Words of love

by Annukul Thakran (India)

Making a local connection India

It was about 15 miles from Jaisalmer, a tired old village when I first saw it. It looked like during the rainy weather the streets turned to water canals, grass grew everywhere, shrubs all around the wells. Only at this time of the year, the animals didn’t seek a shady tree and the children were free to play throughout the day. But during the summers it was all very different; bony mules and camels hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live acacia trees. Men worked from morning to evening, surviving the 50 C temperature, women bathed before noon and took their three o’clock naps, and by nightfall were preparing meals for their families. And the old ones would still be hooting their Hookahs. I imagined all that! A day was 24 hours long but seemed longer. When I reached the village, everything moved slowly like someone clicked the slow-motion button and forgot to turn it off. There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with, nothing to see outside the boundaries. It seemed like a set of a Bollywood movie. It was wintertime in the desert, I wore a jacket and my head covered with a cap. I spun my head around, the archaic walls of the houses were engraved with beautiful paintings and carvings, and they were built with big blocks of sandstones, only. Beside one of the houses, an old lady was sitting on the cot with a small hookah in her hands. She wore colorful clothes and heavy silver bangles in her hands and legs and a big one in her neck. She rose her hand and made some gestures towards me, she was calling me. I parked my bike in the shades and reached for the key but it won’t come out. I approached her, she spoke a different language that I hardly understood. Her untidy hairs looked like nest of a pigeon. She had a tattoo of a scorpion on her left cheek which, with time, became fade. I stood beside her. Her sore eyes locked on me, they were as clear as an untouched sea. She smiled, her smile was as beautiful as a pearl but her eyes were telling a different story, her arms showed the struggles she made for her family. Her face filled with bits of stories on which one could write a book. She didn’t ask for my name or where I came from and I didn’t tell. She took my hands in hers and rubbed them. She touched my forehead with her old hands that once touched her own son. Never before had I taken this much interest in stories of the old people but this time I was bewildered. As she drove ahead her eyes got filled with tears. She held them until the river overflowed and flooded her saggy cheeks and they fell on the barren land like the monsoon rains. She told me that she once had a boy like me. No one could save him because Jaisalmer was too far and the wounds were severe.The hands in which her own boy died were now on my forehead. She tried to cover her emotions in the bitter smoke of the Hookah but her scars kept bleeding sorrow because her sad memories were much bitter. She never had another child. Loss and heartbreak must have plagued her throughout her entire life. I made her cry, I made her think about her boy. Maybe it was my fault or maybe it was good because the river that was, till now, held by the so-called dam of society, now opened its gates. I got emotional and turned my head, this time to hide my emotions, and left here there with herself. Written on her hands were the stories she couldn’t tell, stories that no one will ever know, stories that will soon fade away with time. Across the barbed wires, were some tombstones. In the corner, there lay a small one with some engravings in Urdu, my heart said it had words of love.