Vacation Romance

Wow wow wow. My blog is on a roll 🙂 🙂 What else is going to happen when such wonderful writers grace it with their beautiful writings. I have yet another great friend of mine, Miss Nobody of Miss Nobody’s Scribbles to grace this blog with a fantastic story. She is one of my old favorites. I started following her blog during my initial blogging days and since then, have never stopped visiting her blog. I was so addicted to her blog that when she took a break from blogging, I would bug her to come back. And my happiest moment was when she made a comeback. Thanks girlie and don’t you ever think about quitting blogging 🙂 She writes some of the cutest posts and I love her for all the beautiful book reviews, the straight-from-heart posts of hers and the short stories too (just read this post and you will know!). I am sure you will also become addicted to her blog, the way I got addicted 🙂 Thanks so much for this wonderful story, sweetie 🙂
‘Andrei hated that godforsaken land,the heat,the dust-the nothingness.He hated his father even more for forcing him to join the army,and Leonid Brezhenz for deploying the 40th army into the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. War changes a man forever and Andrei was just one of the pawns,one of the lesser beings to be sacrificed on the way to greatness,or so he believed. He did not care that he would not live to see the war end,or that he could ever fall out of love.

The rubble crunched beneath his heavy boots, the gun’s butt heavy on his hip,the armaments weighing him down but they seemed nothing compared to the juggernaut weight he carried in his heart and the nightmare behind his lids-of ravaged families and unblinking eyes and blood stains on the sand. He had almost reached the communal tandoor where his mates wistfully talking about liquor and women, and exhausting their meager supply of tobacco. That was when he saw her, first her regal profile against the setting sun and then the flash of anger in her hazel eyes as she sensed him watching her.

“Fatima!”, screeched the old hag accompanying her and she hurried forward, adjusting the cloth on her head, hijab, as he had come to know with her bread basket and disappeared among the women. She looked impoverished, yet he sensed that she probably had had a royal upbringing and that poverty had done nothing to diminish her beauty, but had grown fiery with every inch of her land destroyed under the hungry Soviet metal monsters.

He saw her everyday, and each day he looked forward to that hour when he would catch a glimpse of her, even if he got a scorching gaze in return. He felt, that it was natural and somehow prayed that she would make an exception for him and speak a few kind words. He was not at home with war, not at all.

One fine day the merciful heavens shone bright and Fatima smiled at him,tentatively at first.Then started the secret meetings, west of the tandoor on the barren moor. She was always in a hurry and scared, of her father and the burly man who accompanied her-her brother.

”Fatima,” he said one day”Do you know that the next world war could be fought over oil, or in even water?” “Some people are born to fight, others are born to love – I wish the world had more of the latter, don’t you?”she had said.

She called her his “fretted warrior”,but there were no jibe in her words and Andrei sank deeper into love unable to resurface.

Things got more tumultuous in the next few days, but Fatima never left his feverish brain alone. The locals had started to evacuate, parting with their fortunes paying obscene amounts to the soldiers to get a pass out of the Venus fly trap their land had become. Some fat purses earned them a way out, while other hung on the stones for dear life.

Fatima’s family were scrapping together whatever they had left to buy their way out, Andrei wanted to help but was scared of losing the only sanctuary he had. Meanwhile there wore more shellings between the Soviet troops and the Mujahiddin, neighbourhoods disappeared without any traces that they existed. Andrei got restless, Fatima’s family were due to move out the day after. Her father had some wealthy friends in Pakistan who were willing to help them. She was meeting him for the last time today.

As he waited for her near the pomegranate tree on the hillock, west of the tandoor, he saw the distant horizon erupting into fiery tongues of hell fire, and a dark shape-few feet off the air, graceful, grotesque, too near.”Fatima”,he realized with growing dread, and then he knew no more.

…for

There they lay on cold stone,

The earthbound lovers-

Together for eternity,in their

Unblinking sleep-

Beautiful, fresh

Dead;

Yonder thundered the canon balls,

Pawns of muted horror-

It was a dark night, but not the darkest still,

For the stars shone,

And the city lights-

The only thing that remained dim was

The light their eyes.

Make love, not war 😉