I looked at
her body with misty eyes and a heavy heart. There she lay in the sand, a mere
child of eight. Condemned to the life of a slave since the day she was born,
her soul was finally at peace by the merciful touch of death. In our
circumstances death was a blessing to us and was what we all present here
wished for more than anything else. Destined to be slaves all our petty lives,
we welcomed death and in our eyes those dead were better off than the living.
In a world like ours, where we are born to serve; are cursed to live through
all atrocities imaginable; where man himself is our worst enemy, death is our
friend, our saviour.
As I
stood above her wiping my tears, a mixture of sorrow and relief flooding my
heart, the wind blew the sand over her body like she had never existed. She
would be remembered by no one but her family, and even they would soon forget
her. In a world where losing twenty odd people each day was good news, it was
hard to keep track of the dead. I muttered a quick prayer and walked away
looking back once only to see a stretch of undulated sand. The shining sun made
the sand shimmer like gold and gave the desert a deceptively beautiful sheen.
At first glance the desert was the idyllic image of unsurpassed beauty.
However, in reality, it held many terrible secrets under the surface. It was
the burial ground of our dead. Slaves such as me were not given the honour of a
proper burial; the desert was our graveyard.
“Owwww.”
A stream of profanities slipped my lips as, for the second time in the past
five minutes tears sprung to my eyes as I was brought back to my reality with a
sharp kick in my shins that landed me sprawled on the sand. I squinted up to
see Mustafa, one of our slave drivers, yelling at me to get up. Once on my feet
I was sent to the ground again with a punch in my gut which made my inside’s
squirm. Scrambling up again I whispered a quick apology through gritted teeth
and limped back to my work station where I was given what felt like fifty tons
to lug all the way across the desert to the city which was about ten miles
away.
On and
on we walked in a single file like a line of ants with heavy weights on our
heads. If one collapsed, his load was transferred to the person next in line
and his body was kicked away and left to rot in the sand. As my luck would have
it, the lad in front of me was a frail boy who collapsed within the first few
minutes and my load was doubled to the point where it really did feel as if my
head would burst any second. With a blasting headache and the scorching sun
adding to it I felt as if I could bear this no longer. As I walked my footsteps
slowed and my body swayed. I tried to get back in control, tried to pick up my
pace, but my body had a mind of its own and just refused to obey. Finally,
after a lot of internal struggle my mind switched off and my body swayed
violently before I fell to the ground with a shudder as the weights dropped
from my head and the blood rushed in to my brain. Overwhelmed by the feeling of
compete exhaustion I just let go. With an immense feeling of relief that this
would finally all be over I felt tears rushing down my cheeks as darkness
engulfed my world.
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