A Storm on the Mountain

CHAPTER III

Aanav sat there, waiting.

At the wooden home, he warmed up last night's fried rice in the microwave oven his brother gifted him. He ate the bowlful in the veranda, as usual, the cane chair now beginning to make squeaky noises due to the weight being placed. He read some more, then put the leftover plate down on the parquets.

When he returned inside the house, he remembered that he'd already made the bed- the sheet smoothly spread, intricately tucked by the edges.

The birds had woke him up that morning, the chirps loud, unharmonious. The dawn was a little milky when he walked out of the door, stretched in the veranda, his joints cracking loudly. The sun was tearing through the night- not yet visible. It was as if the entire world had spun its course, and the two different hours of the day had mingled, married into only one moment to dazzle the sky with a billion lifted tears from eyes, like dewdrops.

The sky was gold.

A flower raised itself from the damp ground, the stem creeping and climbing the air in a crooked, wavy belly-dance and then at the very tip of the stem, bloomed a flower- opening from the within of the slit, and ravishingly opening its petals to breathe. The flowers, in turn, danced to the wind, and within no time, the petals began to wave themselves and then together ditched the stems, their home- their roots and flew away disguised as a butterfly—freedom, at last.

The shepherd arrived, happy and smilingly tired. He crept over the hill with his sheeps bumping into each other as usual, their bah! bah! as sound as it ever was. One or two of them walked towards the side, and he quickly hit the stick in his hand on a small boulder near him, so knowingly, that no one would ever believe that he couldn't see. In fact, in the beginning, Aanav thought that too, that a shepherd being blind yet walking around the mountain was nothing but a poetic cliche. The first couple minutes they met, when Aanav was nothing but ignorant, he was startled at the shepherd's words.

Normally, one would pity a blind man, but Aanav envied him at times. Purely the fact that the shepherd, even though blind, who'd never seen this outrageous beauty in real, felt so rooted to it, so drawn to it, that he never left. The fact that he knew every inch of the mountain, like how Aanav knew every trace of the shepherd's body, only showed how much life was missing and incomplete. It didn't just teach him how different they were, but also how desperately similar they seemed. Life is nothing if something isn't missing, he thought.

He believed all his life, he had been blind, or perhaps others around him were- ignoring him, not showing to his invisible presence. And in these very fragmented moments, when he stood or sat or slept with the shepherd, he felt so much more visible, touched, felt, and watched over than he ever had.

Aanav could smell the muddy feet rustling in the sharp grass, the distinctive country odor- of dung, of cattle urine and food, of smog from the steep valley, of dying yet recognizable meat wrapped around his below- the aroma of the earth, the aroma of nothingness, of everything. He let a stinky kiss make its way across the thin vacuum between them and then land on this soft cheek.

"My goodness, you stink," Aanav said playfully, then erupted sounds of displeasure, smiling, cocking his eyes from the side, and watching his lover.

"I know. But I'm not even sorry. You deserve it. Yes, you do," the blind man replied very plainly.

"Oh? And why is that?"

The shepherd kept his stick leaning across the wooden railing of the very small veranda, the small of his back resting against the cane-chair. "You're here every day, all the time. Can't you come for a lovely walk with me across these beautiful, I say, beautiful clouds and small valleys?"