Last Breath
I am lying on a white hospital bed now, a few small arrow-balls lodged in my stomach. I only have a few hours left to live. As is lay there, thinking about my family, the man next to me started telling me a story. He too, had a few arrow-balls embedded in him, and was slated to die earlier than me. His story was really touching and reminded me a lot about my family. I shall post it here, as a last beautiful remembrance, before i leave this world.
“Mum, you need to go to the hospital.”
I suppose I myself was pretty surprised that the dialect that flowed out of my mouth seemed so foreign to me. It was a native dialect, but ever since they came, all of us had to adapt to their style of governing. There wasn’t a choice on our part in the first place I suppose, but there was still animosity running deep in the blood of the older generations, like my mother.
“No! I refuse to go there! Take me to the shaman instead!”
I ran my hand through my hair and let out an exasperated sigh. There she went again. Indeed, the shaman did treat many of our people in this secluded village spot in the colony, but couldn’t she tell that the hospital could treat her much more effectively?
As if she could read my mind, she sent me a death glare and muttered, “Did you know the shaman treated all of us, even before you are born? Ungrateful child…”
I rolled my eyes, “Sure mother, but we’re still going to the hospital tomorrow.”
She ignored me.
My mum used to tell me about the whites, or as she had spat out, the ‘devils’. It was these dark creatures that had killed my father, she had always told me. It was them, when they first came ashore. They wanted to talk to the village elder, they had claimed.
My father bravely walked forward, and pointed at them with the alpha stick, demanding them to explain themselves for such audacity. The ‘devils’’ faces were that of indifference, almost as if they were bored by what my father was doing.
My father by now was hopping mad internally at their unresponsive state, and raised his alpha stick to signal to the rest of the village folk to attack these strangers. One of the devils raised his hand, clasping a contraption that had a hollow structure to it.
He must have performed some sort of black magic with that contraption, for seconds after that, my mother had remembered vividly, a sharp noise rang throughout the whole village, and my father fell.
As she recounted, my mother’s eyes welled up with tears of sorrow and shame. Sorrow that my father was gone, and shame that she could not do anything to help him. All she did was stand there and watch my father, the village elder, drop on the ground, his hand clutching the alpha stick tightly, and a pool of crimson red forming on the sand.
I could not understand the significance of that when it happened, for I was simply too young. All I knew was in a span of five minutes, my father was gone from my life. Permanently.
Life used to be much simpler, when we lived in the wooden shack and my father the one helping out and governing every household in our village. There was no such thing as a train, no such thing as a train track (which had effectively destroyed half of the village), and definitely no such thing as a hospital.
Yet, now, things seemed so different. No longer could we use our native dialects to converse with one another. We had to use the language of the ‘devil’, and bartering was also no longer in motion. No, we now had to carry around with us small gold and silver and copper chunks shaped in a perfect circle. All of us doubted the use of such paraphernalia. They couldn’t be eaten, what was the use for them anyway?
No longer had we the voice to call out to the injustice served to us. We had to accept it, internalize the fact that we no longer had power over our lives. It was a terrible thought, and it was a terrible time.
It was a terrible time to exist, and it was a terrible time to live.
I finally managed to convince my mother to choose the hospital over the shaman. She was disgruntled, naturally, but she nevertheless agreed when I told her that the hospital was a special shaman that could cure even more problems.
We took a train to the city area. The ride was not long, but to my mother, who had never been on a train before, the experience was exhilarating. Every few minutes, she would comment, “Everything is going past so quickly! Well, at least those devils were good for something.”
It was heartwarming and heartbreaking to watch my mother take the train. It was heartwarming that she was still so naïve about such technology that the ‘devils’ had provided us with, but at the same time heartbreaking to know that her mind would always be entrapped in that little village that we lived in.
It was not long before that I had managed to secure a job that paid relatively well in the town, having been privileged as the village elder’s son to receive education. In doing so, however, I left my mother back in our little village, inadvertently leaving her at the mercy of her new, brutal employers after her previous ones returned to their homeland. It was then that she succumbed to the cruelty of the “devils” and the ravages of nature, coming down hard with a debilitating disease that required the risk of undertaking the tiring train journey to a hospital.
