It all started with an odd headache. The middle of his brows burned like a misplaced sun forgotten by an old god. He struggled to breathe and started mumbling about trees much as an infant’s first vowels. The spirits of the enchanted forest, the comrades of time from the prime moment, descended for the last hour of their dear companion.
He was many centuries old and resembled a small, a great-great-grandfather tree. Countless grandchildren were born and died in the shade of the branches of his antique love. He caressed all of them with his barky hands wrinkled with cracks of unwavering guardianship. His eyes bloomed and cheeks flowered with laugh lines when he smiled. He was that ancient magus from the very first moonlight, radiating wisdom through a long silvery strand of hair that almost covers his spine.
Gods and demons of all the unknown secrets blessed his ancestors with magic. He was born on a rainy night on the banks of the mighty water snake meandering the hip of the rainforest, many millennia before man invented materialism. He spoke to the trees and called like a hornbill. He flew with the kingfishers and led the pack of jackals. He spoke the language of mankind’s forgotten umbilical cord to the womb of mother earth. I followed him days and nights in strange gasps of the deep forest for the past uncountable years. Yet I couldn’t grasp the last notes of the lullaby the forest hummed for us. Once on a full moon, deep in the enchanted forest, he greeted the soul of the wilds. They sat around a bonfire on chilly nights to retell the love story of man and earth. That fire connected the two worlds, until a rainy day, an explorer with a new map of our future sailed up to the river.
The alien language speakers, the self-proclaimed owners of every land, came from another world where things could be bought and sold. They sealed our world in their papers and began cutting down the trees. The fairies fled, the spirits vanished, the sacred bond was broken, and the magic died. The trees met axes, the free folks met masters, and our open land was made a colony.
The modern gods in their books told them to throw us to hell for our uncommitted sins. They baptized us with our blood and buried our stories in our mud and planted crops for money. They thrashed and looted, raped and murdered, silenced all the songs of our souls. In every helpless night, our river sings of our old sweet memories, carrying them away to some faraway place only she knew, where they couldn’t steal them.
And then, his love was turned to courage. His spirit was anointed to the light warrior of his tribe. His defense with a spear of iron for the land, its children, and the forest was met with disgust and laughter. They couldn’t decipher the life in the howl of the wind or death in falling leaves. They didn’t see the roots deep in the soil where the trees embraced each other. All they saw was money in our forest.
In the midst of the never-ending battle for centuries, generations were born in shackles of slavery. They were mute and their language was stolen. With no voice, their tongues evolved into useless patches of muscle that wept for its old folk songs. The trees never answered him, and the cuckoos didn’t coo. He grew very old calling them every day in his dreams and sanity.
The magus shut his eyes looking to the dark open sky through the silhouettes of canopy and stars twinkled in tears that rolled down his cheeks. The amazon burned in the rage with smoke piling up to eternity. Dark shadows were cast in the sky as the demons drank oil from a riverbed choking with dollars. Now his story will be deeply buried in the land he has ever known. With him, we are to be forgotten forever beneath the huge pile of greed.
After many days, people from the other side crossed the river looking for the dead. They told about a strange virus, which quietly crossed our river, from a faraway land. His spirit must have known it somehow and I winced for the excruciating pain he carried in his soul. I sat by the river in the silence of the loss, listening to her last solo. Maybe one day, I will hum songs of our blood and land written in the language from the origin, in the gushing of the pure water, or in the rustling of new leaves from a small, resurrected tree by the bank of the river.
Author:
Anjali Jwaala is a short fiction writer and poet from central Kerala. She published her first collection of Malayalam short stories " Valanja Vazhiyum Oru Kuthum", in 2017. She is interested in social justice and political non-fiction and believes that words still hold power to transform minds. https://www.linkedin.com/in/anjali-pushkaran-99b371121
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