Beyond the Horizon

BEYOND THE HORIZON

Prologue

To the passersby, nothing seemed unusual about the ceremony taking place in the farthest corner of the sprawling cemetery. Their lack of interest suggested what was in progress could have been just another ordinary and harmless event. Some of them even made jokes about the grave posturing of the attendant standing a little bit farther away from the crowd, not knowing that to him this wasn’t just a burial; but a reminder that nature had once more acted defiantly, handing out another painful token of finality.

He raised his head and slowly surveyed the mourners, trying to dissect the intense sorrow he thought he sensed was concealed beneath each calm face, but he found nothing. His searching gaze then wandered beyond the gathering, and as if for the first time, traversed across an enchanting and peaceful mile upon mile of dazzling white stones. His eyes watered; he thought he could see infinity.

Not that there is a noisy graveyard any where in the world, the man reflected…. But here is the only place where I find serenity and comforting thoughts that make my solitary existence bearable. It will soon be 2000 A.D- `after death,’ he wryly mused. All my kith and kin are dead… at least the two words will now have an appropriate meaning, a new significance that will elevate them above the mere historical signpost that they have been…

The cemetery attendant, Vic, as he was known by anyone who cared to take notice of him, thought about the two words and the `deaths’ with a bitter sense of irony that went beyond a simple acknowledgement of the inevitable… so many deaths in so many slow, wretched years of lost dreams; lost friends and lost loves… a sordid spell of grim challenges and vain expectations; a time of lost opportunities and abandoned hopes…terrible years of confidences and betrayals that rather than kill our spirits provided the flint that sparked off our fiery determination to live on, endure, sacrifice, fight and win despite all the odds that we faced.

But shall we really win…? Will there be something- anything at all apart from this vast field of cultivated concrete that will give testimony to our desires, struggles, and frustrations? Is there any legacy by which posterity will acknowledge that what they have does not belong to them, that what they do is not new but a repetition? Will they know that no matter how much they think they can achieve, in the end those will be nothing but a minor installment of the great debt humanity must repay time! Will there really be anything at the end of time? Vic deeply pondered over these great questions.

In the yard, there were far too many graves. Straining his eyes, Vic idly started counting again. He always counted the headstones as a pass-time. But despite knowing that he would never finish the count- even if the fates were to grant him a fresh mandate of another lifetime- this had become a favorite ritual in which he liked indulging his bitterness. He always stood at the same place, the very spot where he was standing at the moment, and would begin to count in a slowly widening circle, for in that way, he reasoned, he would never ever risk counting the same grave twice. Vic’s field of enumeration had not at any one time increased in size because he always counted only as far as his eyes could see- which wasn’t far enough.

For the time he’d been working here, he’d developed a special liking to a few graves which he’d come to associate with certain individuals from his past. He thought he knew these graves so intimately well that the bond with them had come to supersede any sense of attachment he might still feel to a fellow human being… after all, were these not the only people who’d mattered to me in that other life…? The ones who’d provided me with the family I had never had, the family I had cried for, craved for… almost killed for.

Vic had never had any family to speak of until he met these people… they were the only ones who’d extended a welcoming hand and accepted me as one of them when I ‘d had no where to turn to: no friends, no relatives… no one with whom to share my thoughts, fears and disappointments.