Raghead: International Talk Like A Pirate Day Special

Copyright B Purkayastha 2014

Winning the Lottery

“Class”, said Miss Bliss, “Mary has something to tell us all today.”

Everyone looked at Mary, who stood up, blushing with pride. “My dad,” she began, “has won.”

“Won what?” somebody asked.

“The lottery, of course,” Mary said impatiently. “Will you just listen?”

“The lottery?” Everyone gasped in wonder. They all knew which lottery, of course. The news had been full of it all week. “You mean your dad –“

“Yes, he’s going to be on the firing squad!” Mary said gleefully. “He said it’s the best hundred dollars he’d ever spent.”

The class fell into an excited buzz until Miss Bliss called it to order. “Now, everyone,” she said, “this is a very proud moment for us all. Mary’s father will be one of just six men in the entire state who will get to be on the firing squad. Won’t that be great?”

Mary smiled at Miss Bliss, who was very pretty. Mary had a huge crush on Miss Bliss and wanted to be just like her when she grew up.

“Of course, it’s not just a matter of being famous,” Miss Bliss said. “Mary’s father, Mr Cummings, will be doing a very important job. Can anyone tell me what it is?”

A thin arm rose at the back of the class. “It’s to kill that bad man,” the owner of the arm said. “That Douglas.”

“Yes, Douglas,” Miss Bliss replied. “A very bad man, as we all know. He killed two policemen, and you know policemen are good people who keep us all safe.”

“I saw him on TV last night,” the boy at the back said.

“Yes, very ugly, isn’t he?” Miss Bliss shuddered delicately. “You can see the evil in his face. Anyway, he has to be punished for killing those policemen, and Mr Cummings, Mary’s father, is going to help do the job.”

“My father said they put a blank bullet amongst the real ones,” Mary said. “But he says that he’ll insist he gets a real bullet. He said he wants to be sure he does his job, and by God...”

“Mary,” Miss Bliss said warningly.

“Sorry,” Mary replied contritely. “He said he paid for the chance and won’t be deprived of the kill.”

“He’s a brave and good man,” Miss Bliss said. “You could ask him to come to the class tomorrow and give us a talk on how the execution went.”

Mary blushed even pinker with pleasure. “I’ll bring him along with me,” she promised.

“That’s good,” Miss Bliss smiled. “I’m sure your mother is very proud. Will she go along with your father to the execution? I’m told the lottery owners can bring along their family members as witnesses.”

A brief shadow passed over Mary’s face. “I don’t know,” she confessed. “She said she doesn’t want to be the wife of a killer. There was a row.”

“I’m sure it will be quite all right,” Miss Bliss said hurriedly. “Now, everyone, open your textbooks and turn to page forty-three...”

***************************

“Mary,” Miss Bliss said the next morning, “I see your father didn’t come with you.”

“No, Miss Bliss,” Mary confessed. “He said he didn’t want to come.”

“Why not?” The class hadn’t yet begun, and the other children were still coming in. “I saw in the news that the execution went off all right.”

“Yes, he said it went fine.” Mary scuffed her shoe on the floor. “He didn’t want to talk to me about it though. When he came back this morning his face looked all funny and grey.”

“I’m sure he’ll be fine,” Miss Bliss said soothingly. She held up her newspaper. “Look, here’s a picture of your father and the other members of the firing squad, right on the front page. And here’s another picture of the chair in which Douglas was shot.”

Mary looked at the paper. “My, dad looks fine, doesn’t he?”

“I’ve got an idea,” Miss Bliss said. “Why don’t you talk to the class this morning, show them the paper, and tell them all about how your father won the lottery and did his duty? Would you like to do that?”

Mary nodded, her heart filled with love for her teacher, and she thought once again that Miss Bliss was a very pretty woman, and she would grow up to be just like her, after all.

Copyright B Purkayastha 2014  

Don't Lose Your Head

So – let me tell you a couple of things about the Great Big Islamic State Threat du jour.

For the purposes of this show’n’tell, I’ll pretend that the Islamic State (which I’ll call ISIS for convenience’s sake) is not an American creation and tool (which of course it totally is). For the current purpose I’ll pretend that it is exactly what it is claimed to be – a radical Islamic insurgency carving out a jihadist terrorist state in Syria and Iraq, which it intends to expand into a caliphate stretching from India to North Africa.

Where does that get us? Doesn’t it justify the extermination of this sadistic, ultraviolent movement by any and all means possible before it overwhelms us all?

 Um...not exactly.

Let’s look at what ISIS is. It’s a conglomeration of disparate groups with wildly varying ideologies, which are fighting under a black flag of convenience. Few of the “ISIS” who allegedly overwhelmed the best the farcical American-trained Iraqi army had to offer were actually ISIS. A lot of them were (and are) Baathist militia comprising battle-hardened trained soldiers from the days of Saddam Hussein – the Naqshbandi Army and the misnamed Islamic Army. Others are groups from Syria which were given the Hobson’s choice of signing on with ISIS or being eliminated. And the rest are disaffected Sunni tribal militia, alienated by the systematic anti-Sunni policies followed by the Washington-installed “government” in Baghdad.

What do these people want? Some of the Baathists long for a return to the enforced secularism of the Saddam era, and these are the same people – the hard-drinking, rigidly secular generals of the old Iraq Army – who are in charge of the military campaign. Many of these officers actually offered to join the new Iraqi army and were rebuffed, whereupon they went over to the insurgency. Two of these generals, Azhar al Obeidi and Ahmed Abdul Rashid, have in fact been appointed the governors of Mosul and Tikrit respectively by the Baathists.

