It wasn’t a regular evening – one that comes and slips by unnoticed. Instead, it arrived with thunder in its throat and dread in its wake. Every moment of it lurked heavy on Seema’s soul. She never cared for her own life, but for her blood and flesh, her only child that carried the semblance of his late father. A fourteen-year-old Sunny was all she had – the centre of her being.
The thunder grew loud with every passing minute as the rain tapped hard against the dilapidated window pane, and with every clatter, Seema’s heart sank.
A furious knock on the door summoned the ghost of her anxieties and cast a dismal gloom on her fair face. Sunny, seated in a corner of the one-room lodge, painting earthen cups with floral motifs, rose up from his seat, his bright little face haloed by an air of bliss as opposed to his mother’s anguished countenance. Getting hold of the only burning candle in the room, he went for the door.
Seema blurted out,
“Don’t! Do not open the door, I say!”
Before Sunny could utter a word, the rat-a-tat at the door cut him off and echoed through the decrepit walls of the run-down shack.
Mustering her courage and determined to face the demon of her fears on the other side, Seema grabbed her child’s hand smeared with paint into her clammy one and swung the door open.
A tall, lean man with slanting shoulders, half-dripping in rain stood there with a broken black umbrella that partly sufficed to save his body from the gusty slaps of wind and water.
“It is time”, he said, his voice heavy enough to weigh Seema’s spirits down.
The torrential rains had been lashing the land without a halt for several days, impregnating it to the brink of flood. Five days ago, the elders, cloaked in their pherans and cold resolve had made a decision.
The storm would not end, the rains would not stop!
Tunnelling back to an old legend, the solution to their plight lay in sacrifice – not demanded or declared, but merely offered.
The legend had it that the sacrifice of a pure soul had redeemed the land from a similar situation in ancient times – a sacrifice beneath the chinar!
Who was but pure as the driven snow than Sunny himself?
The lad who swept the stairs of the school to help the peon, Akbar chacha, the frail octogenarian. Who rowed his late father’s Shikara even in the chill to treat the old and the lonely with hot kehwa. Who ran errands for all and sundry and refused to accept a coin in return, just blessings. The boy who would easily jump into fire if they called it light.
He was naïve, that was his jewel, and perhaps his undoing.
But he was indeed the ‘purest of them all’. Not only his mother’s beloved - her 'lakht-e-jigar' (flesh of the liver), as she would affectionately call him - but a child cherished throughout the land.
And so, her fears were real, for Seema knew that Sunny was to be the fall guy taking the heat for everyone else.
And they knew – all of them did, in their heart of hearts, who would go. But they did not name him. Instead, the silence shrieked his name, and these were the shrieks that pierced Seema’s heart.
As the messenger left, there was a quiet – a queer silence!
The mother-son duo did not utter a word. Yet, their eyes conversed and spoke volumes. Seema’s tear-stained and red-rimmed eyes pleaded with Sunny to stay back while his resolute gaze exhibited an unflinching faith in Ajal – the destiny.
Retrieving the shawl from the hanger, Sunny put it around Seema, kissed her cold hands and went to join the gathering.
All the people that had gathered near the great chinar watched him coming – obdurate in his determination to extricate his land from this plight. Behind him, the feeble frame of his mother, like a woman unhinged, trailed him, wailing and sobbing from the ordeal, out of breath, cold, and wet right through.
Sunny stopped as he stood before the village headman, the Pashto-speaking Pathan.
“Da stargo tora! (The black of my eyes)”, he said as he kissed Sunny’s forehead, and raised his arm in the direction of the chinar. Without a word, Sunny began walking in that direction.
As he reached the base of the tree, he looked back and met several pairs of hopeful eyes, waiting for the moment of redemption. Meanwhile, a montage of memories flashed across his eyes; the countless beauties life had blessed him with but the love of the land and its inhabitants over swayed it all.
“For them…always!”, he whispered with conviction as he stood still beneath the majestic chinar and closed his eyes.
A frantic Seema, barely able to keep her balance, ran to him and stood right beside him. She would not let her world crumble before her eyes. She would not let him die alone.
As she did so, a celestial light sparkled through the sky – a jagged bolt of lightning roared down from above.
It did not strike the boy.
It did not strike his mother, either.
It struck the earth behind them — where the villagers stood, watching the spectacle of the sacrifice.
In a trice, all those who sought redemption in the boy’s sacrifice perished where they stood.
As the clouds parted and the sky cleared out, Seema and Sunny were the only ones who remained – breathless, trembling but alive!
The storm ceased and the village reclaimed its pristine glory.
Some say that the legend of the pure sacrifice was a mere fabrication. Others say that love has the power to protect and preserve.
But in every telling, one word endures. Ajal!
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