The Search for Love

The novel The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd could also be named The Secret Search for Love (although the search was not secret, it is to rhyme with the original). The young teenager Lily Owens is looking for love, which she is not getting at home. Her father treats her like a drill master and punishes her at his every whim. She is a growing girl, and the absence of her mother in her life creats a void that is hard to fill.

It is not only the absence of her mother, but how she became absent that weighs on Lily. It was possible that her mother died because of Lily, when she picked up a gun which went off accidentally and killed the mother.

And all her life until she spent months with the Boatwright sisters, Lily kept on thinking that she was never loved - neither by her father, nor her mother. She was without love in this entire world. Except Rosaleen, the maid, no one loved her.

To save Rosaleen from a hard life in jail, therefore Lily takes a drastic step. She sneaks Rosaleden out of jail, and then runs away from home with her. She had always wanted to find more about her mother, as her father had nothing to do with her. He would not even hear Lily mention her, so Lily had no other way but to find about her mother on her own.

Running away from home with Rosaleen was a drastic step, fraught with danger of being caught by police or found out by her father and then put back in the house. But the need to know more about her mother was so overwhelming, Lily went ahead and started the search.

Where she was offered a roof to stay, the pink house where the Boatwright sisters lived tending to bees and selling honey, Lily found love. She discovered love in the youthfulness of Zach, and in the sisters August, June and May. In this same house she found out the truth about her mother. That her mother loved her. That she was not an unloved child.

And Lily continued to stay on here, even after her father found her out.

Color in Fiction

Earlier, I had read the classic novel, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, and had been bowled over by its clarity and directness in depicting racism. And now I am reading a more recent novel, The Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd, and it is still a de ja vu when it comes to the question of color.

The interface with color is a theme that tends to transcend color and rise to a human emotional level. There is understanding and empathy. The parallel in both the books is unmistakeable. And the overarching feeling while reading them is the power of the author, who describes scenes with such humanity that one can't but get into the skin of the characters, and once and for all forget about various prejudices that still invade so many relationships.

With their pointed focus on individual stories, the authors of both these books with their different story lines through their eyes, have laid open the idea of a world that is close to the ideal. They have written at a time when the ideal was too far away, and their work was a step towards it.

This is the way, through individual effort, the world changes. It is a slow process, but for changes to take place, these efforts are invaluable.