The Plough

Austin Joseph
Sep 4, 2018 · 3 min read

Hot perspiration runs through his forehead as he looks up to the sun. He finds the sun is in bliss today, as it shines brightly on the stretches of land below. He walks up to the closed doors of his closed shack, the broken remnants of a hut. He grabs a rusty plough from a corner, a reminiscent simile to the life he led. He takes his mud pot with him, and fills it with water from the clear stream besides his hut.

His mind slowly drifts apart to the time when his skin was smoother, his eyes clearer. A young man in his prime, his stomach full and without hunger, his children playing at the field, and his wife gazing on to his eyes, her pupils shining in euphoric entrance. Those days, the heavens cried when they knew it would, and the field glistened with the golden pellets of grain, just when they wanted it to. The children held hands and ran across a little puddle by the field. The kids didn’t mind having mud at their feet. Their happiness wasn’t measured by the things they owned, but the love each of them cherished with their brethren.

Come back, his heart says. He sighs and gazes at the remains of a wasteland, staring back as if to whisper to him, “why don’t you need me anymore”. The curdling screams of widows, as they lose the man of the house to the exasperations of a broken livelihood, rings at his ears. He finds it sadder that his wife wouldn’t be around to see him lose the only thing inanimate, that mattered to him in his life. His field.

The crooks in the white collars hand him a paper bag, and in them he finds fresh notes of coloured paper, and on them a smiling man of his 80s. He’d heard Gandhi had helped his grandfather’s village in winning back fields from landlords, and somehow ironically, the same man is now taking them away. His face flushes to pale white, almost colourless, as he stares down at the ground, but is heart whispers, almost as if to say, what better choice can you offer yourself? The sentinels of truth, the media, wail about farmer suicides throughout the country, and still feed their bellies from the same crooks, using the same slices of papyrus. The children now, did mind getting their feet dirty. Love for brethren and their father, apparently didn’t count for satisfaction. He realises, he’s 78, and alone.

The crooks ushers him to a small vehicle at the side of the roadway, with a gentle, but forced smile on his face. Inside it sits two of his neighbours, apparently the only ones who hadn’t succumbed to the bitter treason of the land. But when you think of it, it isn’t really treason, is it? The question of who cut down who, and who made who thirsty, would be a game of future generations to play, as they stare down at the barren wastelands from the concrete jungles, perching on their steel tools enjoying everything inanimate around them, but somehow failing to realise, that their fathers did kill the true mother of the planet.

Give me a minute, the old man whispers. He limps slowly, the plough at his hand, and slowly walks up to the big peepal tree by the shack. He looks up to the tall branches of the tree, the one he planted himself, with his children by his side. He gently rests the plough at the base of the tree. The plough once wrestled with the mud, and ploughed the field for gold to be reaped later. And now, like him, it is rusted and broken.

He brushes his tears away, and gazes upon the young men, waiting to land their axes on the peepal tree. He turns back, his hand shivering, and slowly walks away. His heartbeat thumps a little harder every time he hears the men with the axes cutting his child down, on stroke at a time.

Just like one farmer, at a time.

Austin Joseph

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Just your average misfit. Loves reading. ♥️