Longing

The reddish glow of unfiltered sunbeams struck the sleeping man's eyelids. A smile crept outwards from the corners of his lips, almost involuntarily, as wakefulness only took a hold moments later. Slitting his eyes, and holding up one hand to shield them from the rapidly strengthening sunfire, he propped himself on the other elbow.

A view beyond compare greeted him. It was a view that no other man in the world possessed; yet it was a view that was commonplace to him. Wispy clouds raced against each other before dissolving into ghostly nothings; turquoise ocean glimmered and sparkled in the distance. Towards the west, inky black mountains punched a jagged outline in the sky. A handful of stars, still fighting their hopeless battle against the light, crowned their peaks like jewels.

To anybody else, a vista like this would have elicited astonishment; perhaps wonder at its implausible perfection, perhaps tears at the magnificence of natural beauty, but not to this man. The man merely smiled and sat down to sketch in the sand.

Today, it was a strange fusion of lines and curves that seemed to undulate the longer one stared at them. Satisfied, the man sat back to survey the fruit of his labour. A light breeze stirred the patterns in the sand, but strangely, only seemed to add to their beauty, not detract from it. The sun had begun its daily descent into its westward slumber, when the man broke free from his reverie and made his way towards the freshwater spring nearby. He was suddenly thirsty.

Swift strokes of his palm erased the morning's patterns; fingers scrabbled rapidly to make new ones. This time, strange animalistic faces seemed to bulge from the golden sands. Wiping his brow from his exertions, the man shuffled over to the shade of a rocky outcrop nearby, where a tasty and nourishing meal awaited him. Presently, he fell asleep.

It was well into the reign of the night when he stirred again. White-gold stars, white-red stars, white-blue stars and even the vanishingly rare white-green stars glittered in the perfect black. The man's eyes stared into nothing as a haunting melody slipped through his lips like the gentlest breeze. The wind rose and fell in perfect accompaniment to the vocal harmony. Eventually, the voice faded to a whisper, and soon all was silent.

It was sunrise again. The man woke up, sketched beautiful things entirely unlike anything he'd drawn before, ate and drank, sang beautiful songs that seemed more like Nature's hidden sound, rather than music composed for the human ear, and slept.

And so the days passed in simple tranquility for the man in the sky on his floating island of sand and rock. Alone, but not lonely, austere but not impoverished, his was an existence of serene joy. Whatever he needed, the island provided for him. Warm golden sand shielded him from chilly winter nights; the same sand, but now cool and dry and hard, formed a canopy against the sun's burning wrath in summer afternoons. Food was frugal but delicious, more so because the island tailored it to his every fancy. The man never noticed, busy as he was sketching in the sand.

Like most things, this too came to an end. Looking back, it is impossible to pinpoint the exact moment things changed. Perhaps it was the day the man woke up to the red glow of dawn with a thoughtful frown on his face. A memory or experience had come to him in a dream and it had left behind an indelible longing for change. Slowly, it possessed him like a fever of the mind. He stopped sketching first and took to lying on the ground for days at a stretch, thinking. Then he stopped singing, and then eating, and began to waste away. When the island tried to tempt him with offerings of food in greater variety and quantity, he grew angry and tossed it all away in the dirt. One day, he refused to drink from the stream at all. His face grew white, his eyes dry and stony and his lips chapped and colourless.

The next morning was different. The glow of sunrise was muted by the dark clouds that were suddenly everywhere around them! Drops of rain pattered onto to the man's cheek and he exulted in it, tracing each droplet as it wound its way through invisible channels on his face. For, this was what he had dreamed of - novelty, and it had almost killed him. Health restored quickly and he was strong and happy in no time.

It rained every day at dawn. Sometimes it was a fine spray, a barely there rain that was like a soft kiss; other times, it was a downpour that the man watched from a distance, cocooned in a cave of rock.

One day, the man tried to sketch again. The sand, hardened into brick by the incessant rain, refused to yield. Using a harder rock as a makeshift hammer, the man tried to break away the upper layers of brick, hoping to hit soft sand again. Knock, knock, knock he went for hours, but there was yet more brick. Eventually, and to his dismay, he hit empty air. Little was he to know that the rain had been slowly destroying the island - piece by piece, it broke apart and fell into the ocean below. As the man peeked through the hole in the ground to the glittering ocean far, far below, the first stirrings of something struck him. Was it recognition? Was it regret? But it again to rain again, and all was forgotten for a while.

A solitary raindrop made its way through the hole in the island's floor towards the ocean. But powerful winds buffeted the helpless raindrop this way and that, until it drifted a long, long way from the place it had set out from. As it approached the Earth's surface, it was no longer aquamarine seas that it made its way towards, but green paddy fields and coconut groves. There was a solitary figure making her way through one of the fields, and the raindrop promptly fell on her head like a not-there tap.

The woman looked up and cursed. Was it going to rain again? She had had enough breaking her back shipping water out of the fields to prevent them from overflooding. But that wasn't it. Although she complained about the hard drudgery in the farm, deep inside, she enjoyed the simple pleasure of hard labour; no, what annoyed her about the rain was how it ruined everything else! She looked at her spotless white dress and cringed at the thought of it being inevitably stained with slushy mud. She hated the rain!

