Souvenir

Seraphine traveled from her home 30 miles away from Huma’s, twice in a month every time to be with her in the uncluttered room. When that day arrives, Huma bathes herself in attar sprinkled water and get dressed in an attire which she had chosen at the night of their last commune and which she never wore already. In the days that stood between them, she renounced even her confined worldly pleasures. Every people in a nation never get the taste of independence they need when a nation does. Though the blindfolds are removed, they are still held by chains tightened around their wrists, ankles, necks, and whatnot. Without rallies and fights, they create themselves a world, free of tyranny dreaming that they would inhabit this short-lived world all their breath.

For Huma, it’s the presence of Seraphine behind the locked doors of a modest room in her relatively larger household that gave the flight to a free world. It has been six years since her mother found a photo of her without a hijab and her already clipped wings were cut down to the scapular.

“You will never go outside anymore without us,” her father said.

They arranged a home tutor and she was taken outside only to attend the exams until she graduated.

*

She met Seraphine two years back, seated near her humming a song that Huma was unable to recognize but still she remembers it, the voice that liberated her though momentarily.

“Can you teach me?” hurriedly she asked amidst the instructions given before they took the exam.

“Sorry, if you meant it. I just like that song,” Seraphine answered, intrigued at the question.

She never got any reply, but her hands held a paper flooded with words hanging at the corners after the exam ended. Brooding over the letter for two days, she did what Huma

sought. Upon the wind of her arrival, even Huma’s fallen feathers flew.

“I will come on the 18th of next month.”

“Till then?” Huma paused and gave a penny to her. Seraphine held her hand with the penny interlocked between their sweaty hands and showered kisses on her palms, fingers, and along the veins that her lips traced from the knuckles.

Without the blink of her eyes, Huma re-lived the moment of their separation when they last met realizing the day has come. She heard the sweet echoes of 18 and even felt the rush

of kisses all over her body starting from the day. Like a chariot standing still in the hope that rain wouldn’t curb the festival procession, she waited.

Sometimes, she would come in the morning and sometimes at noon which even Seraphine was never sure of. Never did she missed coming on the day that she promised. Though they had the privilege of a telephone in the age of letters, it never held the keys to reach their new world. Huma asked her once, “When the sun is visible, could you be here beside me in this bed?”

“Yes, and someday, the sun will rise with us and we will watch it together.”

*

As the bus left the city, the summer smeared golden sweats on Seraphine’s face. Reminiscing the days that led her to this, she took a penny from her purse, hung her hand outside the window, and let the wind wash away all its tears. The day she met Huma, reading her well-planned escape letter, turning up as a fake - tutor for her, desiring her freedom, selling her hand-knitted sweaters, longing to burn her body in the sins of

their love and the 31 pennies.

Her thoughts wandered like the still clouds that floated along the stream.

“Did you knit?” Seraphine asked drying her hair as she was drenched in rain.

“Yes, I used all the yarns, every colour I had.”

“Next time when I come, I will buy it. What colour do you want?”

“Sera, I will never knit in this place again. If you sell this one, I should have the money to leave from here.”

She took the newly knit woolen sweater with yarns of a rainbow and wrapped it over the trembling body of Seraphine. In the witness of its warmth, they embraced each other.

“So, this is the one going to give me the last penny,” when she said that, she decided to buy it herself. But she never showed any signs.

“You always want a single penny every time you sell my sweater. Is this enough for you to survive our fate?” she drowned her face in the cascade of Seraphine’s dark hair.

“I have seen the coastal people. The ones who love every drop of the sea and wish they would swim through it all their breath. But the storms and floods of nature never let that

happen. So, they return to the shores. Some with pearls, some with seashells, some with the sound and taste of the waves. Till they go back again, whatever is in their hands, that’s

their sea.”

The red of her collarbone was ruined by the kohled tears of Huma. In the roar of the rain, they tattooed traces of love and pleasure on each other’s skin.

*

Seraphine felt a tickle at the nape of her neck as these moments flashed its way through her mind. With the sudden forced halt of the bus and the effect of the dropped penny on the road, she came to her present sense.

When she got down from the bus, running to pick the penny she was blocked by a man with a rifle.

“Do you dare to run from us? Step aside!”

She saw a group of militants, men, and women standing in front of the bus. People were driven down as a militant got into the bus and shouted, “If you don’t want to get out, burn along with it for what your government does to us.”

In the quest for freedom, somehow people derail from their path and their own people’s blood spill on their hands and they never know the differences since it’s red.

“You are not allowed to travel further into our region. If you want to go back from here alive, give us all the money that you have.”

Some people started to queue up to give their possessions up to the man and woman who made sure that the people have nothing left with monetary value.

She stood away from them, with the money to buy Huma’s last sweater and 30 pennies, thinking about the lone penny on the road.

THE END

(This story was featured in the first edition of Qissa)