The Road Everyday
The palms on the horizon dripped in blood, freshly falling from a forming yellow blister on the morning sky’s bruised skin. The profane tricolor of the sun, the sky and sand was troubling to his eye, casting an awkward tint over everything he saw. Few saw dawn as he saw it then.
He wasn’t unused to it – or so he thought that he shouldn’t be unused to it. Every day, he had been making the solemn march to the patch of woods and bushes to east of his small village, coppicing and cutting, digging and looking for what he thought must have been there. Rather what he believed must have been there. Every day on the hours long march across the sandy wastelands of Kur, he would wear away his leather shoes and parch his throat to the point that a fine layer of salt lay over his tongue.
His persistence, as stupid as it was, was regular. He thought about how he strode everyday under the watchful gaze of the sun and then strode back under the night sky. Had any of it been worth it? Had the Old Chief’s gold ever been found? No. He knew what he believed was Anwe’s lore as it was but he also knew that a man believed much just because he wanted to believe so.
Like all the countless days in the last twenty-nine years of his yearning he felt a horrible sinking into a dune he had been meeting for what seemed eons. The sinking had been just been as surprising as the first time yet less threatening after he had familiarized with him, making it a silent companion or witness to his pain. The fine sand tickled him not, nor did it sting his legs, which had become coarser than his shoes in the twenty-nine years. Twenty-nine years wasted away just like that.
He wondered why he welcomed the newborn sun only to realize he had treaded into his own doom as he faced its mighty glory. The sun, it was his worst enemy – a harbinger of hope; a hollow of hell. His hair, now overgrown and laced with sand were to him, a crown of thorn turned ablaze; his hands a testimony to cuts from the Kikar bushes which he searched through, yet was moved by nothing. He persisted.
‘Why am I still doing this?’ he asked himself. He couldn’t be sure. It had been Anwe’s word, word of the ancient man from the hills. Anwe wasn’t the kindest person he knew but then again, no one was kind in the village. At least, Anwe mastered the old lore and knew the true names of all beings and was rumored to have partial control over nature. It was rumors mostly but a man believes what he wants to.
He had stolen Anwe’s goats and rather than being infuriated or vengeful he told him suggestively and slyly, “Why trouble me? There is more than enough gold in the woods to satisfy all the village’s greed – yours mostly.” Anwe had pulled out a nugget of gold and he had been bewildered by the sight. He had been coming here ever since.
The whole conservation was repeating in his head. “Why can’t you leave it?” inquired his tired limbs, put under the heavy weight of his head. The woods weren’t too far now and he realized that they were plain woods, just like all over land of Edash. “Why turn to the woods when there is enough gold in the village to fulfil your greed?” he asked himself in a periodical manner. He was sure he was going to turn back. Then he saw it. At first he thought that what had caught his attention had been Anwe’s grinning face across the sun, looking as sly as he did on that day but he dismissed it as a hallucination caused by his nausea.
He had seen something, a speck of yellow solid on the foot of a tree, shining and lustrous. This was not the first time he had seen this sight and he could tell with a hint of sadness in his heart that it wouldn’t be the last. It called and responded. He knew well what it would turn out to be like every day and he would want to come tomorrow again but he had to take a chance. He rushed towards the woods.
Simply because a man believes what he wants just because he wants to.
Roots Millennium Schools
Hill View Campus
Mirpur AJK