But she was on her way to something special and the little irritations were soon forgotten. There was a hop in her step and a sunny smile on her face; her chin stuck out loud and brave and her hair fluttered in the breeze. She was about to meet somebody! The rain had stopped when she arrived at her destination - a two-trunked coconut tree that everybody in the village knew. Nervously twirling a finger in and out of her hair, she waited.

Nobody came.

The sun wasn't visible through the thick covering of clouds, but the falling light meant dusk was imminent, and she had to get back. Trudging slowly, downcast and hopeless, she made no attempt to dodge the rain that had returned, or the pools of slush that filled pits in the ground. Her dress took on more and more water until it became so heavy that she slouched under its weight; the bottom half of it turned more brown with each muddy splash.

With dawn came work in the fields, and with work in the fields came complaints about self-imposed slavery. But it used to all be in good spirit, and the day would pass in no time at all.  Come evening, you'd find her curled up by a log fire in the cabin, with her knitting or a good book. As the flames would crackle and spit and occasionally caress her toes and fingers into tingly warmth on cold nights, the woman would sit and reflect on a life well lived. And so the days had passed, until one day something happened.

It had begun with a visit to a friend. The friend was to get married, and they had been close once, so, crankily, grudgingly, she had roused herself up from her comfortable routine to travel. The wedding had been delightful; despite what you may have been led to believe, this woman was no grouch. She lived the solitary life by choice, but one party in a decade had never hurt any introvert. She had sung and danced and drunk and eaten into the wee hours of the night. She had fallen asleep on the soft grass of the lawns, and woken up to an ardent longing that she couldn't shake off.

Perhaps that was how it began, but she didn't known that then. The routine of her everyday began to seem heavy and cloying. She started to take days off and the crops suffered. Eventually, she grew to understand the source of her yearning. Companionship was what she sought, and putting a label on her desires only made them stronger. She began to socialize more, but as those interactions arose from an urgent need, and not simple camaraderie, they inevitably felt empty and left her feeling worse off. But the yearning did not fade, and she persisted. She did meet men - tall men, fat men, funny men, silly men - but there was something missing in each one, something intangible, yet crucial, and her yearning only grew.

She grew to curse the rain. In her mind, the rain was why she hadn't found a companion yet. The rain that made her so grouchy and old - far beyond her years, the rain that made her hair clump together in a soggy mess, the rain that soaked her best dresses and the rain that created muddy pools that ruined her best footwear, it had to be the rain that was at fault. One day, the rains didn't come when they were supposed to, and she cheered.

The crops failed, and she cheered.

For the first time in his life, the man in the sky wondered about the island. It had been there for as long as he could remember, but it was only now that he was coming to realize how alive it was. The stream he drank from every day? It had never occurred to him that it seemed to be there just when he needed it, and his needs shifted like capricious waves. He had never noticed how the sand and the mud and rock that surrounded him ebbed and flowed and changed in tune with his desires. Had he ever felt cold? Had he ever felt too warm? He smiled, but it was a bitter smile. It was only when the island was coming apart at the seams, and only to assuage a whim of his, that he could see all this.

But there was hope yet. For a time, the rain had seemed endless and unforgiving, but it hadn’t been around for a few days now. The island wore a battered look, pockmarked with holes like battle wounds, but it wasn’t broken yet. The man picked up clumps of wet clay and turned it over and over in his hand to spread it out into a thin film so that it would dry quicker. When it eventually did dry, he pounded into into fine sand and poured it into the cracked ground. But it was all too slow! For each wound he healed, another seemed to open up. Even without the rain, its effects persisted - like a slow poison, they had sunk deep into the veins, until one day, a laceration would open up with a whipcrack, gushing muddy blood. He yearned for a way to heal his beloved island, and eventually, the answer came to him. It would have to be hotter, much hotter. The island began to descend slowly towards the turquoise waters far below.

Much of her farm land had suffered in the drought, but something about her was different. She moped no more; she was defiant, and she fought against the vagaries of fate. She reshaped the canals so that whatever water remained was redirected to a smaller portion of land. Everything looked withered and dry but her practised eye saw hope. Was that a tiny patch of land where the green was a touch more verdant than anywhere else? That was where her farm would be. It would be smaller, battered to the point of near extinction, but it would endure.

Months drifted by in quiet industry, until one day, suddenly, the first new crop burst forth from the parched land. This was the life she had chosen, and it would reward her if she put the work in. She cupped a tender stalk in her hands and felt its fragile beauty; it was almost like she had birthed it, and she loved it like a mother. When the day's work was done, and the sun slunk away to refuel his fire, she sat beside the fireplace in the log cabin and knitted. For the first time in a long time, her brow was unfurrowed and a half smile played around her lips, as she hummed an old war song. Droplets of rain began to drum a hesitant rhythm on the roof, but her smile only widened.

As the man and his island healed together, they didn't notice that they had begun to drift gently in the wind. No more was there an endless expanse of ocean, but it was replaced with vivid, tropical green. Details began to resolve themselves; a grove of coconuts swayed carelessly in the breeze, and rectangular swathes of paddy fields dominated the landscape. If the man had the eyes of an eagle, he may even have spotted the the solitary female figure squinting her eyes against the sunshine.