33
Like this brown grass, we have dried up inside. We can bear no more fruit. Even the memory of clear, clean water vanishes within me. Men vanish in the desert sands, and the sand sweeping across our sun-parched bodies will soon turn us, as it even turns rocks, into sand. There will not even be a recollection that men once lived here. I remember one who dreamed that India would shake off this fatal dust, that torrents would fall and wash it away, that life would start again. But the drought has already destroyed far too much, it has stayed far too long. Who will remember what life was, what it could be? You, my son? You were born after it was all over. Your memory reaches only as far back as death. And the others--poor miserable wretches--they cannot even remember that there once was India. Their only dreams are of food and debts and tax collectors. One comes and says Things are not what they used to be, and I tell myself here is one who remembers. But he does not remember. He speaks only of debts. He had never borrowed before and now he sees the moneylender constantly. The land does not yield as much as it did. Newcomers are constantly chopping corners off his plot. Implements and clothing are more and more expensive. There's not enough food to feed the family. Debts are never paid, they only grow larger. Things are not what they used to be, he repeats again and again and always he means the same thing. The man dying of thirst has lost all thoughts except one: to spend the rest of his life drinking. We are sick men who cannot remember life as creation, expression, understanding; we cannot remember life at all; we can only dream of being not-sick, the rest of eternity being not-sick, nothing else. Totally consumed by the presence of sickness, our only hope is to be totally consumed by the absence of sickness.
INDIO
