Dominoes

The mountain plains of the Plateau held the clouds to ransom and invited such cold rarely found in the tropics. Even though the sun shone high above, a cold breeze still blew over the face of the plains and swished tufts of shallow grass rooted in the scanty savannah that dotted the mountain sides.
Bare chest and laying flat on his back, the man lay on the cold rock in absolute silence. He did not see the Seeker but the Seeker saw him. He had watched the man since the day of his birth and the time was now.

Two continents away, a half way round the world was the reason for the Seeker’s mission: A little girl about seven years of age on a hospital bed- white and balding; neither from age nor curse but from the gnawing of cancer within and the war of chemicals without. She was so frail, she resembled death. Her skin was whiter than her Caucasian complexion and dark patches encircled her hollow eyes casting shadows that were not.

The seeker adjusted his scope and looked at the plan again even though he did not need to as he had it all in his memory. Everything about him moved to the song of the wind but his eye kept still and kept watch: The focus of his attention- the unmoving man.

The man lay there staring at the calm blues skies but he did not see it. Neither did he feel the cold nor the hardness of the rock against his head. His mind was on one thing: the bottle in his pocket. It was a lethal mix that held the end for him and now felt uncomfortably warm on the sides of his thighs.
Suicide, they said was evil and so he had believed. But now, here, on this rock, he had concluded that neither good nor evil existed. Contemplating suicide had been the biggest hurdle for him but he had crossed the line now, there was no going back.

One year earlier in a place far drawn from the cold mountain, a woman had met a little girl in a cancer awareness conference and had been moved by the sight of the frail child speaking of finality and hope as was the purview of one dying- the aged; but no! Not a child. What struck her the most was the happiness in the little girl who was about her last daughter’s age; she had that wan but true smile that indeed was rare.
After the conference she had approached the girl and her parents and over a period of three months they had written a book. Meeting that little girl had changed her life.
Now sitting at her reading table, dimly lit by a dusty lamp, she held the book in her hands looking at the familiar words spoken by a child and written by her. She flipped to the picture page and unconsciously started to cry. Smiling back at her from the centre page was the face of the dying girl. She was wearing the pink frock she loved to wear but which had started to hang loosely on her fading frame.
When she met the girl at the conference about a year ago, the doctors said the girl had just about a year to live. That meant her time was nearing now. The woman cried again; for herself, for the unfairness of fate and the eventual wilting of a flower that never will have the chance to blossom. She wanted to scream out loud but the inhibitions of impersonality restrained her from doing so.

Two days before the present, a school boy with unkempt hair and rumpled uniform detached from his little group of friends on their way home. The war in his mid-regions had reached an unbearable stage and he could not hold his bowels anymore. So running for the nearest thicket he could find (where presently the Seeker stood) he hurriedly yanked off his shorts, squatted and let his bowels loose just quick enough to prevent the watery stool from pouring in his pants.
‘Ah!’, he let off a sigh of contentment before beginning to rationalize his action. He had nothing to clean up with!
He looked around with darting eyes before realizing he had some books in his back pack which he had dropped beside the now buzzing fecal broth in the grass. Diving into his bag, he searched for the first book his blindly groping hands could find.
He had brought it out before realizing it was the book he had earlier stolen from the school library- the one he had hidden in his shirt on his way out. Opening it hurriedly, he tore off the first page he saw; it was a glossy page in centre spread with pictures. Arching his back for clearance, he wiped his backside with the page unsettling some buzzing flies in the process. The gloss did not do well in its role as tissue paper so he had to tear off three more matt pages till he was satisfied.
Feeling better, he made to put the book back in his bag when he noticed the picture on the cover. It was a funny girl with missing teeth and no hair. He thought she looked ugly; like his naughty younger sister who just lost her teeth too.
HOPE was written boldly on the cover.
‘H-O-P-E’, he spelt it out to himself before putting the book back into his back and running off to join his friends, screaming their names from a distance.

The Seeker stood still and made the wind to sail the rumpled page stained with dried faeces, nimbly in the air till it stopped at the feet of the unmoving man.

The man saw something fly out of the skies and land at his feet but he didn’t bother to look. Lying still for a little longer, he took a deep breath, sat up and proceeded to remove the bottle from his pocket. Then the pictures on the stained glossy page caught his eye.
Bottle in one hand, he picked up the sheet with the other. On the picture page, though rumpled and stained, were pictures with captions beneath and he started to read them, one after another. It was the story of a seven year old girl. Cancer…awaiting death…her bald head…with daddy and mommy…her smile.
Her smile;
He could not take his mind off ‘Her smile’.
Why?
Why did she have to die?
What did she do to deserve such?
But why?
Why did she smile?
What was it that made her happy?

Then all of a sudden he started to cry. Such tears as would well hot in ones nose and blind the eyes to sight: And he started to wail, screaming and shouting into the distance.
He wailed.
His life…his sorrows…losing everything….
But ‘Her smile’….
Then he shouted out loud and smashed the bottle in his hands on the cold rock crying for as long as time stood still. He had never cried like that before and possibly never would.

The Seeker folded the plan and stood by the girl’s bed side. Her weak frame madly ravaged by chemotherapy but her smile never diminishing. She looked up and when she saw the Seeker, she smiled again and in that same breath, closed her eyes forever; her mission done. The Seeker did not need to see the flat line. As he left the ward, he saw on a shelf in the pediatric ward, a stack of dominoes. He smiled at how much humans resembled them; one on another, their destinies forever intertwined.