Silvio woke with a start. The banana vendor had been screaming all morning at his barrow trying to get rid of his last stash of rotten fruits. Silvio always woke up with a start. He couldn’t remember the last time he had woken from a beautiful dream. His nightly dreams weren’t exactly nightmares. But they were mostly about a dreary place with Silvio roaming around aimlessly looking for something desperately. The silhouette of a woman would begin to dissolve in a nearby stream before he could stretch out and grab her. Just then, an invisible child would start giggling and the pitch would continue to rise until it split his eardrums and he woke up gasping.
Dragging his body out of his unraveling cot, Silvio hobbled towards the front door. A bottle and a due slip lay on the porch. Silvio waited for the local stray dog to poop in his small lawn before picking up the bottle; the prick always did that. Nothing could stop the infernal beast from shitting right there every day. Silvio had come to accept cleaning dog poop as a chore. So, he talked to the shameless creature as it pooped—the usual stuff about how he was doing, whether he had found food last night except for what Silvio had left him outside, and other trivial matters. The dog finished pooping and left without even so much as a tail wag. The local crackpot Joga marched from east to west, clapping his hands. He would always return in the evenings walking backward from west to east.
Having cleaned the lawn, Silvio proceeded to broom the house before lazily sprawling on an armchair with a cup of horrible tea. Silvio was a lousy cook. Tea was the best he could manage and no one, who had ever tasted his tea, would drink another cup from him. Silvio’s mind drifted in the empty house.
The pile of clothes in the overflowing laundry bag had been collecting dust for one whole week. Silvio looked at them and felt a sudden surge of infinite sadness streaking through him. Washing clothes was the worst of all chores. So, he dragged and kicked the lot toward the washing machine and dumped everything into it. But the machine wouldn’t start, not even with Silvio begging and praying to it. The evil thing was worse than the dog outside. It had a mind of its own and resorted to testing Silvio’s resolve every now and then. So, he pulled the soiled clothes out of its belly and proceeded toward the washing platform.
In the morning heat of early summer, he began to pound the clothes with a wooden paddle but soon slipped and fell in the soap water. A few crows sitting on the backyard fence watched as Silvio wage war with laundry. Their eyes followed Silvio as he fumbled and tripped and made a mess of washing dirty laundry. This made him more nervous. Nefarious little creatures! No better than the dog!
With his war with laundry finally won, Silvio picked a bucket full of wet clothes and proceeded to spread them neatly on strings strung across his backyard. The nefarious little crows watched on as the poor man tangled in dripping bedsheets tripped over the bucket.
Silvio’s neighbor was particularly keen on his well-being. She had known her lonesome neighbor for about a year now, since he had moved in. She had made a few passes at Silvio when her husband wasn’t around. The woman had wide eyes with big eyelashes. Her smooth, brown skin glowed in the noonday light. But Silvio was immune to her charms. He had locked his virility in some cellar and forgotten the keys. But she clung to hope and often brought him pots of hot curry and cottage cheese. Silvio would accept the gift with a thin smile and return the empty utensils soon.
The woman watched the dark man with thirsty eyes as he fumbled and teetered. But Silvio’s water-dance soon became too much for the woman and she exploded in a fit of mad laughter. Silvio gathered his bucket and towel and ran inside his house buck naked. The crows flew away. Nefarious little creatures!
By noon, Silvio’s bowels began to growl. He longed for a bowl of warm rice and hot curry. But the bowls in the kitchen were all empty. He had once tried his hand at cooking but it turned out to be too horrible even for the dog outside. He had resolved never to cook after that. So, he went out on his bicycle. The dog met him on the street with a smirk and a full belly.
Sivio’s rusty old bicycle screeched and rattled on the gutted asphalt. Bobbing up and down on the torn seat Silvio looked around at the empty streets and trees. The lovebirds had left their haven beneath the litchi trees already, and the last of the peanut sellers lugged their barrows from the school building. It must be very late, Silvio thought; another day with cigarettes and a bottle of water. But luck had yet to leave his side. One shack still had a bowl of lukewarm rice and stale curry left in the pots.
