In this short story, Douglas M. Jain showcases the story of a family struggling for survival with a captivating narrative and characters that will haunt the readers.
A small town exists on the outskirts of F-city, near the Y-river. Although it has been largely rebuilt now, some twenty years ago, in July, excessive rain and shoot flies destroyed most of the wheat crops that grew around this town. Houses—mud and concrete—were reduced to rubble. Dozens of people died in flash floods, none of whom could get a proper burial. Their bloated bodies floated in the dirty, muddy, green-brown water for five days before their stench attracted scavenging birds. Corpses of dogs and cattle lay scattered among the ruins, along with the human remains.
A few people, with ration and their belongings, found shelter in a long-abandoned J-hamlet on a nearby hill. Charun was five years old at the time, with deep black irises, a gaunt chest, and skin that shone like brown obsidian. On his last day in the town—before an old man carried him to the hamlet and when the water level was still low—he saw his father clutching his hair and screaming like a raving lunatic, ‘My crops!’ for two hours straight. By noon, he found the man hanging from a rope tied to the ceiling fan. He saw the neighbors pulling his father down, and he saw his mother wailing. He looked at his father’s blotchy face and saw his eyes—almost popping out of their sockets—red like cherry tomatoes, his blue tongue hanging out, the deep purple marks that the rope had left on his neck, and the red and green shards—from shattered glass-bangles—scattered across his chest. That evening, he made his way, wading through knee-high water, to the river with his unusually deranged mother, where she spontaneously threw herself in the water. She tried to drag him with her, her nails digging into his forearm and drawing some blood, before he managed to free himself. He ran a dozen paces from where he watched the waves engulf her and heard her deafening screams.