The dusk had
descended and the chill blast of winter was not so welcoming. Almost everyone
in Amira’s vicinity had withdrawn to their burrows. Lying on her stomach and murmuring
her favourite song, the six-year-old was doodling something on a scrap of paper
which she found near her tent the other day. Her one-year-old brother, Moosa,
slept in tranquility making Amira envious of his garden of dreams, full of
serenity. After a short while, she was carried away by sleep.
The rays of
the morning sun came slicing down her face. It was not long ago when the girl
dreamt of going to school and making more friends. But it took just one harrowing day to
transform her world into a nightmare. The bomb blasts took away her father, her
house, her country and her hopes. Amira’s only experience of madarsa was what she fantasised of in
her head. Her happy future came crumpling down like that building in her
neighbourhood two years ago, and lost somewhere in the rubble.
“I am quite brave,
but I feel scared now,” Amira exclaimed while climbing the boat to the Lesbos
islands. Yes, she was scared of the huge waves and of course, her life.
Nonetheless, she was just a six-year-old caught between the conflict and a
futile war, struggling for survival. Amira
recalled, “The sea was enormous, windy and scary at the same time.” She vividly
remembered that she couldn’t move her hands and feet for five hours at a
stretch, for the boat was overloaded. Allah-u-Akbar
echoed in the air because everyone feared that the boat might capsize and
the hungry waves might devour them all.
The little
girl travelled with her mother and younger brother. Fear of insecurity,
uncertainty and death was written in large letters on every single person’s
face. Amidst the hullaballoo of cries and discontent, there was a sort of
quandary shrouded on the boat. The trauma people went through, including the
end of livelihoods in their own homeland where they sadly became refugees,
shifting from one place to another and finally to Lesbos, in search of hope. Also, the flux about the future
and the hardships reflected in their eyes and flowed down in form of tiny
droplets. Amid all this, Amira thought of her new toys and dresses which she
had not used even once and to her amazement, the baggage was flung in the sea. Moreover,
water splashed all over the boat and this further aggravated her distress as
her only frock too was damp by now.
It grew
pitch dark and the island could be seen. Fortunately, the boat reached the
shore safely and people hurled their life saving jackets out of sheer joy. Some
were happy and some were horrified at having taken such a risk. The fear had
shackled their very souls and had left them in an eerie numbness. But the
shivering Amira was gay, ironically, for the future prospects in the island!
Like
yesterday and a day before, Amira was again lying on her stomach when the world
went in slumber. Up with her pencil and another shred of paper, she landed in
her world and scribbled. A gust of wind twitched the paper from her hand. On
the paper, the little creature had sketched what she experienced at such tender
age. A building being bombed, a boy bleeding from the head, a mother wailing
with her dead child on her lap… in nutshell, the cruel and pathetic condition
that had become the reality of Syria. Maybe in the stillness and solitariness of
night, the girl tried to manifest her plight in those sketches and experience a cathartic release.
Amira
sneaked through the camp and took hold of the paper and resumed her drawing,
silently humming her regular song:
“We've come to wish you happy holidays,
Why is that we do not have any holidays/decorations,
World.... my land is burned down,
My land's freedom is stolen.”