Things of the past are obscurities, they exist
only in memory. Inside me the nebulous cloud of remembrances are ever thinning
and one day will be no more. I must pin them down with words before memory
becomes no different from the northern lights of old age.
Across the road from
the old white building of Quetzcal, built by the lost founders of this city, there
is a statue. The restaurant I work is on the slopping road behind the statue.
People from the archaeological department inspect the statue every year and
every year they reach the same conclusion- no one knows whose statue it is. It
is a man who is remembered because his name and his language has been
forgotten. Some times when customers are sparse I go out to look at the bronze
plaque that bears his name, but like the rest of Quetzcal I cannot read the now
forgotten script of our founders. Then I look up and I often see white fumes
coiling upward from the shabby dome of the white building. Perhaps this is how
all things die after they have been abandoned, evaporating away in the summer
sun. I see these fumes every day, exhaled by the old men who visit my
restaurant, as they catch the beams of sunlight that comes in through the glass
windows. Sometimes I see those fumes on horrid days, coming out from my own
nostrils, those days are more frequent now, the fumes and the sepia air haunt
me like the bronze plaque of alien tongues.
The memory of the two
is a hundred years old. I was young. The beef ularthiyathu that I carried from
the kitchen counter to the tables in white porcelain plates did not tremble
from the fear of death. The two spoke the same language as that of the statue,
which I knew back then. I have forgotten it now. Their names too are lost, but
I remember what they spoke for I heard it when I was young.
They always ordered the
same things. Beef ularthiyathu and two black tea, sulaimani as they called it.
The one with the mustache ate more. Picking up dark pieces of meat off the
white china, talking while he sipped the black tea. They spoke of trivial
things and rarely of their work. They spoke about the weather, rain always
excited them, food, politics, and the police of Quetzcal. They were
journalists, and sometimes they spoke about writing too, but always about
writing of others and never about the process of writing itself. Rain excited
them, words seemed to roll of faster from their mouths when it rained, and each
syllable reverberated with enthusiasm. Back then it used to rain often in
Quetzcal. It rains a lot even now, but the rhythm of the raindrops is lost, and
forgotten.
I remember that day. Students
(that’s what they call themselves) clashed with the police in front of the
white building as usual. White fumes of tear gas rolled down the road behind
the statues. I had closed the shutters. The two watched the road through the glass
windows, shaking.
‘Shouldn’t we get out
there?’ one asked the other.
‘No, we wait’, he said.
‘But the violence will
pass us by, we need the photos of broken bones and smashed skulls.’
‘No we wait’, his eyes
were unwaveringly fixed on the chaos outside and he continued to talk in a
serious tone ‘These idiots will beat each other’s to death and while they
languish in pain on these roads their leaders will come. They’ll come to pick
up their comrades and wipe their tears and talk to them. But only when the
fighting is over, only when there tear gas subsides. Because the white khaddar
that they wear is too expensive to be thrown away if stained by blood and
chemicals. Let the others have broken bones and smashed skulls, it is the
scavengers that come after that will make a great story.’
Sometimes I wonder why
he couldn't be satisfied with the bones and pieces of skull. I can only guess his reasons. They spoke a language and represented a culture that was forged in red.
A tongue that had questions in abundance. Where is the equality you promised?
Where is justice for our dying brothers? Tell me in what whore houses did you
pawn our freedom to ascent the ladders of power?
Don’t they have wives
and beautiful children to go back home to? Did they not know that in Quetzcal
the people who are supposed to protect them with laws can harm them and paint
their dead bodies as those of radicals, extremists and terrorists? Perhaps not.
I heard the shots later, the sound had penetrated trough the shutters. On my
way back I saw their bodies below the statue.
The road behind the
statue slopes downwards and for an old man it is easier to walk down it. But
sometimes the statue draws me to it with a pull stronger than gravity of the
slope. The bronze plaque is usually covered by dust from the day’s traffic. I
wipe off the dust and I try hard to understand those words, words of
generations past, as if staring at it hard enough would bring back those
memories, and I fail every time. Then I start my defeated descend down the road
and sometimes the skies open up, as if the clouds are laughing at my failure to
comprehend those words. But by drenching in the rain I understand how they made
this culture and language. They made it from the sound of rain drops make as
they skid off the green leaves, as the rain drops hit small puddles, as the
rain drops are gobbled up by bright red flowers of hibiscus. Yet I have
forgotten the language and those two are dead and now in Quetzcal there are no
leaves, no puddles and flowers are grey from the dust of the day’s traffic.
-AJ
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