When Amma woke up with a jolt from her afternoon siesta, she saw a soiled, crumpled piece of paper near the window. A missive, tossed in by the dust storm and mid-day sun, through the rusty window bars.

Haridas was coming home.

As she smoothed the folds of the paper and let her eyes wander again and again through the words, Amma recollected the sights glimpsed in her sleep. Two guards were leading a young man towards a stone quarry. The shackles around the man’s hands and feet were gleaming in the sunlight. He wore a jailbird’s outfit inscribed with some number. There was a grubby cap on his head. His insteps were singed and swollen. Sweat was streaming down the face darkened by harsh sunlight.

The images flickered in the dusty wind blowing around. The men stopped under the monstrous rocky cliff which was trying to hide the sky. The guards unchained the prisoner and sat down on the boulders nearby. They were muttering curses while trying to light up the beedis in the unforgiving mountain wind.

The convict looked around hopelessly as he crouched amidst the stone splinters. Not a soul around. When the guards started screaming, he got up slowly. The man started breaking the rock with a sledgehammer. A guard loitered near and tapped the rock with the lathi. The intensity of the hammering increased. The mid-day sun was burning like a furnace. As they sipped water from a bottle with blue stripes, with eyes focused at a distance, the guards willfully ignored the parched young man. As the heat scalded him, the youth raised his hands with a half growl. The sledgehammer slammed against the rock furiously and sparks of fire scattered in the air. Perspiration and fiery sparks merged in the wind which lashed around the valley, carrying rocky dust and grime.

As the man turned his face, Amma saw him. “Ah, that is my Haridas!”

Even after the knots of the slumber slowly left her, Amma kept whispering the same words. “Ah, that is my Haridas!”

There were no twinges of anxiety or agony in her murmuring. Not even the surprise which should have been stoked by the unexpected revelation that had dawned on her. Like an echo, she kept on repeating: “Ah, that is my Haridas!”

As she gathered close the alphabet in the paper, tossed inside by sunlight and wind, the mother kept muttering, albeit like a poem: “Haridas is coming…My Haridas is coming.”

“Perhaps the shackles around his feet have rotted by now,” she mused. “Indeed, the rusty joints of the chains must have corroded in years’ worth of rain, sun and wind. He will evade the watchful eyes of the guards, make his way through the boulders, cross the heaps of rock splinters, and drag his scalded feet over the burning sand. My son’s resilience remains unvanquished by time.”

It was then that the remembrance struck her – of how, on another similar afternoon, a young woman had dropped in at her home, with a little boy.

As soon as the woman stepped inside, she said: “Prostrate yourself at your grandmother’s feet, dear.”

The boy had looked around warily and then obeyed his mother. He lay still, touching the worn, ancient feet with his tiny hands. Amma felt as if someone was caressing her forehead with cold fingers. Seeing her unmoving stance, the woman softly spoke to the boy: “That’s enough, dear.”

As he scrambled up, the confusion was still evident on the little face. But Amma’s indifferent gaze was fixed at a distance. Even when the young woman prostrated herself at Amma’s feet, she remained impassive.

“In which summer, under what cavernous darkness, did your union with Haridas happen?” Amma wished to ask. She swallowed her own words.

The young woman stood waiting with aggrieved anxiety. Surely, Amma would enquire about them. She would bless her grandson undoubtedly…

Amma, however, did not even bother to offer her a seat. After some time, when she was exhausted, the woman curled up on the ground. The child, fatigued by the afternoon heat, collapsed on her lap.

Amma did not watch any of that. Her eyes were still gazing afar.

All I have of my son are the sights which come to me in the darkest hours of desolate, still nights.

Wherever Haridas was, he would return to her, with such brief glimpses…

Numerous sights. Numerous sounds.

A warrior on a stallion, with a shield on one hand and a spear on another, cleaving through the east wind, riding towards the ramparts of the formidable fortress. The muscles of his toned arms were gleaming. His armour, wrought of iron, glinted in the sun, as he sped forward. His spear pierced through the wind and the light, splintering them into shreds.

On another occasion, Haridas was crawling through the forest, on all fours. In that interminable creeping, blood drops had splattered on the crushed leaves beneath.

Haridas’s blood? My blood? He must be parched. He must be ravenous!

Amma had sprung up from her sleep that night. She sat sobbing for a while in the pitch darkness. Then, suppressing her moans, she had stumbled into the kitchen. Lighting a lamp, the mother had made three balls of rice from the leftovers and thrown them outside the window, into the wilderness.

The young woman’s weary eyes were still affixed on the old woman’s face. The child was asleep in her lap.

“What is she seeking from me? What am I supposed to offer her? My son was born after many prayers and offerings to the temples. Did this girl undertake any such sacrifice amidst the rocks, in the darkness of the cave?” Amma brooded. What’s left to give them? She could not understand the significance of their prostrations either.

The young woman stirred a bit. Then she sighed, fondling the forehead of her child who lay exhausted in her lap: “We started very early in the morning. Such a long journey, and the terrible heat…”

Amma seemed to have heard her.

Haridas was still crawling through the forest, with his bloodied and bruised body. A flock of birds came to roost in the dizzying canopies hiding the sky, their wings flapping noisily. The clammy night was treading onward with terrifying growls of the wind, wild screeches of the night birds and cicadas. Even as the saliva dried up, the man became alert to the sound of flowing water nearby. He started crawling towards it.

Amma got up suddenly. She returned with the rice vessel and cold water in the kuja.

The young woman’s eyes widened. An inexplicable look of ravaging hunger flashed on her face. She shook her son awake. As the little boy mumbled something in his sleep, the woman struggled to contain her surging tears. As she watched the mother and son gulp down the cold water and greedily pounce on the leftover rice, for the first time, Amma felt her eyes stinging.

Haridas was lying near a stream, drowsy. Morsels of rice were stuck to his lips and chest.

Amma did not speak a word to the visitors. The young woman and child sat staring at her for a long time, their hunger appeased.

“What do they want from me? Why are they waiting still?” Amma asked herself.

Amma remembered how the woman left eventually, holding her son’s tiny hand, stepping away into the waning sunlight. She thought that the girl had aged suddenly.

Haridas was walking with firm footsteps, holding onto the enervated fingers of the woman with grey hair.

Even after the mother and son disappeared, Amma sat in a hazy bewilderment. She stood leaning against the door for long. Who were they? Why did they travel such a long distance to reach me? To eat food from my hands? Should they not be feeding me instead?

Amma stood near the window, holding onto the creased paper strip, tossed inside by the sun and wind.

“I don’t trust this sun or wind in the least,” Amma murmured to herself. “It has been countless years now. How many times have similar messages flown in through these window bars…?”

Amma stared at the alphabet in bafflement. The writing seemed so familiar. Was it hers? Or was it Haridas’s? The alphabet was utterly inert. Shouldn’t they have moved a teeny bit after her intense observation? Shouldn’t they have come to life? Shouldn’t they have spoken to her? But they lay immobile, as if imprinted on the landscape of white.

What could the lifeless alphabet tell the hapless mother? Later, as usual, she crunched up the piece of paper and hurled it out through the window.

Even at that instant, in the valley of the scorching sun, Haridas was breaking rocks, the sledgehammer held high in his skinny hands.

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