45
OCEAN OF THE SAND
[The one who has taken birth will remain forever in fear of death. So, to say this world too, one day see its end. End of this world or Pralaya is of three kinds: Naimittka- induced; Prakrita- natural; Atyantika- immediate.]
-Puranas
PADMA:
The current of water drags us away from that horrible sight. The current is fast and trying to drown us but we are all teenagers and all of us know swimming. Though none have tried in channel except me they are used to swim in lakes.
“Don’t give up.” I shout, “Don’t allow water to drag you down. The undercurrent will be fast, you can fight it.”
I don’t know any of us is hearing me among the sound of water or not but I keep shouting, “keep calm and stay on the surface.”
Jalpa is next to me. I don’t know how but she is a good swimmer. She is swimming on her stomach. Head first downstream like me while most of the other teenagers are swimming in a different position, their back is down, and head positioned upstream.
After an hour all were tired and exhausted but the fast current had sent us away, somewhere at safe from a troop of Nirbhayas.
“Flip over and flow with the water,” I shout, “diagonally.”
I tell everyone how to get a hold on the wall. They swim diagonally toward the wall as I say and the 45 angles help them save their energy and reach the wall.
One by one teenager climbs the wall, using creepers falling in from outside. The channel is leaking at some places and where it leaks in the surrounding area creepers start to grow. The same method to climb wall which I used to use in the at home save our lives.
Once on the channel wall, we are out of danger and the tiredness catches everyone. All throw themselves down at another side of the wall, into the sand.
The channel has dragged us somewhere in sandy – desert.
I crane my neck to see my surroundings, still lying on in the sand.
As long as eyes can see was a sea of sand and my eyes spot some thorny plants of knee- height.
I sigh and lay on my side, curled into a ball, panting and panicking. My limbs are aching. I see Jalpa in the same condition as me or maybe she is semi-conscious. Her heaving chest tells me she isn’t dead and I feel calmer in my chest.
Dead – the word floods memory in my mind.
“Run!” I start to hear my people’s shouts, “Run. Kids.”
The last cries of my people, “Run kids before they get you.” I’ve heard my people many times – my people shout on small matters but I’ve never heard them shouting as I heard them last time. The cries were sounding like frantic, panic, helplessness and madness.
The images flash in memory as the tiredness leaves me alone. My people, dying, trapped among troops of Nirbhaya, helpless against the strength of Devatas, and telling us to run.
And what did I do?
I ran.
What if I was crying like them, would they have run?
No, they were our parents, our elders. They would never leave us.
Images of my people fighting against death haunt my mind. Their screams start to slice through me. I cover my ears with both palms and try to stop the sound but they aren’t going – the screams, they aren’t going.
Then I prop up on my elbow, tears streaming in my eyes, my clothes wet with channel water, the sand clung to my body and clothes.
Still, I am hearing death cries of my people.
I stand up on my feet and brush the layer of the sand settled on the wet clothes, the screams still tearing me. I feel then that it won’t stop. I’ll hear them over and over again, echoing in my mind, deafening my ears, not for some time but for every hour of every day until I’m dead or I’ll take revenge.
I inhale, deep and I test in my mouth is sand. Now, uncle Akhil is dead. Like others. Like my people. Like my father.
And the teenagers who couldn’t escape?
Taken.
Girls are raped and the boys are killed. Or maybe dragged to the cell where the Devatas will do who knows what to them. Cell beyond the wall means something terrible than death.
I shouldn’t run. I feel. My father would often say: life is something made of moments. So many moments together and we call it life. But then only one moment comes one day and takes every moment from you. This is Kaliyuga and survival isn’t certain. Life is nothing but a survival game where we are players and he is game-maker. He means the Creator.
He was right – that was the moment – the moment to show courage – my people saw it but I couldn’t pass a test of courage, of strength and I won’t forgive myself for it.
RUN KIDS.
Why did I listen to them?
I should have stayed. I couldn’t have won but I should die with my people. I should have died and it would be something called courage.
I sigh and cover my ears. I keep hearing them – RUN KIDS.
What will happen when they will send dead bodies in the wall?
And then it hit me – a troop of Nirbhaya will go on the train. Jagapati has said the Creator is planning the greatest raid.
My mother – I want to be with it. What will she do in raid? How will she survive? Not only she but all in the wall – how will they survive?
“Where are we?” I hear Jalpa’s voice and see her standing beside me.
“No idea,” I say, looking at the lifeless area. It’s covered with grass. I remember what my people would say about the grass: the devil- grass. Don’t touch it. It gives a nightmare and death.
“Everybody,” I shout, “get on your feet, we have to move. Maybe they are chasing us.” I see some teenagers looking at me, “Leader has told we will get help but only after we get rid of the tail.”
As everyone regains their feet, still some of them trembling, feeling nothing but pain and seeing nothing but sand, I say, “lets count so we can know how many of us have made it?” I look over others and say, “One!”
When no one counts ahead, Jalpa speaks, “two!”
From there, the teenagers count off until a thin boy calls out, “thirty-six.”
“We don’t know how many have jumped into the water but now we are thirty-six and we are a team.” I say, “We will take care of each other.”
“Good that.” One boy says, he is strong in the frame but his face is pale, “if we want to survive we need a leader like they have beyond the wall.”
I don’t answer. I don’t know whom we should make a leader.
“You are our leader.” When no one speaks, Jalpa says.
