DUNES OF DOOM
I clung to his calloused feet, desperate.
Feet that had walked miles. Feet that had resolved to keep walking despite the pain. Feet very similar to other pairs of feet that I kissed daily. Feet that had worn shoes some time back, but not any more. When I had kissed them, I had hoped to relieve them of some of their angst. I had hoped to infuse in them a will to go on irrespective of the odds.
My familiar touch didn’t seem to comfort most of them, and the glass-like, stony eyes of their owners were oblivious to my good intentions.
But not Ali’s. He had been singing while navigating his way through the perils of a conflict-ridden land. He had cared to play with me, holding me precariously between his fingers, and then letting me go as the wind caught up with him.
“Take away all the misery,” he had said, as I slipped through his bony fingers, flirting incorrigibly with the summer breeze. His eyes twinkled with hope as he said that.
Covering a few miles more, he had stopped, using his toe to trace letters on my golden visage.
“I miss school and all the learning,” he had sighed. “And my friends, of course.
He had written down a few names in Arabic. Then paused. Erased two of them. Shed a tear or two. Then he had smiled again, adding his name to the list.
He had halted one more time to offer prayers. As he had knelt and bowed down, I had peeked through the holes in his oversized t-shirt. Pale skin stretched over his ribs like a thin muslin cloth barely hiding them. When he had raised his hands in obeisance, the sky had rumbled. Laughing, he had gazed up and chided, “That’s how my brother’s tummy growls all the time.”
On reaching the relief camp, he had been given a meagre amount of rice and some scraps of food. His face had lit up. He had kissed the hands of the volunteer in gratitude and shouted, “ Thank you!”
And then he had started back, his pace faster, his smile triumphant.
Only to be shot.
Like many others.
I clung to his calloused feet that lay still. I mourned until my friend, the wind, pushed me to erase his name etched on me.
The aureate glow I always flaunted when the rays of the setting sun caressed me was replaced by a listless brown with some streaks of red. The red was that of unwanted stains; stains that would remain, even if the waves of time tried to wash them away. Stains that would show up time and again even if they were embedded under tombs of hypocrisy and diplomacy.
At the other end of the expanse, where Ali’s family waited for him, his brother took a handful of me and filled his mouth, crying, “ No rice, no flour, I will fill my tummy with grains of this sand.”
