I have been awoken by repeated knocks at the door, before the village had been awakened by the usual cries of the countless roosters trapped in their pens. I did not wish to open the door. I had worked through the night, and haven’t gotten a satisfactory amount of sleep. It’s impossible to work during the day at this time of year. The air is too humid and the sun burns the dirt beneath our feet. We are not used to visitors. We have no reason to expect any. Yet here he is, whoever he is.
My son was born just over two decades ago, in the house I currently reside in. My wife passed away during childbirth. I raised him on my own, for as long as he allowed me to. It was apparent early on that our small village was not enough to quell his endless hunger. We weren’t good enough for him. I wasn’t good enough. After months of fighting I reluctantly agreed to send him off to a boarding school in the capital. That was my greatest blunder. I never really saw him again after that. All I knew of him came from his occasional letters, and the ones I got from the principals of the countless institutes he attended. He couldn’t stay in one place for more than three months without writing on the bathroom walls. I was never told what he wrote. I could only guess based on what I know of my son and the wrath I read in the letters of his superiors.
Soon enough I could no longer make sense of his letters. I didn’t understand the meaning of the words, individually and as a whole. He told me of the difficulties I had faced all my life. How I deserved more. How we all deserved more. How we are being used by the ones who have inherited the fields we work in. He is ungrateful. May God grant some sense into his foolish mind. Just years ago he depended on the farm for sustenance. He would never have gotten the education he received without it. Even with the allowance I received I could not afford to send him to boarding school. It was paid for by the very farm owner he now criticizes. If not for him my son would never have been able to leave. He would have stayed by my side. He would never have written on the bathroom walls. He would never have gotten expelled from everywhere he ever attended.
He had found himself among people with ideas worse than his own. He inherited these ideas, which only grew when he attended university. The villagers were all so proud. He was after all the first of us to attend higher education. I, however, wasn’t in such a festive mood, for I knew what this meant. It would only push him further away from me, into the arms of those who will take advantage of his foolishness. That stupid, stupid boy. Not once has he ever listened to me. I was just a pathetic old farmer to him. Too simple minded to comprehend the nonsense he tried preaching to me. He was wrong. I don’t claim to be an educated man. I never had the opportunity to attend school. But I am far more than he ever gave me credit for. He might be knowledgeable enough to fool us with his fancy words, but he is a fool for mistaking words with wisdom. The ideals he reads and preaches don’t exist in the real world. They never have and never will. I have lived long enough to know what he will never understand.
It had been many months since I’d heard from him. We had a disagreement. It unleashed everything he had been waiting to tell me. Every mistake I’ve ever made. How much I hurt him by not listening to the speeches he has given me. For not waking up even when he had been violently shaking me all his life. I was all he had. Yet I had turned into a mere fly that had become irritating enough to warrant being left behind. All of a sudden he was all I had.
He was widely adored for his sophisticated ideas. Maybe I was wrong about them. Maybe I should have listened. I could have prevented it. I could have prevented everything. Maybe if I had listened to him and quelled his excitement he would not have needed to spread it so openly. He wouldn’t have caught their attention.
I opened the door only to be greeted by a soldier in uniform. There were several others with him who had not bothered to exit their vehicles. He uttered no words, and simply glanced over to the package laid on top of my rug. He needn’t explain. I knew what it was. I had anticipated this day ever since he left the house many summers ago. I always knew it would come to this. I just didn’t think he would visit this soon.
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