Father, Father

A woman shouted down from the open terrace. The man with the cart answered back. She was haggling for wares. He was selling them. It was a few years after the second war, the one that had led to the secession of a large part of this country. They had lost their east wing, it was bound to happen, east and west had been separated by ‘the enemy’, the very same enemy that they had been brothers and sisters with once. It was bound to happen, they had taken what the east produced, sold it, and spent the money in the west. It was bound to happen. So after a struggle, after interference from ‘the enemy’, the two had separated.

She screamed down prices, the haggler responded in kind, screaming up his verbal pars.

It was a cloudy monsoon day, the first of what they hoped would be many to come, it would rain soon, and clear up the dusty sky. It had been dry for far too long, dry and hot, and moist. And when the monsoons came, oh when the beautiful monsoon came, the rains, cool and soft to the touch, the sky too, shone bright, but not harsh. The smell was of banyan trees and groves of green, winds blowing the scent in from all around. Salty air, beautiful moody skies. It was a sight to behold. When you had such incredible highs in weather, the downs like the hot summers were worth it to soldier through.

A woman shouted out from inside her apartment. The buildings were narrowly stacked, colorfully decorated with shawls. Huge, tastefully built monoliths, standing shoulder to shoulder. Three, four stories, not higher. A woman shouted at them to keep it down, she was trying to sleep. In unison they shouted back.

A man stumbled into the courtyard. Silence. Mumbling, stumbling. His hair was wild, his eyes were beautiful, his beard was long and straggling. It was white, tinged with a bit of red. His skin was beautiful but belied his age, which was both in his eyes and in his thin arms and in his stumbling legs. Silence. But for his sounds. In an instant, there were eyes at the curtains. Dozens, all the women that had been ignoring the shouting outside, accustomed to it, were not used to the silence that had embraced the neighborhood. Eyes were on the windows, looking at the man, who seemed to notice every single one of them. He stopped and circled, his eyes going through each and every window, and even though they were tinted, and he could not possibly have seen inside, each of the women shuddered as the eyes of the old man met their own.

He opened his mouth, stood in silence for a bit, mouth hanging open like that of a fish, then under the monsoon sky, he spoke lucidly. More lucidly than he had in years, away from the drugs they had been feeding him. Clarity was his speech and speech was his clarity. A shudder went through the spines of every one watching as he spoke. Before he finished, he fell down, a cloud of dust standing up to take his place. It seemed a natural death. Foul play was not suspected.