THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The absence of someone dear can be felt in numerous ways. For Ilze Skromane - sister of Latvian tourist Liga who was murdered after she went missing from Kovalam beach - the vacant seat opposite her in a dining hall opened the floodgates of sepia-toned memories of her sister. It was the first time she had gone to dine at a hotel alone after Liga’s disappearance.
Whenever the two sisters were together, they used to eat facing each other. A drop of tear broke off Ilze’s eyes and fell on the table. She was coming to sense of the enormity of the void that Liga’s death had left on her.
“All those days I was so busy running from one place to another, arranging things that I didn’t get time to mourn Liga’s death properly. In fact, the sense of her loss didn’t sink in. But sitting opposite to an empty seat in that hotel, all her memories came back to me. It struck me so hard that she is no more,” Ilze said in a quivering voice.
Though the siblings stayed in different places when they grew up, the bond was strengthened by their short stay at Riga, the capital of Latvia. Ilze used to travel from her village to meet Liga who was studying there on weekends. “That was our golden times. We stayed awake all night, talking about all and everything for hours. We had nothing to hide and the chat went on till the break of dawn. That’s when we understood each other better,” she said.
Though she lost Liga in Kerala, Ilze felt the state will be close to her heart. “Liga loved the place. And if she was alive, she would have told the same thing. The land is good, people are fine, it’s just that the people who had done this to me had some bad experiences in their lives that made their hearts callous.”
Ilze felt she has the same compassion towards Liga’s killers.
“I won’t be asking them why they did it. Maybe, they will feel the pain in their inner vaults later. Let it be their punishment,” she added.