Finally, the train came to a stop, and we alighted. I piggy-backed my mum, for she was too weak to walk on her own, and began the next part of the arduous journey – finding an available hospital.
My mother looked around in fear as we trudged through the crowd. Many a times, more often than not, people stared at us as if we were something extraordinary. Other times, they just walked past us as if we didn’t exist. However, there were some cases the ‘devils’ walked past us. My mother had her fun – she spat on the ground as they walked past. They glared at her, naturally. She just smirked and replied – in our dialect, the only language she ever knew – “It’s to cleanse the ground, you bastards!”
The only hospital we were able to enter was crowded with hordes of the sick and dying; unhygienic with insects buzzing around in the tropical climate and linen stained with dried pus and blood; understaffed with a team of ten crazily running round a room filled with at least a hundred patients that all seemed to require assistance at every single moment.
But there wasn’t an alternative.
To their credit, they tried their best. The standard treatment – quinine and such newfangled “devilish potions”, as my mother called them, were used on her to some effect. But her situation deteriorated not long after, for there was only so much quinine could do in the terrible conditions of the hospital – not that my mother’s favorite shaman could do much better, of course.
One cloudy night, four days after we arrived in the city, I sat beside my mother as she lay in obvious pain on the hospital bed. Her condition was beyond salvation, so said the doctors, and we all knew the end was about to come.
“Son?’
A weak, shaking voice emanating from beside me made me lift my eyes off the butterfly on the windowsill, and I turned towards the voice’s source.
“What’s the matter? You should go back to sleep, don’t talk.”
She plonked her head back onto the pillow and shut her eyelids for quite some time, before she started again, in that very same weak, shaking voice.
“You should have taken me to a shaman instead.”
After blurting that out, she never spoke again.
The very next day I dug a small pit into the riverbank where the city’s cemetery was, and buried my mother there amongst the rows and rows of crosses that dotted the field.
It had been twenty years since the ‘devils’ arrived. In those two decades they had truly shaped my homeland in ways no body, including my mother, could have foreseen, or comprehend.
For the once clear, sparkling river had become reddish and putrid from pollution upstream; the shacks on the opposite bank were replaced by slave-built monuments celebrating the might of the ;devils’; and the fading orange sun was already setting on the plains of my homeland.
“Mum, you need to go to the hospital.”
I suppose I myself was pretty surprised that the dialect that flowed out of my mouth seemed so foreign to me. It was a native dialect, but ever since they came, all of us had to adapt to their style of governing. There wasn’t a choice on our part in the first place I suppose, but there was still animosity running deep in the blood of the older generations, like my mother.
“No! I refuse to go there! Take me to the shaman instead!”
I ran my hand through my hair and let out an exasperated sigh. There she went again. Indeed, the shaman did treat many of our people in this secluded village spot in the colony, but couldn’t she tell that the hospital could treat her much more effectively?
As if she could read my mind, she sent me a death glare and muttered, “Did you know the shaman treated all of us, even before you are born? Ungrateful child…”
I rolled my eyes, “Sure mother, but we’re still going to the hospital tomorrow.”
She ignored me.
My mum used to tell me about the whites, or as she had spat out, the ‘devils’. It was these dark creatures that had killed my father, she had always told me. It was them, when they first came ashore. They wanted to talk to the village elder, they had claimed.
My father bravely walked forward, and pointed at them with the alpha stick, demanding them to explain themselves for such audacity. The ‘devils’’ faces were that of indifference, almost as if they were bored by what my father was doing.
My father by now was hopping mad internally at their unresponsive state, and raised his alpha stick to signal to the rest of the village folk to attack these strangers. One of the devils raised his hand, clasping a contraption that had a hollow structure to it.
He must have performed some sort of black magic with that contraption, for seconds after that, my mother had remembered vividly, a sharp noise rang throughout the whole village, and my father fell.
As she recounted, my mother’s eyes welled up with tears of sorrow and shame. Sorrow that my father was gone, and shame that she could not do anything to help him. All she did was stand there and watch my father, the village elder, drop on the ground, his hand clutching the alpha stick tightly, and a pool of crimson red forming on the sand.
