Niya's days began with jets roaring overhead and ended with the cries of the battered, broken, and injured, withering in agony and torment, ravaged by war. She understood death better than she understood life; after all, she witnessed hope shattering and gut-wrenching spectacles every day.
"You are God's favourite child" — the words of her mother would ring in her ears every time she heard the noise of the fighter jets hovering overhead like the angel of death. She often pondered over those words of affection, wondering whether God had made a mistake and put her in the most pessimistic area of the world by folly!
Because, according to Niya, her beloved mother could never lie.
She missed her mother on days when she had time to contemplate the grief embedded deep in her heart. Eldest amongst her parents' children, she understood her responsibilities very well ,though she hated being the eldest when there was lack of food at home due to soaring prices and fewer supplies, as her country was at war with the external enemies as the well as internal enemies. She abhorred the way her siblings looked at her for comfort because honestly there wasn't any left for her to give!
You may feel a pang of pity for Niya after reading these words, but she despised being pitied too! Also, the gravity of the lack of food, medical supplies, and the fear of her siblings getting wounded in the bombing often kept her mind quite occupied during the day. So, the thought of her parents and the vision of their brutal deaths, though vivid in her mind's eye, usually became a distant memory and came to haunt her only at night when she slept on an empty stomach.
Niya believed God had made a mistake. She wasn't even supposed to be born here in this war-torn country. She wasn't supposed to see people haggling for scraps of food and throwing away their entire savings to secure a place on the boat to get out of this country in the hope of finding a safe and new home in countries far away from their motherland. She wasn't supposed to witness the death of her loved ones. Her father first. Her mother after him. She wasn't supposed to become the head of the house at the tender age of fourteen!
She was sure that God had switched her and her mother by mistake with some other mother-daughter duo born in a stable country. She often wondered about that girl and her mother.Did they watch television together? Did they shop often? Did they sleep in warmly tucked-in beds and eat food to their heart's content? And were they aware that they had taken the place of Niya and her mother by an accident — an accident of geography. An accident of birth. An accident of luck!
Niya fed her brother and sister the warm soup and promised them that she would cook meat for them the next day. When her siblings asked if she had eaten, she nodded and muttered a faint, “Yes.”She was lying through her teeth, of course. Niya had only managed a few sips of the leftover soup. With supplies running dangerously low, she had to impose strict rationing every day, and after feeding her siblings, there was hardly anything left for her.She hated giving her siblings false hope, but she simply could not bring herself to tell them the truth. She often wondered if they would survive another day amid the constant bombardment and the lack of even the most basic necessities. In a world where survival had become uncertain, lying no longer felt like a sin.
When her mother was dying, she made Niya promise that she would forever protect and guard her younger siblings with her life. She has since then tried to do justice to that promise, made at an age when she barely even understood what those dying words of her mother really meant. The irony is that not once did her mother or her father ask Niya to take care of herself too!
But right now, Niya didn't have much time to ponder over why her mother and father never asked her to take care of herself. She made sure that her siblings were fed well with warm bread, soup, and a few chunks of meat, while she atethe leftovers and drank a lot of water to quell the pangs of hunger in her unsatiated stomach. To insinuate that she was hungry would be an understatement. She had not eaten properly for a week now! The promise she made to her dying mother would often stand in the way of her and her famished heart and stomach.
"Remember, my daughter, that your siblings are your first priority and foremost responsibility."
That's what her mother repeatedlytold Niya before dying, and since then, these words were etched into her mind as if they were written on stone!
She heard her mother's words repeat in her ears when her head would spin and she needed support to stand because she had been hungry for days on end.
Her mother's words would ring in her ears when her eyes would wander greedily at her siblings' plates. She wouldthenchastise herself and look away.
"Siblings first. Siblings first." … She would mumble to herself every time she thought of eating anything reserved in supplies for them.
She would drink water, tie a thick cloth around her stomach so that she would not feel any sensation, but hunger would creep in eventually. And then she would imagine what life would have been like if she had been born into a better world, and then sleep would come to her eventually, harshlyand slowly.
For the first time, she woke up to a morning without screams of the dying and the injured. No bombardments were done in the night, and Niya decided to go out of her house to get supplies of fresh meat, bread, and milk. Her siblings were still sleeping in a warmly tucked bed.
The entire town was up, with people haggling over supplies. Niya looked at the few loose coins in the palm of her hand and wondered what she could buy with them. Maybe a few crumbs of bread for her siblings and a cup of milk. Nevertheless, she stood in the queue, bought whatever little she could afford, and turned towards the lane leading to her now almost desolate and crumbling house.
Her walk was slow, and her feet tugged along in a mechanical way. Due to extreme hunger, she was unable to walk in steady steps.
And then her eyes wandered and suddenly lit up. A few metres outside her house, she saw a few healthy pieces of well-cooked meat lying in a leftover plate. At first, she was bewildered. Who would leave a scrumptious plate of meat in these times? But desperation born out ofsevere hunger was able to close the curtain of reason and logic very conveniently.
She picked up the plate and ran into the empty building next to her house. She took a bite. The first bite felt foreign, as she had forgotten what well-cooked food really tasted like. The second bite gave her goosebumps, and by the third bite, she was able to finally relish the taste of the meat.
With teary eyes, she continued chewing the meat, stopping only to take a few short breaths in between. And after a few minutes, the obvious guilt dawned on her. She should have saved this plate for her siblings, but her heart understood this, while her stomach couldn't. How could she behave in such a selfish manner? She asked herself.
Not selfish. Just human, her conscience answered.
And then suddenly she heard a loud thud behind her. She turned back, and what she saw made her collapse to her knees. Her almost crumbling house had collapsed with her siblings in it. The bombardments started suddenly, and when the house next to her house was bombed, her broken and dilapidated house couldn't stand the impact either, and it collapsed like a pack of cards.
Her siblings were gone, and her hands remained tightly clasped around the plate.
Thousands of kilometres away, a young girl of fourteen years of age saw the devastation of Niya's town on her television, from the comfort of her home while shuffling through the channels. She felt sorry for the hungry and injured people she saw on screen and prayed for those living in the war-torn region. She often wondered how people survived in these conflict-inflicted areas, but she was just fourteen, and her mind often wandered. And then she sat at a table with her siblings, and they ate warm, home-cooked meat. She told her mother that she had stood first in her class, and her mother replied proudly, "After all, you are God's favourite child."
