Rifat Abdullah

Water gets everywhere. Rain is how the sky touches the ground emitting an aroma of the soil. The philosophy teacher of Rainport Academy believes that the purpose of all creatures by being of higher states is to mature before we bite the dust and our soul; that spiritual gas trapped inside us that the father addresses as the holy ghost, escapes our body and is elevated, by decree of the higher deities, into a higher being. This could go on until your soul is so mature that you can then be invited to join the God’s Club. For now, passing grades would just do it; succeeding the boys to a higher position in the food chain. The academic building was over an island separated away from the neighboring towns. There is a harbor at the inside end of the island, one can peer at the fishing boats there in the early morning when they are returning from the sea to the local market. The Island itself was like a boat afloat in mid-ocean except the absence of the rocking of it from one end to the other. This perhaps summed up the reason behind the boredom, the mundane melancholy and the blandness in the banality of the place, all because the rocking wasn’t there. Sometimes, nothing here moved. Nothing at all.

Morning clamor was shaking the very grounds of the central post office, the café was storming tea up at the edge of the cups, staples were battering the table, the phone sprang ringing every intervals of the receiver clasping the mold, old fans started fanning and squeaking like panting street dogs, birds stated shitting from the sky, bussed were being started, the cleaners who are better than cleaners who are cleaner than cleaners have started cleaning and sweeping, the division bell was being hung on its neck, flowers were blooming and bees were buzzing, the day had set it course in its enterprise at the Rainport Island. Along with life, words stated forecasting. The hot news today was on Mr.Fakir, the rich landlord of the country. The headline on the paper is ‘Fakir to stop buying anymore land’ over the dailies that details how the government is putting a restrain order to cease the right of Mr. Fakir from buying anymore land in the country. Second to it was the news of the return of Kash from the Land Before Time, that is the pseudonym for the medical bay. The new House Master had moved into his office quarter, empowered and taken command, first thing he did on his first day, he put up a new seat plan for the first ten rooms, these were mostly full of the younglings from 5^th up to 12^th grade; the Schoolers. A kind of disturbance was expected coming from room no.9. Rudra was seated in the room at the moment because the room was the closest from the lavatory and he needed it close for he’d been having a fluent case of indigestion. Rudra was to enroll into college in a few semesters, this was his candidacy days. He played the role of the scout for the Brotherhood, fishing in fresh meat. He would enroll the slaves for the brotherhood who were fed with crumbs and he’d occasionally be thrown a bone. His room had to be under absolute dictatorship of his command. Everyone expected an issue because Kash, who is arriving today on his new seat, was placed into room no.9. Rudra made the complaint and protested against the plan by the new master. The new master couldn’t overlook this heat of the moment and comply. To make his statement clear, he relocated Rudra in the elderly regions; these were the rooms beyond 23^rd entirely accommodating graduate and final year undergrads and perhaps some of the dead. No one knew how many rooms were there at the end of the corridor. No one dared to know. They went in a stretch into an abyss where even the sun refused to shine. Rumor has it that there are giants who live at the end of the line who have moussed skin with snakes as pets and instead of nails, they had barks of trees. They have grown deep roots into the academy and are fed only by the occasional overflowing of the water tanks.

Humility requires a far more entertaining story than that of triumph. Humility is the better story of the triumphant, the powerful against the weak and humiliated. Our hate of losing (time, significance, reputation, dignity and words) is the essential motif to excellence in life. All the world competes with itself to excel, to live. Not to merely survive, rather thrive and to exemplify. No to be merely approved, rather admired while we all remain easily unique. All things thrive to its will to power according to a wise man with fancy mustache. The power remains over the one who would delineate anything with the intention to define. The way of the Will to Power is basically falsifying reality so it appears to comply with your version of reality. Curiosity though has some limits. No being can think of a world without itself being in one, wielding its command to live as it sees fit. Thus, truth in such a world is like a litmus paper changing colors as we catalyze our opinion.

The Island was older than anyone’s ability to reminisce, older than memory itself. It had the stature and posture of someone’s unfinished work of imagination what made it beautiful was that it seemed like someone’s imagination would come back one day and to take away the island and finally making it in memory. Every day the ferry brought in the school busses stuffed with students who reside in the vicinity who later disappeared following the gonging bell at the end of the school session back to the busses going back to the ferry taking them back to their nests. Some of the graduate students would hang around till late. Only the orphans would remain behind. Only they stayed over the desolate nights. They did as they must. The nights in the island were lonely, dark and deep but the young boys with big dreams in their eyes had their fair share of promises to keep. The academy buildings were constructed over a hundred years back from now by the military. One can tell for the governing body is still made of high ranking officers. Ranks, is how the boys house were run. Order with no mercy. Rank to rank they run the school in a military based unitary system. All pupils were divided in three colors of Epaulettes. Each color assigns a person to a house, Houses that were named after historical figures. The richest kids in the school received patronage, the ordinary and merited received scholarships and the residents received discounts. Though none of them paid for themselves, that is the one who stayed in, some received a sum of morsel amount. Everyone wins something somehow.

