What seems insignificant for many may be significant for one. Naisa is delighted at the sight. She planted this mango tree five years ago. Now it blooms, causing euphoric waves to pass through her veins. Bringing her nose close to the bunch of blooms, she inhales the fragrance of earth. Soon a sad thought perturbs her.
The mango tree will be an aching memory before too long. The new highway will be constructed, burying paddy fields and mangroves. It will devour ponds with fishes and frogs, drive away birds with sweet twittering. Trees will be uprooted. Mighty legs of the new bridge will choke the Kanoli canal.
The new highway is the need of the time – everybody, except the victims of the land acquisition, says in no uncertain terms. Officers with sense and sensitivity must be entrusted with the task of preparing the alignment and acquiring the land for the highway, otherwise the whole procedure will be an inhuman drama. Any development destroying nature is defective.
Sitting in the veranda, Naisa watches the paddy field in front of her house. The field is parched as her mind. Though the harvest is over, Eenam Club is not likely to conduct the Annual Celebrations this year. Almost all men in Naisa’s locality, which is known as Peringadam, are members of Eenam Club. Every year, Eenam club organized various cultural programs. They put up a temporary stage in the field after the harvest, using areca nut palm trunks, bamboo poles, coconut leaves, tarpaulin, and coir rope. The stage was embellished with lights, colorful silk clothes, papers, and balloons. Either a drama or a musical concert was performed before a large crowd. In addition to that, there were various artistic performances by the girls and boys in the locality. As the moon bloomed in the sky, the rustics transformed joyous, forgetting their hunger and miseries in the artistic fervor.
It was during one such festival that Naisa met her better half. Thousands of eyes had been scattered in the field, yet his eyes magnetized her through the moon-man-made lights. He was selling bangles. His face and colorful bangles gleamed in the festival night. Her thoughts stretched towards him through sweet vibes.
Love began to burgeon. He zigzagged in her valley beneath the hanging mangoes.
Naisa’s mind returns from the romantic valley fifty years away.
The land acquisition procedures are in the final stage. The paddy field with its nostalgic rhythms will be gobbled shortly by the new highway.
Though a frugal life, she is content at home. Eight coconut palms stand like sentinels around her house. Her income comes from coconuts.
Where do I go? This is the recurring question in Naisa’s mind.
The last day blooms in her yard. Carrying a cloth bag, Naisa comes out of her house. A woman police constable leads her into the police van. Naisa is a wizened woman, bent like a question mark. Her face resembles a cauliflower. Just before stepping into the police van, she turns back to look at her house – the last wet glance.
“Let me live in my sand,” Naisa implores the rubber-eared police woman, raising her shivering voice. She curses the corrupt officials, who have altered the original alignment of the proposed highway to make a killing, satisfying the land mafia, and only because of that, she has to leave her house now. The land mafias foresee a Himalayan hike in the value of the land on both sides of the proposed highway.
The police have been deployed in the area. The air is turbulent with the protest slogans against the land acquisition and eviction. “Where do we go?” the impecunious inhabitants ask. Their question is answered by another question from the Deputy Collector, “Don’t you want development?” In fact, both these questions reach nowhere.
Naisa’s bank account has been credited with the compensation. But the question is how she will, or who will build a house for her. She is old, too feeble to manage her things. Not merely money, but thoughts and efforts are also required for building a house, even if a small one.
She has been alone in her house since her husband’s death seven years ago. She lost her husband at the festival in the next village. He had gone there to sell bangles and toys. The temple yard was crowded. Ten caparisoned elephants stood in a row. Sorrows and sufferings of the people vanished in the music from a variety of instruments, both the traditional and modern. Even the ill-famed rural ruffian stood tamed in the music. The elephants moved their ears rhythmically. Soon the fireworks display started. The mahouts were drunk with the musical delight, dazzled by the brilliance of the fireworks. Quite unexpectedly, one of the elephants turned violent, trumpeting, perhaps due to the excessive humidity or the scary sound that each firework produced. It turned and dashed, breaking the chains on its legs. People scattered. Music ended in shrieks. Tragically, Naisa’s husband Quasim succumbed to death under the giant foot of the elephant. A child was also trampled to death. Several people were injured. An auto rickshaw was mangled. The elephant turned a Swift car upside down, trampled two motor scooters, uprooted a dozen banana plants. Finally, the Elephant Squad came and shot the elephant with a tranquilizer gun.
But nobody could tranquilize Naisa.
Fragrant memory often surfaced, scuba-diving through her loneliness. Hallucination was sometimes a boon to her. She conversed with her husband. Words fell down from her shriveled lips without voice.
Naisa has a distant relative who lives in a flat in the nearest city. He often invites her to stay with his family. Now that she doesn’t like city life, she turns down his invitation. Moreover, an old guest’s presence won’t always be welcome in that flat. How can she leave her house, where her husband’s love and smell linger?
The police drop Naisa on the roadside, give her a false promise that they will find her a home shortly. The police van moves with the other protesters. Emaciated, Naisa walks to an old peepal tree. She puts the cloth bag down under the canopy of leaves, sits on the sand, cogitating about her plight.
A cool wind blows. Heat of the day dissolves in the night chill. Naisa bundles herself up in an old taupe woolen blanket. She is enticed by the fireflies, but she cannot make out whether they are flying in her mind or among gliricidia plants.
Tomorrow, vehicles will swish along the new highway, but no traveler will remember Naisa.
Tomorrow, the news media will bring her miseries to the public notice. Consequently, she will be given shelter in some old age home, where she will have to live as a prisoner with her likes and dreams incarcerated.
About the author: Fabiyas M V is a writer from Orumanayur village in Kerala, India. He is the author of Monsoon Turbulence (Poetry Nook, US), Shelter within the Peanut Shells (Red Cherry Books, India), Kanoli Kaleidoscope (PunksWritePoemsPress,US), Eternal Fragments (erbacce press,UK), Stringless Lives (Budding Light Press, Australia), and Moonlight And Solitude (Raspberry Books, India). His fiction and poetry have appeared in several anthologies, magazines and journals, and he has won many international honors. He has been working as a teacher in English at Gov. Higher Secondary School, Maranchery in Kerala.
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