Drum & Bass Anthems

 
The white flower petals seem to die. Maybe from the cold of their season. The petals have lost life. They didn’t seem to blossom. Maybe they had a mind to blossom but they waited too long. Too long that the freezing winter caught them on their blind side and slowly drained their energy to get to their full bloody beautiful potential. Sire looks at them, with pity. But what could he do. He couldn’t just will them back to life. He wished he could.

“How long has it been?” Risper’s voice hadn’t changed a bit. She still had the firm sureness that Sire always liked about her voice. Yet, as Sire looks onto her face, he is bewildered at how much more beautiful she seems to have become. Is it that she decided not to wait for him and move on making herself better or that Sire himself was jealous that he hadn’t been there to see her grow more attractive.

“Three years.” To him, it never felt like three years. Rather, just another bracket in time where he seemed to find himself in. “I’m sorry.”

“Why?” It boggles him that she could ask him that. Shouldn’t he be? But really, there in that little outdoor restaurant, sipping a mug of House Coffee with Risper, he isn’t even sure why he is sorry.

Sire remembers well that he didn’t even say goodbye when they called him to volunteer in some village in South Sudan. That year after he was through with high school, is when he met Risper, at a function, somewhere; where people were all jumbled up there like candy in a jar. When he thought of it, Sire didn’t even have any expectations in meeting someone. However, life had brought him there, at that moment, sipping soda and a snack, while the sun was welcoming with wonderful rays, next to Risper. Sire was anxious, to at least talk, rather than just standing there all stone like. And so, he whispered a faint Hi.

“What?” She might have not heard him but she smiled anyway, at him, awkwardly, the kind he always found lovely about her. That she kept on smiling, until Sire spoke with a more composed and steadier version of his previous self. Sire liked her. And he sensed that she liked him. A kind of friendship that grew into a flowery exchange of attitudes and experiences. Sire remembers the first time he kissed her. At the end of the event, how she fully accepted his kiss and in that single moment, feeling awesome and complete. Sire told her that they should remain friends, because he feared that their want for each other might crumble even before it got a chance to mature. Now he wonders if he had single handedly crushed it himself.

After weeks of testing his conscience, his resolve and hers, he now did actually want her. But then the letter came. The letter with promise. The letter he had been waiting for, for some time. And it had come with its own share of wants. It wanted him to go. It wanted him to leave and actually go. To go to a place he had only heard of but never really been to. It wanted him to will himself out of his current life and into another life completely different from what he had ever known. But mostly, it wanted him to suspend his feelings for her. Sire had really worked for this volunteer opportunity in the United Nations and he was not at any position to let his dreams go. So, before he got on the plane the next day, he called her and told her that he was leaving. Risper didn’t reply, and the next day, he got on the plane.

***

“Why did you come back?” Risper asked to break the chilling silence that was snaking its way to her sinuses and into the back of her eyes. Risper felt her chest heavy with tears. After he left, she was so distraught that she wished he would never return. That Sire would go and die there. Maybe that’s why she never bothered to look for his number after she lost it. She wasn’t even sure if she had lost it because she had blocked him. Then when she wanted to call eventually, his line was no longer in service. She cried by herself. Forever wondering, forever longing.

“The heat.” He said. It was a lie. It was all bullshit. Since when did he start lying to her. Sire knew that she had noticed the twitch in his eye as he said this. He knew that she had noticed how his eyes glanced away from her. Sire looked sharply onto he nicely tanned skin colour of her arms and hands. How he desired that they could be touching him every day. In truth Risper knew that something had happened. Something that had forced him to act like that, to lie. And to do it so blatantly, knowing very well that he couldn’t ever lie to him.