The Brotherhood was an enigmatic secretive society; a band of men. Men, not boys. That was the impression they were in. The hostel accommodated students off all age spanning from 5^th grade up to students who are in for master’s degrees only waning in number the higher you go. No school students knew the exact number of the boys living under the same roof. Defying the authoritarian quantification, the brother hood was a conglomeration of boys from all houses, unauthorized yet bound by fealty, by a code of conduct among men in a chain of command, men of honor, solidarity, equity, trust, justice and uniformity. That is the idea established among the younglings and the men-child. In reality, these were a group of insecure boys who came to form a GROUP in need to possess, in need of feeling significant and powerful. In truth, anyone who have been in one could relate. They functioned with secretive meetings to arrange crimes and thrills, however they pleased to entertain themselves to finally land the piggy. These are boys, not men; boys who wish to be important, boys who used to belong to negligent families. They believe in the righteousness of their pain. Each of them had a legacy, the ruling members of the clan, as a story told and made belief to solidify their rights to rule, to establish a repute to back them dominating others, oppressing and punishing at will. What would they do, these rebels without cause? They teach in the sociology class that crime is a natural deficit response of human beings living in dysfunctional societies. Those empowered to ameliorate disputes would be deprived of purpose in a utopian society. We can have them shot and piled in a mass grave before we enter the heavens. On the contrary, boredom, our essential evolutionary contest sways and rocks a seesaw over the line of fairness. A blind folded lady is blind to the forces she assigns to cure her children and the children folds her blind to hide their shame.

The news of the assault from a week before still pours in fresh tension. Eyes are cautious and vigil, hands were out of pockets, guises quick and purposeful and stooped. Words are expensive, fewer to fewer in exchange, everyone is seen mostly speaking in signs. No wonder no one wanted to be in the same room with Kash. The cover of his diary says in bold letters, “Between pain and pleasure there is a small window to fall in love and a vague sensation we call being alive”. Only he knows the sensation he’s living through at the moment perhaps. Only he should care enough. He got into the turmoil by standing up to Rudra who wanted the 7^th grader to keep up his academic attendance regardless of the injuries he was facing. Kash knew what had happened with the kid. The previous night when the gang ran out of cigarettes the kid was summoned. He was instructed to wait for a truck driver beside the Jasmine bushes who would hand him a fresh pack to take back to the joint. There he had been bit by a poisonous snake which he couldn’t differ at the time from mosquito bites or pokes of wild thorny branches. Morning came to his horror; he woke up with an elephant leg and foggy eyes like the river banks in winter morning. He was alive in a trans like frenzy intoxicated by the poison. While Kash and Rudra was having their brawl, an instructor had arrived and upon one look declared that the boy be taken to the Land Before Time. He added that he knew how he got hurt. He knew the state the kid was in and would remain in such a state for over a month and he knew that the boy would live. He knew that he was going to come back a different person; someone who will have developed a taste for poison by the time he comes back. It did not take all that force to take down Kash.

Talia was a wallflower. Everyone in the school knew about her and Arga. At least, that’s what everyone knew. Theirs was a match had from a joke in the brotherhood. Everyone chipped in on the matter. Everyone wanted them to be there for each other yet on the same time no one wanted they to be together. The students in her class knew enough to stay away from her and from a social distance wait unbearably for the two forces to come together. What no one was aware of was that Kash was the victorious in her eyes. This win of admiration slowly turned into a deep seated desire as she would endeavor to veil her desperation from the male guise. Kash utterly disavowed the attention that was cast over his shadow having borne the aura of a rebel. His untimely eruption once caught the guise of Talia when he was standing up for another minor. He was heroic and brave yet what she observed was his skill to negotiate; how he calmed down when the matter was resolved. A hero who knew how to differ from pretenders, who knew how to hustle and when to stop. This was from a year back. Among this time, they have had exchanged a handful of letters. This was Kash’s final year graduating from Rainport but no one there knew much about him. He was as it goes, aimlessly patient. His nonchalance nonchalantly had stolen the heart of the brightest flower in all the landing; a cynosure over the starry nights. The dichotomy between the two propelled a sense of rocking in the island. Everyone stared at her and she knew how to keep him safe by seeing him by not looking. She wanted him to be no more known than he himself wanted himself to be. They knew the game they were playing; everyone was blind to the letters, signs and flowers changing hands. They were two lovers who lived freely in a world of rumors, free from a world of rumors.

