Sins of my father
(12:93) Go with this shirt of mine and lay it on my father’s face, he will become a seer
My bed is shaking. I open my eyes, my bed sheet is soaked with sweat and nothing is moving. It is said that when you experience trauma, when something bad happens, when a train hits you, it takes time for its after affects to show their face.
It’s been a week since I came back from volunteer work and Farhan has had the same experience.
Late at night, when everything is silent and the streets smell of the dead, our bodies start shaking and it seems that another earthquake is coming and death is sliding through the floors.
You open your eyes and there is nothing. The earthquake plays its own mind games.
Second tour: Six hours have passed. This time around the destination is different; the military has set up a medical camp at Baagh. With the arrival of much more supplies of medicines and a huge consignment of food, Baagh medical camp becomes a looney, logical place to deliver all this.
I cometh.
Our ride in the truck is much quieter. It seems to be much more introspective.
Everybody’s eyes seem dimmer. Farhan is absent. He could talk through his eyes.
What had we seen on that first tour?
The repulsion in the face of an old man who had sold toffees to girls of a school all his life.
When we reached him, all those girls had died, crushed by the debris of the same school which had been second home.
Your parents kill you
Invisible gun
5 seconds
Click it
Bang
My brain has come out
We saw thousands of people, their hands and their eyes, looking at us, through us, for some kind of hope
I haven’t cried this bad in 24 years
We saw the police and the military, helpless, without adequate resources, beating people into submission
We laugh at Jesus
We crucify
We saw truck filled with food and blankets and clothes from all over the country
And we redeem ourselves
We saw the ruined walls and cracks in some buildings
And nothingness in places that had once been homes.
There was chaos
And the smell of death
But I didn’t see a single dead body
Muslims bury the dead
And the worms consume them
We never saw death, but we felt it and sometimes the things that you never see haunt you the most
Sleep comes now and it diminishes all these thoughts and the feelings inside them
Night has fallen, past midnight
The hour of the wolf
We have set up camp and are busy boiling milk for the children.
It is cold
And I wander towards the small fire
There is a middle aged man sitting next to me, wearing a shawl.
After every other second, he starts whispering words to his chest.
Traumatic thought process?
Analyze system
I move closer to him so that I may talk
And know myself better
Things are not what they seem
There is a small child in the shawl; his arm and leg are covered in plaster, both broken.
The child is sobbing, the plaster looks old and the child looks extremely uncomfortable
Itching stage
The man speaks softly to me. He tells me that his wife and four other children have been killed. Only the small child survived.
It took two days to take him out of the rubble
He tells me no more and starts whispering again. The child stops sobbing.
The night has fallen silent again
My eyes don’t move. The man looks exhausted and it seems that it has been days since he slept.
An hour passes
Or two
The child is asleep now. I look at the man
Our eyes talk
The child is in my arms.
The man sleeps, his son sleeps
And I feel extremely empty
It’s been a while since I came back from that second tour.
But they both bothered my conscience
I heard sobbing all night
But one night when I couldn’t sleep, I came to understand
That this story wasn’t about the child
Or his father
It wasn’t about the earthquake
Or the volunteers
It was about me
I remembered that when I was small my father used to whisper in my ear too
-Ali Sultan
Aanchal says:
Absolutely! wow, makes you breathless - i went to kutch about two years after the quake and people living in their newly construced cement matchboxes homes still refused to sleep indoors.
June 1st, 2006 at 05:44 pm
literaturelover says:
what creation….
June 7th, 2006 at 01:23 pm