Sunday, May 1, 2011

In the Shade of a Day: Prologue


PROLOGUE: First Light
The Old Man sits and impassively waits. Darkness coats him with an inky blackness, damp and heavy, blended with the morning mist. The Old Man’s skin, baked under a thousand suns, exudes its own mortal sheen and glows supernaturally out of the darkness as the moonlight catches the angles of his gaunt shoulders. He is naked except for a sarong, roughly tied at his waist, its greys and blues dulled by years of dust, water and sweat. It is as much a part of him as the dark strands of hair – some jet black, others as white as rice – which still grow luxuriantly from the centre of his head. His scythe, its blade dull to the eye yet sharp to the touch, is tucked into his waistband as it has been for his entire life. The carved wooden handle is worn with grooves exactly matching the Old Man’s fingers. The cool blue atmosphere touches his parched skin and he exhales gently.
Darkness fades, as darkness does, into lighter hues of blues colliding softly with gently glowing greys. Without warning or announcement, the lightest tinge of orange emerges around the corners of the sky. It is as if the giant canvas above him is suddenly alight, burning from the edges inwards. Backlit whisps of cloud drift across the foreground of this primal painting, barely visible yet always present, like the spirits swirling around the Old Man as he sits motionless.They accompany him each morning and throughout each day, their shape constantly changing, their form neither solid nor air; they are equally visible and invisible; apparently real, they remain untouchable by human hand. The Old Man anticipated the day when he would once again assume this form and a warmth of contentment washed over him, in perfect tune with the growing orange warmth of the horizon.
Absently, he scents smoke as it drifts across the rice padi. Chaff is burning damply upwind. Smoke - that dark prince born of noble fire - is carried on the morning breeze. It twists like a serpent, fading in colour from thick black to ghostly grey as it stalks through the fields, camouflaged by the darkness of the dawn. By the time it reaches the nostrils of the Old Man, it has no colour, no form or being. Only existence. Its presence is unmistakable, totally intangible, undeniably real. The smoke snakes thinly into his nostrils, through his body and out of his mouth. It hangs in the air, surrounding him briefly as if wondering whether to strike. Sinisterly it encircles him, like a boa on a jungle limb, before silently passing through him to continue its ever-diminishing journey towards the sea.
The wind is coming from the north and it whispers in the ear of the Old Man. ‘The monsoon will end before long,’ it tells him. The Old Man feels a twinge deep in his heart. He has been in love with the monsoon his whole life ever since the first time he saw her – he, a wide-eyed child, peaking from beneath the low alang-alang roof into the blackness; she, at first a distant rumor, a murmur, arriving dramatically to the sound of ten thousand million drums.
She swept in each year, as wild and beautiful as ever. She never fully revealed herself to him but remained a strange beauty from a place he did not know. The Old Man had admired her for many years but she didn’t seem to know him. She would knock on his door but when he answered, she had danced away.
 Sometimes a white flash announced her presence, blinding at first, revealing a glimpse of the beautifully layered sheets of her dress, swishing and twirling in the vicious wind. The thunder, he always knew, was the sound of her shoes as she danced across the land. He craned his head to see upwards but only blackness stretched to the heavens. His vantage point meant that he only saw the bottom of her dress, as if he was watching a wedding dance from beneath a table. The silky sheets of fabric moved in so many directions it made his head spin. He wondered what the face of such a beautiful princess must look like and he dared not imagine. The westerly wind, this strong, powerful Sultan would dance with her, whipping her into a frenzy on occasion. When they were together, the passion was so strong it engulfed everybody below. They moved together in such perfect harmony. It was a joy to behold and the Old Man would sit and watch with the same awe and wonderment as the Boy he had once been. The dance was never the same and he never grew tired of its splendor.
Then the northerly wind would blow and she would dance no more. Occasionally she would return with the westerly wind but their dances became more and more fleeting – their intensity magical but their duration unsustainable. He knew she would soon be moving on to dance her mesmeric dance elsewhere.
As these loving thoughts drifted through the Old Man’s mind, the darkness around him had thinned. It was warmed by the slightest tinge of orange, barely visible at first, but soon there appeared a slash of it above the sea: a paint-splash of orange and red and violet. Blues gave way to reds with grace, their coldness melting away as the minutes passed.
The light was sufficient now for his eyes to see the land before him. His eyes presented a picture in which his heart found easy comfort. He had grown with this land, sprouted from its rich soils. His spirit, warmed each day by the sunlight, arose and awakened within him. As a child knows every hair on his father’s head, each mark on its mother’s body, he knew every inch of this land. In the gentle morning light now he greeted each shoot as a sibling. His entire universe lay before him and his ease and contentment were absolute.
This land had fed him, clothed him, nourished him, loved him. To his right was the banana palm - his nanny - in whose shaded arms he had slept as a child. From her cool shadows he had gazed in loving wonder as sweat rolled in rivulets from the bodies of his parents into the thirsty soil below.
At the intersection of two fields some thirty meters distant, was the crooked wooden sala where he had first kissed a girl from his village. They had waited for the night when the moon was old and had sneaked into the sala from opposite sides of the fields. The darkness cloaked them so completely that only the warmth of their breath and the beating of their hearts guided them. It was a moment so beautifully locked in time, woven into the richness of his life just as a single golden thread stands out in even the most colorful ikat tapestry.
Beyond the sala was the path he had later walked, hand in hand with the same girl, on the day when she became his wife. He had stood and proudly showed her the fields that one day soon they would tend together. Later, their children had slept in the arms of that same kindly banana palm while he and his wife sweated in the sun, nourishing the soil who, in turn, dutifully responded by feeding their growing family.  
Many years later, this same soil had soaked up the sorrow of his tears as he cast his wife’s ashes onto the land that had sustained them both through hard and happy years. From his tears - and her ashes - sprouted more crops, which the Old Man joyfully harvested. As he did, he accepted that the next time this soil tasted tears, they would be the tears of his son. And the soft black flakes that fell among those tears would be the ash of himself.
Day by day, he swayed with the winds, absorbed the light and the water he was given, never asking nor expecting more. ‘More’ was an abstract notion to the Old Man. It was the curse of other men. He simply accepted what he was given at the dawn of each day. He awoke in the rising sun, regenerated, grew again, flowered, gave seed, grew old, wilted and, finally, lay down as the sun sank into the ocean. When his time came, this cycle would be broken. A distant day was marked on a cosmic calendar when he would not rise with the sun in the form of a man but simply return to the soil whilst his spirit soared, uninhibited by gravity and time. His ashes would mix with the tears of the Boy, colouring the soil with their inky blackness. And life would begin again.
Every dawn, the Old Man sat with the darkness in perfect peace. When the darkness left, he never felt loss. They were never really together, the Old Man and the darkness. They shared a moment in time and space, but could never escape the constant motion of the universe. “Darkness, my old friend,” thought the Old Man, “the one thing we have in common is that from the very moment we arrive, we are at once engaged in the process of leaving.”
The Old Man looked at his hands. They had served him well. In this light, they may as well have been carved from teak, such was their bony elegance. ‘They will burn well when the day comes’, the Old Man thought, grinning toothlessly to himself. A dog wanders lazily past, shabby white fur alight with the fiery orange of the early-morning sun. People are cooking. The Old Man hears the noises of life, soft and soothing; the village is awakening. The Old Man stands, raises his eyes and thanks God for sending him another perfect day.