With his stomach full Silvio pottered around. The desolate streets resembled the place in his dreams. With the sun still screaming down upon the plains Silvio paddled uphill towards the old cemetery. The rusty cemetery gate was shut with a rotting lock and chain. So, Silvio leaned his bicycle against the gate and went inside through a slit in the wall. Having walked no more than a hundred feet he reached one particular grave with a nondescript headstone. A wild hibiscus bush had grown through a crack in the stone masonry and was now blooming with big, red flowers. Silvio plucked a flower and placed it on the headstone. It was time to leave.
At eight in the evening, crackpot Joga, true to his routine, marched backward on his heels from west to east. Silvio passed him on his creaking bicycle and rode past his own house. The street dog looked on curiously as he disappeared around the corner of the street. Far beyond the line of houses, beyond where the community market ended, stood a small workshop with a chimney—desolate, shuttered, lurking like a ghost behind a tall Gulmohar tree. Silvio stopped in front of it.
Two keys hung from a chain around his neck. He removed the keys and unlocked the shutter. It coiled up with a whir. Silvio looked around and entered the pitch black of the shop. The inside was a mess of cobwebs, old dusty furniture, and a few pots and pans. A narrow pathway cleared through the junk led to a smaller room. Silvio entered the smaller room and unlocked a hatch on the floor. Beneath, was an underground cellar lost in impenetrable darkness. He descended into the darkness like a bat, the surrounding blackness hardly bothering him. When his feet touched the floor of the musty cellar, he flicked a switch on the wall and the room lit up with the light of an electric lamp.
The cellar was no larger than the room above. Aside from a stool, a desk, and a broken chair, there stood a huge, old iron safe in the eastern corner of the room. He turned the handle of the safe and its heavy iron door swung open with a screech. He plucked an empty glass bottle, a tube, and a tin box from the topmost shelf and proceeded toward the desk. He leaned over the bottle and the pipe with his back towards the light. Fixing one end of the pipe to the mouth of the bottle with a piece of glue tape from a roll lying on the desk, he pulled out a needle from the tin box. The other end of the pipe went straight into the broader end of the needle. The apparatus was ready. Silvio pumped his left fist once, twice, thrice and then with one clean thrust pushed the needle into his veins.
A stream of sparkling green liquid gushed through the tube and began to fill the bottle. Within minutes the bottle was brimming with the fluorescent fluid. With the bottle full Silvio proceeded towards the safe. Arranged in neat rows on the lower shelves lay more such bottles. Sixty—Silvio counted. His face glowed with joy in the dim light of the room. There were two empty sacks lying on one of the shelves. Silvio stuffed the bottles in them, climbed out of the cellar, and crawled out of the shop. The shutter closed behind him with a whir.
For four hours he cycled, sweat streaming down his forehead and onto his chest as he pushed hard at the paddles. But his face gleamed brighter and brighter with joy. When he finally stopped, the town had ended and a large field with stubs of razed trees stood eerily in the starlight. The tree line had been pushed to the horizon and stood like huddled ghosts in the dark awaiting their fate. He carried the sacks to the middle of the field and began placing the bottles full of the glowing, green liquid on the ground. When the sacks had been emptied, he picked up the bottles one by one and began sprinkling the ravaged land with his green blood.
In the pitch black of the night, the field that was once a forest floor and now no more than a field of stubs began to glow green. Within minutes the whole field began to quake and rustle in an otherworldly commotion. And then with an ear-splitting roar the ground cracked open and huge trees larger than the ones that had been felled sprang up to the skies. The forest had come to life.
First, the crows began to fly in. Silvio smiled at them and they cawed back in gratitude. They had been guarding Silvio’s mind for four hundred days, sitting on his fence and keeping watch, lest he exploded with thundering rage and destroyed the whole town with his bare fists. The human skin is too clumsy and claustrophobic for the spirits of the forest. Then the animals began to come one by one starting with the shy foxes and the coy deer. Before the first light of dawn, the spirit of the forest had returned from the dead.
She touched Silvio’s cheeks, her hands as dark as Mahogany. And she wiped the tears on his face and kissed his lips and whispered—You brought me back, you always do! Silvio’s eyes brimmed as two dark, tiny hands wrapped around his trunky legs. It was a boy and he looked up at him and whispered—Baba, I am here too!
I see you son. Now we have to guard our home with everything we have.
