Drought is an Old War

Fiction by ​​​Subarna Mohanty 

​When the journalist came looking for answers, we asked him if he had any water to drink. He said he ran out at the bus station. “I won’t stay for long, so I didn’t carry any,” he said as we surveyed his fresh, plump face. Behind a pair of square glasses, he was only a boy. 

We sent him to the village headman who sent him to the big, white bungalow on the other side of the village, where the government officer lived. He stayed there all day. 

We stood outside, gaping at the barbed boundary walls and the heavy, metal gate manned by uniforms with pistols in their holsters. Under the blazing sun, we scratched and scratched our faces and arms. Flakes of dried scabs ripped off, got wedged beneath our fingernails. Thick, yellow pus oozed out of the lesions on our crusty skins and soiled our dhotis.

When we stepped forward to beg for water, with our wide-open mouths and folded hands, the guards fished out, from their pockets, clean handkerchiefs instead of guns. They pressed them on their noses with one hand and waved the other. “Go away, go away,” they said, retreating. They couldn’t stand our sores and our scabs.

At night, the boy walked out and joined us under the old banyan tree where a fire was lit using dead leaves and dry twigs. A cold wind was blowing. The moonless night had swallowed everything but us. We could see him and he could see us. Nothing else mattered. 

He squatted alongside us, his tailored trousers rolling up his stumpy thighs. “It’s unusually cold, isn’t it?” he said, trying to make eye contact. 

His words made a knot in our stomachs, which then hardened into something solid and pulsated inside us. We knew what this was - this creature made of pain and agony. It was the politician who visited the village only before elections and standing on a makeshift stage, sang songs of sweet promises into a microphone after asking us - How are you all? How has it been? It’s unusually cold, isn’t it? 

We were tired of the frivolity. 

We stared at the boy’s sleek parted hair and his small ears sticking out of his giant head. 

“Did he have drinking water?” we asked.

“Who?”

“The officer, the man in the bungalow.”

“A little,” he said, nodding and trying to hold our eyes. We didn’t let him. We couldn’t let him. Instead, we sized up his torso. He was slight, he was young. Life sprang out of his face that glowed in the crackling firelight.

“Dada, how did all of this happen?” he spoke up, his tone concerned and his voice almost sincere. But then a strong gust of cold wind blew and as we inched closer to the fire, he mimicked us and shifted on his legs too. 

The aching creature in our guts grumbled.

We knew what this ruse was. This was the salespeople who arrived in flocks every now and then since the poisoning and drying of rivers and the ensuing shortage of water began years ago. They came in cars and in suits, invited themselves into our homes and our kitchens. They sat with us. They wept with us and ate with us. And after the meals, they even carefully copied how we washed off food from our blistered hands, only to seduce us with free samples of factory-bottled water. Insolent vultures circling over carcasses. 

But on seeing our pockets empty and our bones lacking meat, they flew away. We were deader than they wanted us to be.

We offered the boy a bidi wrapped in dried tendu leaves. He readily accepted. “Did he offer you any?” we asked. He looked confused. 

“Water,” we clarified, “to drink.”

“A little,” he said and took a drag. We watched him exhale grey smoke into the pitch-black night. His eyes glistened like that of a young goat. 

“Was it the factory that polluted the water?” he asked again. We lit up our bidis and blew smoke on his face. The young goat coughed and bleated. His eyes watered up and blood rushed to his cheeks. 

We thought of our wives at our homes, gnawing at the frayed ends of their sarees with their yellowed teeth and hollowed eyes. From sunrise till sunset, they sat at corners of the mud-houses and talked to the walls endlessly. The poisoned water had eaten away their souls. They were earthen dolls in earthen huts, with no minds for their voices.

“Was it the rain? The acid rain?” he tried again. This time he lowered his gaze, to our bare feet. He eyed our crusty nails and wounded toes, the dark green veins carrying foul blood popping out of raw, pink flesh. 

He had to stop a vomit rising into his mouth as he said, “What happened to the tap connections that were promised? I checked the records. The officer said they were delivered. But I didn’t see them anywhere in the village!” 

He was relentless, like a prying child. 

We thought of the babies we had to bury in the west-end of the village. The water had turned their skins a sickly blue. They had trouble breathing and had died within weeks. Their mothers had screamed and screamed till their souls had lost language. 

“What will you do with all the answers?” we asked. He looked around and said, “I’ll go back to the city and report to my bosses.”

“And then?”

“Then I’ll probably write an article about you. This story needs to be told. You’ll get your justice. This could be a career-defining moment for me.”

“In this article, what will you say?”

He looked around again, at the hanging roots of the banyan tree emerging out like thick fingers from the darkness and dissolving back in. A rock owl perched on a low branch had started hooting. The bidi, pressed tightly between his fingers, had burned more than halfway down. 

He drew a slow breath in and said, “Alright, how about this? I answer this one question of yours. In exchange, you answer one of mine.”

We nodded. We offered him another bidi which he refused. We looked at each other and agreed in silence that one was enough.

“How do you manage?,” he asked, “The river has evaporated, the water in the wells and tubewell are all poisoned. How do you survive?”

A brood of cicadas had started buzzing in the bushes behind us. 

“We trade,” we said and took a drag from our bidis, “We trade with a faraway village. They don’t have food. Their crops, their animals are all gone. Their soil is death. But they have water, not as clean as the old days, but it’s...water.”

He stood up and tossed away the butt of the bidi. He stretched his legs and twisted his body. We heard his joints crack. 

The fire in front us was dying. The night had grown and the wind had started howling. Only we could listen to the soft crying of the parched creature in our stomachs. The mad wives and the blue babies were wailing in the distance. The dead were alive and the living were dead. 
The boy craned his long neck, trying to spot the owl. 

“Now tell us, what will you say in your article,” we said. 

“I’ll say that all of this…this…pollution and disease, this… scarcity and this drought, is an old war,” he said, “And you all are mighty brave soldiers.”

We stared at the fire- now small and fading, and the smoldering embers around it. 

“But listen,” he spoke up, “If the water is bad, how do your crops grow? I know the output of the crops hasn’t been good either. What exactly do you trade?” His voice was frantic and restless, but it slurred towards the end. His left leg shifted back. 

The soldiers finally looked the young goat in the eye and said, “Meat.” 

Panic flashed across his face. Before he could reply, he fell to the ground with a thud. 

The owl kept hooting. The sound of the cicadas had grown louder. We rose to our feet and twisted our bodies. We heard our joints crack. We tossed the burnt ends of our bidis and picked the stub discarded by him, up. No trace of poison must remain.

We put out the fire with our bare feet and scratched our wounds vigorously for one last time. Smell of char wafted into our noses. The pulsating creature in us still cried and cried. 
​
We had a long night ahead. Before morning, we had to drag the dead goat into the bushes. 

Subarna Mohanty

Subarna Mohanty is a Pushcart nominated author from Odisha, India. Her works have been featured in Hammock Magazine, Metaworker Literary Magazine, Indian Review and others. Her sci-fi short fiction is upcoming in a print anthology by Worldstone Publishing. She is a civil engineering graduate from National Institute of Technology- Rourkela, India. She likes watching movies and reading fiction. Find her on social media: @she.tells.tales (IG), https://linktr.ee/she.tells.tales (Linktree).