I could not understand the significance of that when it happened, for I was simply too young. All I knew was in a span of five minutes, my father was gone from my life. Permanently.
Life used to be much simpler, when we lived in the wooden shack and my father the one helping out and governing every household in our village. There was no such thing as a train, no such thing as a train track (which had effectively destroyed half of the village), and definitely no such thing as a hospital.
Yet, now, things seemed so different. No longer could we use our native dialects to converse with one another. We had to use the language of the ‘devil’, and bartering was also no longer in motion. No, we now had to carry around with us small gold and silver and copper chunks shaped in a perfect circle. All of us doubted the use of such paraphernalia. They couldn’t be eaten, what was the use for them anyway?
No longer had we the voice to call out to the injustice served to us. We had to accept it, internalize the fact that we no longer had power over our lives. It was a terrible thought, and it was a terrible time.
It was a terrible time to exist, and it was a terrible time to live.
I finally managed to convince my mother to choose the hospital over the shaman. She was disgruntled, naturally, but she nevertheless agreed when I told her that the hospital was a special shaman that could cure even more problems.
We took a train to the city area. The ride was not long, but to my mother, who had never been on a train before, the experience was exhilarating. Every few minutes, she would comment, “Everything is going past so quickly! Well, at least those devils were good for something.”
It was heartwarming and heartbreaking to watch my mother take the train. It was heartwarming that she was still so naïve about such technology that the ‘devils’ had provided us with, but at the same time heartbreaking to know that her mind would always be entrapped in that little village that we lived in.
It was not long before that I had managed to secure a job that paid relatively well in the town, having been privileged as the village elder’s son to receive education. In doing so, however, I left my mother back in our little village, inadvertently leaving her at the mercy of her new, brutal employers after her previous ones returned to their homeland. It was then that she succumbed to the cruelty of the “devils” and the ravages of nature, coming down hard with a debilitating disease that required the risk of undertaking the tiring train journey to a hospital.
Finally, the train came to a stop, and we alighted. I piggy-backed my mum, for she was too weak to walk on her own, and began the next part of the arduous journey – finding an available hospital.
My mother looked around in fear as we trudged through the crowd. Many a times, more often than not, people stared at us as if we were something extraordinary. Other times, they just walked past us as if we didn’t exist. However, there were some cases the ‘devils’ walked past us. My mother had her fun – she spat on the ground as they walked past. They glared at her, naturally. She just smirked and replied – in our dialect, the only language she ever knew – “It’s to cleanse the ground, you bastards!”
The only hospital we were able to enter was crowded with hordes of the sick and dying; unhygienic with insects buzzing around in the tropical climate and linen stained with dried pus and blood; understaffed with a team of ten crazily running round a room filled with at least a hundred patients that all seemed to require assistance at every single moment.
But there wasn’t an alternative.
To their credit, they tried their best. The standard treatment – quinine and such newfangled “devilish potions”, as my mother called them, were used on her to some effect. But her situation deteriorated not long after, for there was only so much quinine could do in the terrible conditions of the hospital – not that my mother’s favorite shaman could do much better, of course.
One cloudy night, four days after we arrived in the city, I sat beside my mother as she lay in obvious pain on the hospital bed. Her condition was beyond salvation, so said the doctors, and we all knew the end was about to come.
“Son?’
A weak, shaking voice emanating from beside me made me lift my eyes off the butterfly on the windowsill, and I turned towards the voice’s source.
“What’s the matter? You should go back to sleep, don’t talk.”
She plonked her head back onto the pillow and shut her eyelids for quite some time, before she started again, in that very same weak, shaking voice.
“You should have taken me to a shaman instead.”
After blurting that out, she never spoke again.
The very next day I dug a small pit into the riverbank where the city’s cemetery was, and buried my mother there amongst the rows and rows of crosses that dotted the field.
It had been twenty years since the ‘devils’ arrived. In those two decades they had truly shaped my homeland in ways no body, including my mother, could have foreseen, or comprehend.
For the once clear, sparkling river had become reddish and putrid from pollution upstream; the shacks on the opposite bank were replaced by slave-built monuments celebrating the might of the ;devils’; and the fading orange sun was already setting on the plains of my homeland.