All it took was a slap. That was what was being said that Kash was sent to the hospital with a single slap. “Only one slap”, “slapped him to death”, these were the lasting bullets shooting in all direction and lingering like echoes of whispers in empty forlorn tea cups in the café. Arga was the one to slap him unconscious and sent him to the Land Before Time for a week. Fame of his strength was the way to get him learned a lesson. There were many stories of why he did but none of which really considered true because no one saw them when it happened.

Premonition of Winter was gesticulating in the farmer’s almanac; Woodpeckers are sharing the same tree, hair was thickening on the nape of the cow’s neck, mice are rattling indoors, Muskrats are burrowing holes high on the river bank, Early Migration of the Monarch butterfly was gathering at the southern end and the spiders are stitching larger cobwebs. Kash had a mild fever that only he knew of at first. He only recognized it a ten days before for he could no longer afford to go by his ordinary routine without washing down two capsules twelve hours apart every cycle. He had some hunch as to why he had had the fever at the time. He wasn’t sure which was the primary reason for it. Was it that it was time that Kash needed to prepare to finally aboard The Ship of Destiny leaving Rainport for good? Was it that Talia was intentionally negligent every time he tried to contemplate in the letters about what would happen to them, or how would they be when he parts with the waves? Talia was there on the other side, the only other soul aware of the fever. Kash, wrote to her about it. He said he had Patrichor fever, the kind that Talia never heard before. A fever that you get from the fragrance of soil after the rain. The entire week when Kash was absent during the school time, her heart would allow an unprecedented throbbing and howling. She knew him well and enough to foresee that Kash was coming back with a vengeance. That he would final take on the Brotherhood and hit ‘em where it hurts.

Kash had come back from the Land Before Time, and indeed, he was back with a plan. With his return, everyone started licking the old sapless gum again. He was first sited at the common bath after a shower that afternoon and on his way back to his room a 6^th grader followed him a while before he got noticed and asked if Kash was okay at the time. He denied and slowly unraveled that he still carried a disease, that it was a rare type of fever and hooked by saying that he had met the 7^th grader who was sent in for the snake bite. Later in his room another 6^th grader showed up with the previous one and a bunch of them flocking out in the threshold wearing towels and brushing their teeth beside the railing. He could see his plan setting in motion. The two in the room wanted to know how it was in The Land Before Time and why people returned as someone who they were not when they went in.

An inspector questioned Kash the day after he arrived asking him what had went on that day. He confessed having made a mistake, that he mistreated a senior, Arga to be specific. What he did not say that the plan was devised by Rudra who had to vacate the room and was a king turned slave and thus pointed out to Kim, the rumored Chief of the Brotherhood and the elder brother of Arga, that something was potentially laughable about his brother. The pack picked a time of the day to bathe in the sun from the news stand at the highest point in any of the school area. From there Arga was shown that Kash and Talia were sitting on a bench beside the football field at the tiffin break marking him for a brotherly love impending.

The medical bay bordered the school area from the staff quarter surrounding which was railed by the cultivation of fruit and harvest. From which the Brotherhood stole regularly and claimed that these were supplies of offerings by their devotees in the staff. It was the young one who went in to pluck the nourishments in the middle of the night in a pool of blood sucking monsters. When they peed, they saw themselves showering the mosquitos making them crash on the ground without dying and coming back for revenge. Ever since the snake bite incident, they felt like they needed to rotate the young ones within the small window they had. When the pick-up trucks took off for the harbor, they had to pass a number of security check points where they had to go around small barbwire structures which slowed them down. The invaders would arrive on the way before they left the plantation and close the gap between the structures by pulling them closer to each other so it took even greater a lap time from there to harbor then unloading then to back there again. None of the plantation workers would remain behind at those times. Only Nandu, who technically isn’t a plantation worker but was in the night watch and had keys to most gates in the campus. As the story of Nandu goes, they say he lived in the dungeons where grotesque wildebeests were in chains. Nandu’s response to the speculations was that when they farted, it smelled like lilies.

Words spread in the island like wildfire. These words were the life to the lifeless place. The way to get back on the Brotherhood was words. The assault therefore would be on the reputation. Five weeks have passed since Kash had returned. The Brotherhood called for an important meeting that night, everyone came, they had a few important issues to resolve. The first and most severe of all issues was that Jewel refused to pass a pen to Ajhaar, the head of the clan from House Red. Jewel did passed a pen but it was not the one that Ajhaar had asked for. It was a different pen and the matter was a perfect fit to all’s required bashing, cats and dogs. This was sorted out colluding that it was not the pen that mattered, it was who wields the sword. Then they moved on the second issue; lately there had been some news surreal in nature spreading through the walls. Where were these coming from? This leeway was to the third matter in severity; it has been heard that there is another Brotherhood which was a spiritual conglomeration that had been there since before any of them, since the first days of school in the island and yet till this day they have managed to hide themselves from everyone. Everyone in the room fell silent as the Brotherhood fell into an immediate crisis. They decided to out for blood. In two days, they wished to gather all they could find about the others.

