by Muhammad Khurram Salim

Naji was home again. The singular sun showed him his Gaza, place of gentle breezes and lively voices. He’d been away as a refugee for months and months, his clothes old and worn, his face without any semblance of a smile. He walked determinedly with a group of his countrymen, all returning back to the ruined Gaza, after many lifeless months.

“Think I’ll never get back,” Naji, an English teacher, used to worry while in Lebanon when the days were uncertain, his homeland Gaza vulnerable to killers with eyes of hatred, fierce and inhuman. “People can be much worse than pack animals,” he’d thought and sighed, eating hard bread and staring into space, thinking of the desecrated children whom he once used to teach. “Animals never organise a mass attack where they slaughter thousands of children and women … innocent souls who can’t protect themselves.”

“Think I’ll never find the blue skies of Gaza again,” he’d told his friend Zaki in their refugee camp, lying under glinting stars seeming to be a zillion miles away. “My family is missing, my brother and sister Ayesha dead. How can I endure the pain? My inside is a hell of emptiness where I see my death-moment over and over. Then over and over again. I’ll lie with a bullet through my heart as slowly my blood will run, and I will join my departed students in a better world, somewhere, now unseen. The evil ones with bombs and bought bullets rule over the innocents. They determine who lives and who dies.”

Now Naji walked over rubble, glad to be back. His days of counting the hours till his return were over. Zaki walked beside him, tired but hopeful. They were back to their land of birth, where they had hoped and dreamt for so many long years, for happiness and wealth, and days of only laughter. Naji regarded the smashed buildings, homes and hospitals, where lives had been decimated indiscriminately by those who sought to justify genocide through lies and deceit. Some terrorists had slain a few hundred Jews and that seemed to be the reason mindless minds could start to kill tens of thousands of innocent Muslims. “The ones with power prey on the defenceless,” Naji reminded himself and wiped away a tear, his mind crowding with the tender voices of the kids he used to look after. 

His neighbours Basira and Latifa stood near his partly broken house when Naji got there. They told him of the misery of loss and heartache. “My little boy died bleeding, in my arms,” Basira muttered, as they wept and Naji could not restrain tears near the damaged pillars and beams, once a firm support for his house. He spotted a toy camel in the rubble nearby, once a favourite plaything of a neighbour’s child Hadi, one of his eager pupils who used to say, ‘good morning’ and ‘thank you’ in clearly enunciated English. It lay abandoned, not wound up and walking, without the murdered Hadi, cast aside by the cruel killing ones.

That night, as Naji closed his eyes, he saw a camel come to life and the tide turning, in a cloak of part darkness, and a giant friendly creature hoofed and kicked to clear away all the so-called soldiers that bare their fangs and threaten souls with shells and mortars and the insane thunder and blaze of their hateful guns.