The Exodus

It was a deceptive and deranging season.

What a village! dry as dust in the sun. The stones and boulders strewn about everywhere often made me think that we were living on a riverbed. No flowers, no green grass. Only the dark dour foilage of the trees above us. Giant fern and cane tangled in a dense undergrowth that was stronger than steel. The Bamboo gorves completed the illusion of the prision that it had reminded me of often.



The empty month rattled over the stony empty roads. An interior storm seemed to darken our houses, sucking away energy, hope and cherished dreams. In the evenings fireflies beamed out of corners and glowed silently around the jackfruit trees.

We carried water. We pounded grain.We gasped and died climbing up the steep hill carrying firewood. We trudged to the fields and smeared the young shoots of paddy with rice paste.



It seemed to me that for so little we prayed so long.

I chafed under the weight of daily routine and sought refuge in the books. Very few people could read here.

It was the place to live different lives any time one opened the pages of a book.



After the rains the sun burned more brightly as if to make up for the lost time. Cicadas screamed. Huge green locusts thumped against the bamboo and perched on our belongings. People died because of the failed crops and the heat wave that followed.



Why is life so uncertain when it is so short.

I had no answer,

We wear love like an amulet, I thought. But sometimes even love fails.

Everything was recorded in the stories of creation, the birth of man and the legends of the gods.

But of the story of one life there was nothing to say. History, usually so vocal was strangely silent.

In our ballads the rhapsodist sings about the cloud woman. All things are born of the rain, and once rocks and stones and trees had life and names -- the river for instance is also a woman, many armed and grieving, breaking her prison of ice to seek her eternal lover.

The history of our race begins from the place beyond the reach of our senses, where the first flicker of light took shape and expanded towards the horizon forming a trail of thought and imagination.......



The village and all the people I knew and loved, were writing their stories as they lived them now, from one moment to another but none of us would hear them in song, because there would be none of us left here.



The hills would bear no mark of our joy or mourning and eventually our passing.

In the distance I heard the pigs snout around noisily. Now and then an agitated squeal reached my ears and when the wind shook the trees the dogs started and snapped back their ears, then curled up again on the still, now silenced and always indifferent earth.





Everywhere people were packing and carrying bundles out of dark ancestral homes, recluctant to go off just like that. Needing a reminder to the their first and only home till now.

There were also those who simply slipped away without a shred of memory, whistling in the dark. They moved away in all directions. They focused on different hills, walked across separate valleys and crossed different streams, never to return, not even turning for a last look back to our village which grows emptier and silent by the passing of each day. Soon the jungle will take over again and we will be forgotten as if we never even existed.