Three weeks from now the winter vacation would be in commence. All academic activity would close for the rest of the year. The last letter Kash wrote to Talia was about something he was currently working on; a paper on Farce. In the literature class there was a lesson on Farce. When tragedy became comedy, it was called a Farce. It struck him well, how tragedy becomes comedy. Wrote on the letter on how propaganda was bred by these self-proclaimed heroes who glorified their pain as being ornamental to their character. He wrote about him becoming a laughable Black Sheep in the resident amongst the rest. He expansively discussed about pain and how people could laugh at it; that was the comedy, the pain of the other. He wrote on the suffering of his fellow men. He wrote about human feces being more nauseating than any other type of feces. He wrote about men fighting, some, while they fought, appeared scared of fighting to him,and some who fought like it hurt them more than the one they were hurting. He bid her goodbye nearing the end of the letter. He wrote about the island making into memory as he would make it to The Boat of Destiny within a few days. He wrote that he is leaving this life behind for the new.

His last letter was in reply to what seemed like the last letter from Talia in which she wrote about pain and of course intentionally omitted the part of where after from here thus relieving her the burden of saying goodbye. She wrote about wanting to feel special, about righteousness and madness, about fanatics and criminals, about saints being unfit to play the mad man’s game. She wrote about the smell of the filth on him too for he is in it with them now. She beseeched him, of course to walk away from this with her for she stands just across that line. She explained that this whole enterprise made him the same as them. She wanted him to believe that he deserves better, that he should think so to treat himself better. She wrote that taste is as common in people as it is rare. She confessed that she did not understand his pain but she wrote expansively on sorts of pain that she does understand. She wrote about pain in strange places of the body which could not define, about pain that hurts all the time, everywhere. She wrote about pain that she never thought was true or was inflicted on her, pain that gave her shame and the kind of pain that she wished to suffer from but isn’t fortunate enough. She wrote about fortuity. She wrote about nature and selection. She wrote about pain being our manifesto and ended the letter with the concept of treatment; how we are treated determining the way we treat others yet with hope, we do better.

Two days later, everyone gathered again to disclose everything they have discovered. What they came to know was fascinating in every aspect. They found out the oracle of the other Brotherhood in the northwest forest. Up close, it was a manikin with blinded eyes written Tiresias over the forehead. He is the one responsible for all they word of mouth. They found out about the invisible man; all things that are stolen for good is the work of this shapeless sojourning specter who never breaks the silence. They learned about animals behaving in the way they are expected to behave in front of people to hide their true nature and creoles. They learned that the planet was melting from the tips of ice bergs. They have learned about the myth of the mosquitoes, that they were the disintegrated and multiplied form of the lover who had to reach his dying lover in a long forgotten part of the world within twenty-four hours to save her. She had died a long time ago but the lover isn’t aware of it for the mosquitoes have the life span of one day only and every morning they start hunting for blood thinking it’s the same day. They learned about the man with a hole in his heart that nothing could fill. The only myth they heard which was confirmed by the chief, Kimluck, was the myth of the Bridge. Kim had heard the stories from his elders before about how there was a bridge adjoining the island with the nearest highway and it was demolished by the boatmen who one after one crashed into the pillars in an attempt to tarnish it which was a success. What he hadn’t heard was about the fever that took over all the sea-men before the incident and that one of the was slapped by an authority of the bridge cursing him and he was swept away along with the bridge.

At the final week on the last working day, the brotherhood received an anonymous letter. In the letter there was a description about a curse that rests over the Brotherhood because of Arga’s actions. He had slapped someone with Patrichor fever, the same kind that took away the bridge. This was the sensational topic that superseded the issue with the local damp. The brother hood called for a meeting that same night to alleviate the superstitions arising from all the stories that were in exercise those days. Only the empowered had showed up in the middle of the night. The letter proposed that they bring Arga to the edge of the island as sacrifice to lift the curse. Kim considered this a direct threat on the Brotherhood and asked for all the seniors to accompany him and his brother to the edge of the island that night. All the boats had carried off with every other boys and staffs leaving the harbor empty. The entire island was thus under the Brotherhood regime. At mid-night they went to the spot and in the midst of the fog the saw one boat with Kash as the only one on board with a lantern on his hand. The message was clear, if there would be a body left behind, it would be of Kash, not Arga.

They saw Kash turning out the lantern and following it the water level suddenly started shrinking in loose rapidity. Before they could decide what to do, they heard a earth shattering noise that was reaching towards them from the sea. A gulf of whirlwind took over them and the last thing they saw was a colossal tidal wave coming towards them washing everything in its path.