Escapades

                                                               

The sun beats down harshly on my back, as I labour in the fields. Any moment now the skin will peel off my back, I muse. I dip a towel in the water in a bucket placed nearby, and wrap it around my bare back. I can’t begin to describe the relief that sets in; it is so exquisite in its wholesomeness, that I think that this must be the grandest pleasure available to man. Given that I am a poor lad farming on a semi parched piece of land in rural India, there are very few pleasures that I am privileged to. Love and belonging are not on that list. They disappeared the day she walked out on me. Tears threaten to stream out of my eyes when I think of that day, and that moment; and this happens infallibly, each time I revisit that dark corner of my memory.

She was all I had, and I was all she had; or so I used to think. The meals she cooked were made extra tasty by the love that went into their preparation… or so I imagined. When she walked out of the house each day, I felt a deep sense of loss; but I would comfort myself by the knowledge that she would come back to me in the evening, when the cruel sun had set. Only, one evening, she came back to leave forever. When she told me she had to leave, I was dumbstruck. I don’t remember asking her why, but she had explained nevertheless. She wanted to have a second chance at life, she said. One in which she wouldn’t feel fettered by her bond to me. She wanted to feel young and free again, and to feel loved. She reckoned I would survive.

As she walked down the curved path leading out of our tiny hut and onto the fields yonder, she had a spring in her steps…one that I had never seen before. Maybe she had really found love. And I wondered at the power of that newfound love, because it had made her oblivious to mine. She had said she wanted to feel loved, when all of my life, I had done nothing but love her and trust her blindly, as only I could. At fifteen, I had lost my mother forever. And all that remained were memories; but memories don’t bring pleasure, do they?

The coolness of the soaked towel on my sun drenched back though, is a different story altogether. I believe I could work like this forever, if only to have these brief moments of reprieve.