Raksha Bandhan is coming closer and in every Raksha Bandhan I get a Rakhi from my sister who is settled in Assam and one of the currier services bring me that happiness from my sister. I truly miss my sister as for last one decade I am out of my home and then she got married and now happily enjoying her family life, touch wood!!! But on Raksha Bandhan I miss my other sister, Tanima, who is not with me, god knows how many years. Don’t know whether she is still alive or not as I never met her in my life!!!
Surprised? Well, then let me tell you this true chapter of my life, about my sister Tanima, whom I never met, but she was very close to my heart, whom till date I miss a lot. I was in class eight when one Sunday, being curious, I checked a magazine that my uncle was reading for some time. It was a youth magazine, with few short stories, suspense thrillers, movies and yes, few pages were dedicated to Pen-friends. Pen-friendship was a form of social networking at that time which, with time, evolved to electronic media and now we have all the social networking sites with thousands of friends in the friends list, most of them we never met. I was just going through the pen-friends requests which were quite amusing and interesting for a fourteen years old. Suddenly one request got my notice which said, Tanima, class seven, looking for a brother as she does not have any. I noted down the postal address and posted a mail to her one day while returning from school saying I would love to be her brother. Few days later the postman delivered a letter on my name and my father was curious as who can send a mail to me? I told him I have a new sister and he did not have any problem with that. From her letters I came to know that she is from a lower middle class family, living in a place about four hundreds kilometer away from my home town in Assam. They were a family of three sisters and she always wanted a big brother and as time passed by she found her brother in me and I got my second sister. At that time leave alone cell phone, the landline phones were also very rare. Hence our only way of communication was through letters. In the first Raksha Bandhan I got a postal envelope and there was a rakhi in it. I was so moved. For three years we used to share our sorrows and smiles and as a big brother I tried to guide her, though I was also a teenager at that time.
I was in class eleven when for a couple of months I did not get any letter from Tanima. Meantime I sent her several letters but she did not reciprocate. I was so tensed, did not know what happened to my little sister. I was seventeen years old and did not know how to contact her. In her last letter she said her father got transferred somewhere outside Assam, but she does not want to go as all her friends were there only. That was the last communication from her. Didn’t know where she was, she just vanished!!!
Slowly with time she started vanishing from my life also. I had grown up, too preoccupied struggling to make a place in this maddening competitive world and meanwhile somehow Tanima slipped away from my life. When the first time I came to know about social sites like Facebook, Orkut, I searched for Tanima, but in vain. Today also during Raksha Bandhan I miss Tanima. My beloved sister, where are you???