“Yes,” rupa steps ahead, “you have saved us from the water, you should be our leader.”
Feel happy not because she suggests me as a leader but seeing her alive makes my heart calmer.
“She is right,” Dinesh says. He is conversant. We have first met at Jagamal teacher’s hut.
Then, Akash, Malti, Paresh, Ratika, and many girls and boy whom I don’t know by their names suggest my name as a leader.
No one opposes – it’s like our gathering and I feel comfort for a second as if I were at home. But I’m not.
“Okay,” I say, “fills your waterbags and get ready to go.”
Every one fills water bags, some brush their clothes and some girl release knots of their hair to dry them in the current of hot air.
“Let’s go,” I say when everybody is ready. Then we are off.
In the ocean of the sand. It was a lifeless area. I felt as if the earth has no creature. There was nothing. Not a single house, not a single hut. Just some creepers near channel wall where the land is not sand but hard and wet with leaking water and that devil grass and of course we – thirty-six.
We walk across nothing but an orange-yellow sea of sand.
We walked along the channel, no one says anything but I know everyone was thinking about their family members – most of the teenagers were with their fathers and they know they have lost them. I know the pain of that loss. I’ve an idea of their pain.
No one has the energy to walk but the fear of chase and rush of adrenaline are forcing us ahead. We don’t stop until we saw a branch of tunnel turning at the left. We had the option now – we can go straight or turn with the branch.
We rest there. No one wants to eat but Jalpa and I force them to eat from the food packets. Food was in plastic bags and so it was edible.
After rest and food, we turn left. I hope there will be any city that’s why a branch is going in left.
I don’t know how long we walk in the current of hot and boiled air but we don’t stop till we see a city. It’s far and stretched wide,
We don’t know how far the city is but we don’t give up.
We take two more rests, eat food packets and drink water from bags. No matter how tired we are - no matter the day had ended and the darkness is falling we continue until we reach the first building of the city.
It isn’t an abandoned city. In front of the building are some trees, not big, of my height. They are sure signs the city isn’t abandoned. The branch of water channel has given us first sign and the trees are a firm testimony of it.
The sight of trees gives us comfort. I feel my heart calmer than it was before.
We enter inside the building. It’s dark inside and we can’t see anything but we aren’t bothering about who would be inside the building.
As soon as all enter inside, I close the door behind us and one by one teenager collapse to the ground.
I haven’t release Jalpa’s hand during the travelling but I can’t hold it more. I sit down, my back resting to the wall. Jalpa lies on the floor beside me and closes her eyes, panting.
The image of Akhil uncle and my people haunts me as I close my eyes. Then the memory of my parents rushes to me. The same way I lost my people today I’d lost my father, too. I was very young but still, I’d memory.
I do have- lots of memories, how small I was when he died. I remember that when there was reaping time he would take me outside in the farms with me to see how people cut ears of wheat and corn. Watching it while resting on his shoulder was something that I still wish. I remember how much he loved to eat baked ears of wheat and how he baked them in the wood fire for us. He bounced me in the water at the Lake of Lakshmana. I didn't know how strange this was at the time. Other fathers didn’t teach their children to swim but my father did. Other fathers tell their babies to stay away from the water, and my father told me to don't afraid of it. He taught me all the things that a father isn’t supposed to teach his child as the rules made beyond the wall.
And my mother before she lost her sense when we trio was together.
I remember that she brought me white flowers from the forest when I was sick. No one could understand why she gave me flowers when I was needed herbs that can heal me, even I didn’t understand that time but now I do. Now I know it was love. I remember her each kiss on my cheeks and when I was learning to walk and jog and run and her kisses on my bruises when I fell during learning, and I remember once when she cried for an hour when I first time fell from a tree while trying to climb it.
We used to have fought too. My mother called them "quarrels" because we would fight with words and all the fights were just because she wanted to teach me how to cook. I found my father always at my side. He would say Dixa, she is a kid, let her grow up and she will learn everything she should learn.
And in reply my mother says, one day she has to take care of me, when I’m old and unable to cook she will cook me rice and wheat and if I’ll be too old to remember things then she would teach me how to peel orange and how to tie ears of corn before baking them.
Even Bhdra uncle joined in, and speak in my favour. he and his small brother were my father’s best friends. He comes to our huts usually though Bhdra uncle never came to my hut after his brother didn’t come back from beyond the wall. He was with my father and they used to steal books together.
My mother would never let him go without food but he never came to help us after my father’s death. Why – I know. My hut reminds him of his younger brother.
It was the time when I laughed so hard I always went to the cot with a stomachache. But after my father’s death, everything changed. I always went to the cot with heartache. And after today what had happened I doubt I can even go to cot or sleep again.
I start thinking about my grandfather, too. I don't remember him at all, though I have some dim, ancient impression of two warm, rough hands and a large looming face with full beard and white hair floating above mine, I think that's just because my parents kept me telling about him after his death. I was only one and a half-year-old and there's no way I'm remembering for real perhaps these memories are false, my mind has conjured them from the talks I’ve heard about him from my parents.
I don’t know how long I think about my family. The last thing I remember is that there isn’t warmer around. The only warmth to be is from my own body, I see other teenagers curled up on the filthy floor, their hands buried deep between their thighs. The place seems uncomfortable I lay on my side and curled into a ball like others, my arms wrapped around myself.
I can’t remember when I fall asleep.
***
to be continue...
