Water

 Short Fiction 

By: Kaleem Butt

All of sudden my eyes open…. I can feel the darkness and death like silence for a moment…. As though world has ended…. I think I’ve survived…. Something has happened in this dark deep belly of the raging sea that has helped me to survive like Jonah survived in the belly of the whale…. I am coming to my senses and hearing voices. To tell you the truth I have no idea for how long I’ve slept in this dark belly of the water. It might be a small part of day or a full day… or more than that may be a week or month or a year…. Or even more than that… I am not sure…. But I want to know it…. I want to reveal the truth and this is my journey to find out what happened to me and how long have I slept?

 

 I could hear the gushing sound of the water….. I think… at this precise moment I can only image… I can’t tell anything for sure but I would unveil the truth.

 

The gushing sound of water continues…..

    

Water the cause and reason behind all life as we are told in scared text:

“All life is created from water…”

It fulfills our bodily needs and purifies our souls…. From ancient times human beings have anointed and purified themselves with water…. There is something special about it: the magic to heal our wounds, the power to give life…. Yet surrounded by the darkness.

 

Right here under the dark belly of water I am unable to tell you the difference between day and night. Everything is blur like my memories…. I am still unable to gather my memories… all I could remember at this very moment is the huge shipwreck and then woes and cries of humans…. I think by some miracle I am the only person who survived in the belly of water like Jonah, who was swallowed by a huge whale and who survived for three days and three nights in it. I was embraced by huge waves as though they were my beloved.

 

Suddenly a thought has entered my mind…. This is not the first time I have been thrown into the water, I think I have been thrown into the water again and again in the course of human history and I have survived each time to reveal the truth.

 

Something is happening to me but I don’t want to close my eyes, closing eyes would remind me of death…. I am getting back my lost memory: memory of disobeying the rulers, memory of my beloved’s scent, memory of hate, violence, leaving my home and memory of a shipwreck.

 

And here I am in this water, it has saved me, given me a new life… as it is truly said water is life. I am Sindh and I am going to die because of water!