Disbelief is a curious notion.
Each person seems to have their own definition of it: disbelief in God, in oneself, in life. But to Zayan’s father in 1939, it was the absence of hope, the presence of curiosity. Audacity.
Sitting in the corner of his house that night, Zayan could hear Abba jan’s voice reverberating through the walls, rhythmically pulsing like a beating heart. Throb pause throb pause. His mind wandered to the cotton which carpeted the Earth outside: the fickle seedlings, sprouting from the fertile ground into branching plants reaching up towards the sky like distorted hands, blooming into flowers the color of pure clouds calling to the bees and butterflies and flies before collapsing into dried husk-like acorns which then mature once more into soft interlocking fibers collected and woven into thread and fabric and ply, into shalwars and kameez and topis which people wear.
Such purity, such beauty, such purpose encompassed within a single bloom.
Throb pause throb pause.
Zayan wondered if the cotton plants have hearts. Do they feel afraid as they embrace the world to grow, pride as they bloom, pain when they are harvested? Do they know the comfort and legacies they leave behind?
Throb pause throb pause.
Zayan wished he was cotton: unable to question and speak, but simply living. Even if he may not have a heart.
The house stopped pumping, and that was the first night in his thirteen years that he slept on the floor with an empty stomach, dreaming of cotton fields.