The unfinished story

THE RAIN

His eyes scanned the horizon for the signs of clouds, the orange glow of the sunset coloured the barren landscape. The trees long stripped of their leaves stood ashamed on the face of the naked earth. The planted saplings like dying traveller stranded in the desert were drying in their planted coffins. The land was thirsty, so was the parched earth, the deep furrows running like an old man’s wrinkles.
The heat prickled and burnt his skin. His sweated vest turning yellow and his sallow skin under it spoke of age and decay. He felt he had aged since the summers, and the day of his marriage many summers ago. He wetted his dry lips with the tongue that clung to his throat.
A skinny kid played in dirt near his feet. There was nothing in the little boy’s melancholic activities that suggested the play though. The boy looked bored, his eyes were sad and sunken, he was whining, asking his baba with pleading eyes to head back home, back to his mother’s lap. He was four, but looked like and frail enough to pass for a two year old. He was taken sick a week back with dysentery, and had barely recovered. Dayaraam paused to look at him with dispproval and went back to his routine of searching for the clouds.
The Indian farmer’s life is riddled with many problems and monsoons with their entire unpredictability over rule it with dictating cruelty. Raingods had been merciful last year and with the intuition alone handed down the generations crops were planted by the farmers and stranded by the rains.
He felt the bile rise up, his anger squeezed into his chest into a ball and made his heart thump loudly. With a long loud cry through gritted teeth , he threw his arms up to the sun and collapsed on his knees, knowing his life’s savings were wilting before his eyes, were the gods hearing?
The little kid was taken aback, he stopped whinning and looked at his father whose sight scared and enthralled him, and knowing not what to do, he too started crying, with out tears, tears had long dried.
They got back at sun down, the boy’s crying had subsided into sobs and he was being carried by his father. His body was limp and he burnt with fever. Occasionally he shook and trembled in his unknown dreams and kicked weekly.
He laid down the boy on the single khaat outside the house and clanked the latched door impatiently. ‘Bitch’ he spat on the ground, and kicked the door open, she was not home again. ‘Where did she go?’ he made his mind to properly lock her inside like the earlier days, after the boy he had been a bit too easy with the woman. She had to be guarded. She was youthful and pretty with his advancing age she could be given to temptations. He looked at the boy, whose chest rose and fell with quick breathing, he seemed to be made up of bones alone.

(to be continued)