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.

About The Pearl

Yesterday night, after a dinner of wine and what my husband calls 'retrofitted' pasta, I picked up the slim volume of John Steinbeck's novel, The Pearl. On the firt few pages, the family of Kino, his wife Juana, and their son Coyotito are waking up in the morning and getting up from bed. It is a perfect day, a day similar to any other day when Kino eats the corn cake breakfast his wife makes in their traditional fireplace.

The entire scenario is so pristine, untouched, that it is a little out of the way when I get to know that they live in a brush house, away from the concrete and plaster houses on the other side of the land, and light a brush fire to cook their meal. There is a world of difference between these two segments of society. They are poor.

A sudden development brings their poverty into full focus. A scorpion bites the beloved child on his hammock. The mother Juana wants the doctor to come and look at the child, but she is informed by the neighbours that the doctor would not come to cure the child living in these houses.

Hence the march of the entire crowd to the doctor, who lives in a palatial house. The mony minded doctor refuses to examine the wounded child. He is also unable to find any value in the rough pearls that Kino offers instead of money.

What happens next, I'm eager to know. Would have to be patient.