Murky Skies

They walked all morning and were all really, really tired. At least they thought they should be, what after five miles of steep, uphill walking, and so Aisha pretended to be exhausted even though she wasn't. Amir and Ismail sat down on the steps of the old rundown cottage, while she, being of a naturally shy disposition, flitted away behind the low lying wall to a spot amongst the trees.

The upper part of the hillside intrigued her. The flora here was different than from the valley. The pines, she felt were always whispering some secret amongst themselves. 'Always aiming for the sky while still rooted in the soil...poor souls, their faces to her seemed drawn out in pain from aspiration of the unreachable. Why shouldn't they get what they wanted? Why did the earth stop them when they so wanted to reach to the heavens? How cruel--to first have that great height that enables you to know what the skies look like and then to have the dirt you started from hold you back. The small shrubs are much happier in their ignorance.'

It was all really sad. Was it a tear in her eye? The conscious in her still awake to distant reality reproached her for her thoughts. 'The girl who wouldn't cry for the death of a friend stood here wringing her heart out for pine trees. Pine trees--had she lost all sense of reality? Was she just going to stand there, and cry, and moan, and bleed inside till buds appear on her skin, roots twist her legs into the ground and her head is buried under a mass of leaves reaching for the sky...the sky, always the sky.' It haunts her in her thoughts--poor lost soul!

She could hear Amir laughing. That boy would either find or create an infinite number of occasions in a day to exercise his short, gleeful laugh, revealing a row of perfectly structured white teeth and a deep set dimple on the right cheek. . What with his good looks and cheery disposition Amir was a great favorite with everyone whose life path crossed his own—friends, relatives, teachers, they all tended to forgo the cheekiness that often underlined every sentenced he uttered. A bright smile is often the best of cloaks for impudence.

“And I placed it on his seat” he was saying “and said ‘Raj you probably left your pen back home. I don’t have it’, but that elephant, he tried to grab me by the collar. ‘Give it back you bandar’ he said ‘or your mother won’t recognize your pretty little face by the time I’m done with you’. I wriggled out of his grip and ran back. He didn’t try to come after me. The fellow knows he’s too heavy to even run after a snail. So to save embarrassment he just pretended to play the upper hand and sat back on his seat. That’s when the pen hit him.” This last sentence was accompanied by a howl of laughter from Amir. “Oh! Brother I wish you could have been there to see his face. Ha! Ha! Oh well at least he got his pen back”.

Ismail, in contrast laughed in a rather self conscious way. In his laugh there was a tone of censure; Amir caught it and reassured his cousin “Arre Ismail you think too much. The entire class was laughing. Raj’s a bully. He deserved what he got.”

“But if he’s a bully shouldn’t you have faced him Amir, fair and square, instead of running away”.

Amir was disturbed, not by what Ismail said; his own conscience had a different definition of courage for him to be disturbed by someone else’s, but the pitch of disapproval with which those words were uttered bothered him. “That giant will grow up to be like a Khali” he said with a rare contemplative frown on his forehead “what fair and square you talking about?”

The comparison with the wrestler and the genuine expression on Amir’s face made Ismail laugh out. It was a very genuine laugh this time. He took out some pistachio shells, painted black on the convex side, and the two boys sat down to play 'luck' a game of dice throwing that was all the rage amongst school children those days. Engrossed over four shells that lay on the ground between them was how Aisha found Amir and Ismail when she returned to show her brother a Rhodendron twig she had found amongst the bushes.

"Amir" she said conciously avoiding the elder boy's gaze, "there's a bush of these red flowers growing at the peak. Come and see. Tell me what they're called". Amir decided the plea was not important enough to be acknowledged, even by a refusal. The girlmjust stood there feeling embarassed by the rebuttal. Ismail said kindly "It's Rhodenderon. They grow on high peaks during summer time". "Oh!" said Aisha "The view from the peak is lovely. We should go there Amir, before the fog hides it". Amir grunted a reply that his sister interpreted as 'maybe later. We're busy'.


Her mouth involuntarily twisted itself into an expression of disgust. 'How very like boys' she thought 'to spend the entire morning climbing a hill and now that we're here all they want to do is play'.
Little did she know that had the plea been made to Ismail he would have easily relented, but she considered him a scary personage, what with the burn marks on his face.

(to be continued)