not only that but she refuses to think as to why she was so scared of coming close to him. Vague glimpses of her lost love while thinking helps her find the answer. She feels guilty when she discovers that she had stopped loving him a long time back and that she was only hanging on to the relationship because she never thought about it seriously. The “rest in peace” inscribed in his grave wasn’t for him but for the others who were living.

The obstinacy in her, her ability to veil her grief by cracking jokes, not thinking over the problem but instead trying to keep herself busy to outshadow them and the pinch of haughtiness are also my ways. It is like a behavioural pattern that I had formed over the years. I couldn’t help but smile at her blunders, which are so much like mine. I have actually started correcting myself.  It isn’t easy to correct little bad habits we have and I am realising it now. It is always easy to look for easier ways out of any situation. Life seems unproblematic then but any unsolved work will bother us in future.

So it is better to go through the pain once and for all and break an unhealthy pattern and free ourselves rather than pile them up and try to finish them all together. It won’t do any good but lead you to depression.

— Dibya Karki, Campion College