This post has been published by me as a part of the
Blog-a-Ton 7; the seventh edition of the online marathon of Bloggers; where we decide and we write. To be part of the next edition, visit and start following
Blog-a-Ton.
He had been walking for hours. He almost stumbled over a child; lying there covered in blood with missing limbs.Bile rose in his throat; he indulged. He knew he had no energy left to even puke anymore. Yet he dragged himself to walk on.He had to.. somehow. He had to get away from all this...
Yesterday when he returned from his shift and browsed for more than an hour before finally giving in to sleep, he had not even dreamed of having to face a day like this. And that too the very next day..
He didn't know what actually woke him - the loud noise or the cries or the pain that shot through his body or the eerie feeling of fear he had never experienced before. When senses returned to him, they did so with a lot of pain. He could feel blood gush out of his ears and saw a broken bone protruding out of his left hand with blood and flesh exposed. That was when he first threw-up that day.
He tried to compose himself. He looked around. What he saw, he could never have believed. There were no homes, no vehicles on the usually busy roads and not even roads to be seen.. All that could be seen was debris - concrete, dust, carcass and blood. For once, he couldn't stand the crimson color. He had always loved to see his love wearing crimson colored dresses.
He ran, as fast as he could. He must see her. Hoping she was unhurt, he had run. He had ran for hours and on the way all he had seen was destruction and death. He had stopped just enough to let the vomit escape before running on and on again. The few people who were alive like him, were in tears over their lost ones. Some refused to leave the shattered body parts of their family, some could not even cry.
But he couldn't find her house. With all this debris and the usual landmarks not to be seen, he couldn't even be sure this was the place where she lived. Something within him told him that he had lost her. He had lost the one who had loved him the most. He wished he had called her yesterday, he wished he could just hear her voice.
He thought about his parents. They were with his pregnant sister in the Gulf country. He wondered how vast this destruction was. He hoped they were fine, but he had no way of knowing. No TV's anywhere, he never got to retrieve his smart phone, no computer, no internet . He didn't even know if the Third World War had started and this was its resultant or if this was just another terrorist attack where his city got targeted. He didn't know why he survived...
He wanted to lie down somewhere. He wanted to stop the pain growing inside him. He wanted to nurse his hand which had become numb with pain. He wanted the flies to leave his wounded arm alone. He wanted to turn deaf to the wails of cries around. He wanted to eat.
He couldn't believe how among all this he could feel so hungry and so desperate for food. Yet he had to. He walked on and on. Looking for someplace he would get something to eat. He remembered all that food he dumped casually in the office canteen's waste basket because it was too salty or less spicy or just not interesting enough. He remembered ordering more than he could eat at restaurants and without regret binning them. He wished he could have a morsel from them now..just a morsel.
He knew he had walked out of city limits when he saw fields. He felt happy. There would be something to eat. But even the fields were destroyed. Then he saw a partially destroyed paddy field. Yet he felt defeated, it was recently farmed, it was not even near ripe. But hunger gripped him and he knew his life depended on it.
He fell on his knees and struggling to keep his left hand out of the way, he uprooted each blade of paddy with his nails and fingers. He found a grain of sprouted rice on its end. He split it open to find a white thing within. He scraped and ate it.It was hardly enough for him to even taste it. Yet he kept on repeating it. He dug with his fingers on the hard ground, scraped the mud till his nails and fingers were bruised & bleeding - for each unharmed grain in the fields.. With every grain, his eyes filled up with tears...
When he woke up his heart beats were abnormally slow. He panicked. He looked around. Everything was intact. It took several minutes before he could convince himself that it was a dream.
But he could never again live like he did till the day before. He could never forget that dream. He could never shake off all that he felt in the dream. He could never again take life and its blessings for granted. He grew to value what he had. His life would never be the same...
There was one question that drove him to live a new life, more than anything else : "What if the dream came true???" In today's world it is not an impossible thing. In fact many fellow human beings might have actually gone through worse..
Till he lived, his every action was haunted with the question, What if... ; yet it only brought him happiness and an odd sense of fulfilled living...
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