I don’t know you, Grandma.

It was about 11 miles from Jaisalmer, a tired old village when I first saw it. It looked like during the rainy weather the streets turned to water canals, grass grew everywhere, shrubs all around the wells. Only this time of the year the animals didn’t seek a shady tree and the children were free to play throughout the day. It was the only time when one could see greenery. But during the summers it was all very different; bony mules and camels hitched to HOOVER carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live acacia trees near the wells. Men worked from morning to evening, surviving the 50 C temperature. The women bathed before noon and took their three o’clock naps, and by nightfall were preparing meals for their families and the old ones would still be hooting their Hookahs.

A day was 24 hours long but seemed longer. When I reached the village, everything moved slowly like someone clicked the slow-motion button and forgot to turn it off. There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with, nothing to see outside the boundaries. It seemed like a set of a Bollywood movie.

Kids played marbles in the hot sands, under the acacia tree.

It was wintertime in the desert, I was wearing a sweater so as the villagers. I moved my head to take a look at the village when something caught my eyes, an old woman wearing color clothes but mostly black. She wore heavy silver bangles in her hands and legs and a big one in her neck. She rose her hand and made some gestures towards me, she was calling me. I parked my bike in the shades and reached for the key but it won’t come out and I left it on the bike. The archaic walls engraved with beautiful.

I approached her, she spoke in a language unknown to me but buy her hand gesture I figured out that she was telling me to sit down. I sat beside her and looked her in the eyes, her eyes were as clear as an untouched ocean. She didn’t ask for my name or where I came from. She just took my hands in hers and rubbed them. She looked at me and smiled, her smile was as beautiful as a pearl, her sad eyes told stories I couldn’t tell, her arms showed the struggles she made for her family.

She touched my forehead with her old hands that once touched her own son. Never before had I taken this much interest in stories of the old people but this time I was bewildered. As she drove ahead her eyes got filled with tears. She tried to hide but they fell on the barren land like the monsoon rain. She burst into tears when she told me that she once had a boy like me. No one could save him because Jaisalmer was too far and the wounds were severe. The hands in which her own boy died were now on my forehead. She tried to cover her emotions in the bitter smoke of the Hookah but her scars kept bleeding sorrow. She never had another child. Loss and heartbreak must have plagued her throughout her entire life. I made her cry, I made her think about her boy maybe it was my fault but it was good because the tears that she held in her eyes for years were now free.

I got emotional and turned my head this time to hide my emotions. I didn’t have anything to tell, I just looked her in the eyes and smiled and it was enough for her.

I left her alone. It was not easy but it was easier than to stay there. She didn’t call me and I didn’t look back. Written on her hand were the stories she couldn’t tell.

I approached my bike and saw a tomb-stone which said something in Urdu, I couldn’t understand but I felt it. A drop trickled down my chin, it wasn’t the rain.