Desert - 1

‘A much too intimate a knowledge can haunt like the plague’

The white patch of a downy cloud was casting transparent grey shadow on an almost ripe field of golden wheat. A tuft of fleeting white fleece spreading thinly into vanishing wisps offsetting like strands of opaque threads of white gossamer against oceanic skies, merciless in their afternoon blue of glowing sapphire.

Keesan was trying most meticulously to keep himself shaded under the deformed shadow of the now disappearing cloud which offered some protection even if for a forgetful moment from the scorching heat, most in part due to the wide open spaces of these bountiful fertile plains that enabled a scalding white incandescent afternoon even in this relatively pleasant weather.

His childish antics followed closely by a pair of worn out eyes that shared none of Keesan’s optimism and time and again flitted over to the waving heads of the richly colored crops, healthy with a spring to their breeze slapped bodies. 

‘Another week’ Huram thought. ‘Gods, please let them live for another week’. A string of tear raced down his crevice filled cheeks spreading in salty tributaries across his wrinkle ravaged face.

As Huram sat by the communal fire that night he noticed how other villagers with similar thoughts tried with all their might to push away their cynically truthful experiences hoping in vain. 

Their muffled chatter about engaging a thresher for next week’s harvest was twanged with a forced inflection of expectation; a lie everyone told themselves that night, a burdensome truth the villagers tried to camouflage in false encouragements.

The very next morning there was a hailstorm. 

An out of season unusually chilling rainfall that dumped hail stones. Fist sized ice pebbles that rained down a torrent destroying the lush crops of wheat that stood to be harvested, almost ripened to a golden maturity now slumping in grey twigs of broken life amidst jewel like diamonds of ice.

There was perhaps poetry to be seen here for someone of the idle verse and far removed from reality but for Huram and the villagers who stood among wails of desperate cries knew this to be justice.

Of reactions they had none; this was something they all knew yet hoped it wouldn't be so this year. A presumption they fed on year after year for more than a decade now to the point that it had turned into a hope so remote they’d almost started to think it a myth.

More than half the fields were destroyed. What remained was just barely enough to suffice a livelihood.

‘It’s her again’ someone said 

‘No it’s us. Always was us’ Huram knew.

Keesan came threading through the crowd that felt like it was divided between a bunch of sorrowful whimpering howls and a group of paralyzed grieving mutes.

His uncle Huram looked like the pioneering pallbearer to this melancholic shroud of unbearable misery that’d struck every villager including Keesan himself.

This would have been his first harvest since his parents death. An orphan new to this village Keesan had shadowed his uncle at the farm and spent months tending to the now inanimate heaps of crops that he’d often seen breathing with life, growing in front of his eyes when he spent nights sleeping in their coolness, feeling their vitality and urgency to nourish. Everything he looked at yesterday was now dead and his heart gave way to uncontrollable sobs.

A gait that could only ever be possessed by a broken man, Huram trudged back to his cottage and Keesan still sobbing followed.

Between snivels of muttering villagers ripe with apologies he heard many talk about ‘her curse’ and each time he looked at someone for an answer they shied away hiding their mourning faces reddened with grief and tears. 

‘Uncle’ Keesan was starting to speak with a voice still shaking and weary from crying when Huram said ‘you want to know what the villagers are talking about?’ 

Keesan could only nod and Huram sensing it grunted while trying to sit at the edge of his bed. He tottered over and almost collapsed; not for his frailty as much as his guilt ridden defeat that bore on him with the savage remorse that years of shame had compounded into. 

   

    ‘The year of eclipse was a massive flood’ Huram’s calm voice came out weak ‘Nearby villages were torn down and carried with the flow of water so oceanic it beguiled the existence that was dying below. There was nothing save expanse of muddied water burying the horizons and destroying all life that came its way.

Like swelling amber that slowly descends on an unsuspecting fly it engulfed all that stood, breathed and lived. 

Weeks later when the water subsided, what we assumed were little shrubs protruding out of water turned out to be giant trees and many a bodies entangled in their branches of the unfortunate many who thought clambering a tree would let them survive.

After the flood came the diseases and the villagers already uprooted from their circumstances thought little of continuing in desolation of the swamp and dying cattle.

We gathered all that could be rummaged, found and scavenged and made our way like an untethered flock of sick sheep towards another village or at least some place that would be dry land away from sickness and flood.

How long did we walk I could not say because time was without meaning.. There were days and there were nights. There were deaths and there were among us new living debris of flood residue. No matter how far we went there was no respite from brackish waters, from mosquito laden filthy swamps and bloated insects living on surplus human detritus.

Conversations had dwindled to pained gasps or repetitive wails and after one such mournful night spent huddled in shared hardship our fates changed with the morning light.

We had broken up our meagre camp to make for another long meaningless walk towards quickly depleting hopes of salvation when we heard a child weep.

Another leftover of the homicidal floods, and in our long journey we had begun stitching these remnants of surviving breath to our dying flock that we’d already amassed a tattered rag of a human collage, rich in diversity and common in misery.

It was a child. A little girl no more than five months who cried herself hoarse. Lying untouched in a mire of mud this helpless little girl was picked up and made one of us.

A girl child no different than any other child her age but for her fingers for she bore six fingers in each hand.

It was that very day, I remember it as clear as I see you now that we found land untouched by floods. Sun kissed, soaked in greenery; vast belt of wilderness spread with soil so rich it could yield gold. 

This we knew would be our new village.

A most auspicious day, the village elder had cried and we wouldn’t have found it had we not come across the six fingered little girl. 

‘Seti’ we named her and she became our deity.' 

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Read part 2 here