Light over the landscape

It was eleven at night, and the world lay cloaked in darkness. The moon, shy yet persistent, played hide-and-seek with the clouds, casting fleeting silvery light over the landscape. Around me, the tall coconut trees swayed gently in the breeze, their silhouettes a rhythmic dance against the endless expanse of paddy fields that stretched beyond my makeshift bed.

This was my world for the nighta fold-able cot, with me draped in a sleeping bag and enclosed by a mosquito net. For the first time in my life, I was sleeping out in the open, nothing but thin mesh separating me from the stars. In the spaces where clouds hadn’t staked their claim, the sky revealed its glittering secrets, a cosmic reminder of how small and fleeting we are.

But I wasn’t here for the stars. I was here for the land.

This village was my birthplace, though I hadn’t seen it in years. Decades ago, this very soil bore witness to the sweat and toil of my familygenerations of bonded laborers, bending their backs under the relentless sun. They tilled this land, planting and harvesting crops they could never call their own. What they ate were scraps, thrown disdainfully in their direction. Hunger and servitude were our inheritance.

Yet, the wheel of time had turned. I’d escaped this life, propelled by a fierce hunger for something more. A government school and free education were my salvation, but it was sheer determination that carried me through years of study. I earned degrees that were unheard of in my family, even in my village. Those degrees became my ticket to a world far removed from this one, a world where I earned dollars instead of debts.

And now, those dollars had brought me back.

I had returned to reclaim the land my family once toiled uponnot as a farmer, not as a laborer, but as its owner. The once-mighty landlords who had wielded whips for their amusement were now penniless. Their power was as empty as the fields they no longer controlled. Selling the land to me, the boy they had once beaten, seemed to trouble them no more than the passing breeze. I felt no hatred for them. Life has a way of balancing its scales, and I believe karma will find them in its own time.

For me, this night was not about vengeance or triumph. It was about remembrance. None of my family lived to see this day. Their lives had been swallowed by the fields long before the wheel of fortune turned in my favor. I had come here to honor them, to sleep beneath the same sky they once toiled under, to feel the earth that had known their sacrifices.

As the breeze rustled through the trees and the stars twinkled faintly, I closed my eyes, cradled by the land that was finally mine. For this one night, I was not just a man reclaiming his roots; I was a son paying homage to his ancestors, a witness to the endless cycle of loss and redemption.

And in the quiet vastness of the open sky, I found peace.