Sire remembers the contents of eventful mixture that drove him back. It had all gone smoothly the first few weeks in South Sudan. Him, together with other volunteers; some of his age, but mostly guys older than him all formed a large family of giving. Of helping. Of loving. They had come to this foreign land on temporary visas, scheduled to expire in a year. However, Sire found the work of helping the sick and homeless war victims fulfilling. He found a kind of satisfaction in giving those hungry and emaciated fellow Africans something to eat and seeing how they tried to smile but couldn’t. When they did smile, it looked like their eye sockets were gonna burst out and so he never waited to see them smile but sort of hurried them away to go and eat their food. It was Mr. Ding whom Sire became friends with. From the first moment he saw him, he saw himself in him. A man, desperate to become whole. A man who was desperate to live for something. So every time Mr Ding came by, he tried to listen to his stories. Of his wife and sons. Mr. Ding was never with his family. They were not lost by any means but were somewhere in the camp. Among the hundreds of thousands that were in the camp. Mr. Ding always told him that if he saw anyone that looked like him, he should bring them to him. But Sire wasn’t even sure how he could do that, for most of the people in the camp looked like him. It was as if they were all one humongous family at the camp. But he was always hopeful that he would one day see the- his wife and children. This is the type of hope that made Sire reapply for another visa and extend his stay.

Even when the killings started, and more and more volunteers went back, Sire stayed. He wanted to do more. He knew that he could not give up, because of people like Mr. Ding, because he had developed a connection with his work. At first, Sire would hear children crying. Perhaps due to malnutrition. They were loud and shrill. Piercing the soul. Cries of innocence born into despairing worlds. But months in, the volunteers work seemed to pay off as they seemed to find peace again in their sleep. It eventually became kind of a safe haven for the victims of the war torn nation.

Then it all began. One morning when they woke up, a volunteer was missing from their pack. That alone was enough to send half of them packing. Later, on some nights, while they slept in their tents, at the mercy of the cold, still, windy nights he heard desperate screams and sinister laughter. And blood in the morning. Blood all over their tents. Heads. Rather, heads without bodies, with their eyes gaping and mouths wide open. It wasn’t safe anymore. The rebels. The once so happily consolidated amalgamated conglomeration of a newly hopeful generation was once again struck to hopelessness and stripped of its newly found home. People didn’t stay after that, How could they? They moved in numbers, in their thousands, and even Mr. Ding, telling Sire that not even he could be spared if he stayed.

The UN advised extraction. A representative from the Kenyan embassy came to their aid. He explained that probably the rebels wanted to ensure there was no opportunity for opposition to mount in camps such as those. They were housed at the former Kenyan embassy that had been evacuated following the state of insecurity. There they would be safe till morning.

Sire wondered as he covered himself in between the sheets, how his work had been squashed like a bug at the hands of power hungry people. He couldn’t sleep. He could even find the peace to lie down. It was his peacelessness that made him expect anything. Even as they came. With determination. First at the gates. Tearing them down with ease. Then the gunshots. Loud and awakening. All of the residents in that building were shaken to full cognizance. From the windows, they could see, that the street was lit with orange and red burning fire-lit sticks. It was like a freaking witch hunt, surrounding the walls of the buildings. All of their voices, rising up like a spell, like a slow and sure chant. Sire could hear them. He could listen as they advanced past the guards with ease, not even deterred by how easily they took life away from them. They knocked. They howled. They pushed. As if they wanted to shake the whole three story building to its foundation. They had burst in. With so much verve and vitality that he wondered how these people never won the Olympics. That energy would have been put into such good use.

That was the building just across the street. They had no time. The Kenyan nationals and volunteers had to be evacuated sooner than anticipated. As the Kenyan representative led all of them to the transport waiting at the back, Sire wondered what the rebels would have done to them had they found them asleep

***

Sire looks at Risper. He blames himself and blames her. But he mostly blames her for supposedly not seeing his intentions and moving on. WTF. Was she blind. She just moved on and ignored him, her feelings and his feelings, or the future that they could have had. She was supposed to be his. He was to be hers. He is angry with himself.

He notices the neckless, the top she is wearing and her hair. Pink. How predictable. Ever since he knew her, she always loved pink. That had seemed not to change even while he was away. He feigned a smile.

“It seems you didn’t divorce the pink colour in you!” Sire says, with a shrug. Risper looks at him. And laughs. It surprises him. The laugh. So new. So solid. So lively. How could she still laugh? She looks down. Then up. Then smiles at Sire. Sire stares at her. He touches her hand, sort of brushing it before letting go again. Risper looks at him, into his heart, now she really sees him. She is once again flowing in his little rhythm. Drumming and beating, so beautifully.

“I love you Sire.”