Neela's Monster

Once upon a time, there lived a little girl in a lovely little cottage with her mother, father, and little brother. The small family was very happy in their tidy home and they all lived busy, productive lives.
The little girl, Neela was her name, was the happiest of them all. She loved her home, with its cozy rooms, its kitchen garden, its rose plants. Her friends lived just around the corner and they would often play in front of her house. Thus, the streets of her merry home were filled with laughter many an afternoon.
But as we all know, “all good things must come to an end.” And so Neela’s childhood ended, very swiftly and very suddenly.
One fine day, when the little girl was twelve years old, a monster of sorts entered the lovely cottage. He wasn’t very large, nor very small. In fact, he wasn’t very scary looking at all. He seemed quite familiar, as if she had seen him once in a dream. But he was not from her dream of candy canes and puppies. He was from the rare dream of twisters, evil clowns, and pain.
This monster crept into the cottage, and as they say, “that began the beginning of the end.”
Whenever the coast was clear and there was no one to detect his presence nor to protect the little girl, the monster would invade Neela’s room and terrorize her.
He never really hurt her physically, so Neela could never, at first, understand what to make of his odd behavior. But he did scare her. Sometimes she was so afraid that she would lock herself in her bathroom, and cry herself to sleep.
But for all her twelve years on this planet, Neela understood one important truth. If she told her mother about this monster under her bed, their happy little family would be destroyed.
So the girl took it upon herself to keep the monster’s presence secret. She acted like her normal self, laughed, and forgot about the monster when she was with her mother. But when it got time for bed, the monster was there to remind her of her eternal suffering.

The little girl, who was not so little anymore, became numb and jaded. Neela felt like she had seen all the horrors of the world and that nothing could possibly surprise her anymore. She became depressed and eventually withdrew far into herself.
But this Neela was a wonderful actress and a practiced liar. She kept up her happy façade for not days, weeks or even months, but for many, many years.
While the girl suffered and dealt with her secret pain, her family decided to move from her beloved home to a larger less humble mansion. To her parents, the mansion symbolized the results of their hard earned success, but to Neela the mansion was a ghastly castle with too many rooms to get lost in. Her heart was left behind with the small cottage, its vegetable garden, and her childhood friends. And to make matters worse, the monster had moved in with them.


One day, Neela came home and looked her monster square in the eye.
And what she saw quite astonished her.
Here was a fine, respectable being who had had a troubled childhood. As he grew older and more successful, instead of helping others less fortunate to have a better life, he grew jealous and hated those who had beautiful childhoods. There he stood in front of her, a being of hate and envy. But when Neela saw past the monster’s unseeing, tranced eyes, she glimpsed regret, guilt, and sorrow.
The girl thought she could change her monster. And so she pleaded with him, asked him why he did such dreadful deeds, but it was all in vain. Her suffering continued.


So Neela learned to hate. She abhorred the creature with all her might and therefore looked for a way to hurt her monster. Neela rebelled.
In her blind rebellion, Neela thought she was winning, when in fact it was quite the opposite. She had lost her entire life to the rebellion. Neela no longer had many friends, no one came to play with her, and everything that she had planted in her large garden had died. She no longer thought about the future, and rarely about the present. She was obsessed with her past and those past hurts meant everything to her.
The girl did not even notice that the monster had grown older and had begun to terrorize her less. She could not see the bright plans her mother had for her future, because she lived in the land of memories.
“How young I’d been!” She’d shout to the skies. “How much evil was done to me!”
But this she would only cry when she was alone, for her mother still suspected little.
So the girl’s successful, evil façade continues to this day, and the family seems blessed to all who gaze upon them in their mansion, amid splendor and beauty.
Look a little closer, however, and this family’s true, ugly reality will come into sharp focus.