Some other Baathists, undoubtedly, would be satisfied with some kind of diluted Sunni Islamism – the top commander of the Naqshbandi Army, Izzat Ibrahim al Douri, was one of the few practising Muslims in Saddam’s inner circle. The Sunni tribal militias, on the other hand, are divided among those who demand a partition of Iraq and those who want equality between the sects. And as for the Syrians, a lot of them have no greater desire than to gather arms, money and experience to return and fight the Syrian government.  

Even the core of ISIS is hardly homogeneous. It comprises jihadists from tens of countries, including at least some Indians, who have absolutely nothing in common with each other (including language, culture or military training) except an adherence to an ideology. And that ideology, itself, has nothing more to offer but the setting up of a tenth-century political establishment completely out of touch with the requirements of the modern world.

Obviously, then, ISIS isn’t a group so much as a fiction of a group. It isn’t even an idea like al Qaeda, because it has no goal besides the setting up of the “caliphate” which it has already declared – and, therefore, its primary goal has already been achieved. And its “allies” – the Baathists and the Sunni militia, not to mention the Syrians – are fighting for completely different reasons, most of which are actually completely contradictory to ISIS’ own aims.

So what is the outlook for ISIS? In the short term, it’s attracting recruits for one reason, and one only – it’s the new, dynamic kid on the block, the street thug who’s charismatic, covered with bling and with plenty of money to throw around. Such street thugs usually collect a following in short order, but they also have a short lifespan because they overreach themselves very quickly.

On the other hand, the far from charismatic and very sclerotic leadership of al Qaeda’s core group are like the capos of la Cosa Nostra – well-established, cautious, thinking in the long term and careful about the risks they take. These mafia bosses don’t attract attention as far as possible, and they end up living much longer and making much more money than the young kid on the block.

In other words, from the jihadist point of view, ISIS is the equivalent of a sprinter, say, a hundred-metre runner who will leave everyone else in the dust but run out of steam embarrassingly quickly. Al Qaeda – building up influence slowly and patiently by a system of franchises and subsidiaries worldwide – is the marathon runner who waits for the opponent to exhaust themselves, whereupon a last burst of speed will win him victory. But the TV cameras love the sprinters, and nobody even remembers the marathoners’ names.

It’s when the opposition exhausts itself – that is, when the Americans and Europeans run out of finances and ability to continue their endless Global War Of Terror – that al Qaeda will make its move. Not before. Until then, it’s willing to just keep itself in existence, while setting up launchpads in areas like Yemen and Mali from which to conduct future operations.

But how great is the jihadist threat, actually? If you look at it, not very. Sure, the jihadists can cut off heads on camera and blow up car bombs in photogenic balls of fire, but in all these years of endless jihad, have they been able to control even one single country? Even the Taliban – which is not a jihadist organisation, just a Pashtun tribal fundamentalist militia – at the height of their power could not control all of Afghanistan. The prospects of jihadists taking over anything of any substance are dim unless one looks into the very, very remote future. And long before that future arrives, global warming, resource depletion and the new imperialism of NATO will create problems which will make jihad look like a non sequitur.

Currently, ISIS occupies a space in West Asia which, for convenience’s sake, we might call Syriraq. It has not, after its initial gains, shown any great ability to conduct further advances – and that’s without the airstrikes currently being conducted on it by the United States.  

For all practical purposes, therefore, ISIS has been boxed in and contained. As such, as long as it is left in its box, it will not last long. Its components will soon disintegrate into different mutually warring factions, which will simultaneously, and increasingly ineffectually, fight the external foes. These factions will swiftly draw funding from different power rivals – from Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Qatar for sure, and probably from other sources as well. Some of these funds will be in the form of protection money, and the rest as a means of using the factions as proxies against the factions run by the others. The quantum of violence will increase in the short to medium term, but will be restricted to Syriraq; and in the long term it will die out, not with a bang but with a whimper.

And that is if the Syrian and Iraqi armies, the latter under Iranian leadership and with the help of Shia militias, don’t finish it off first.

But all that will happen only if ISIS is left boxed in Syriraq and allowed to autodestruct.  Fortunately for it, the Nobel Peace Prizident has other ideas.  As everyone knows by now, he’s decided to “degrade and destroy” it by simultaneously bombing it and by arming the other, “moderate”, Syrian militias to fight it.

Naturally, ISIS must have broken out the non-alcoholic champagne when it heard that news. For one thing, it’s been given a purpose greater than the already-achieved goal of setting up its “Caliphate”. The evidence shows clearly that ISIS got a massive “shot in the arm” when America decided to name it its Global Enemy Number One. The United States is hated worldwide by a lot of people for quite excellent reasons, and being identified as its enemy increases the acceptability of virtually any group, anywhere. Besides, the usual American tendency to drone-murder schools and weddings, bomb funerals and target random “military age males” on suspicion alone, will flood ISIS with new recruits.

And, as everyone knows well enough, and as the Evil Emperor himself admitted, there are no “moderate” Syrian rebels. Those that are receiving American largesse have either defected immediately to ISIS or else declared that they will not fight the Islamic State – but that didn’t stop the US Congress from authorising a military aid package for them anyway.

Directly arming and funding your enemy so that he has the wherewithal to fight you, while simultaneously increasing his support base and recruitment by ineffectually bombing him, has to be one of the least effective military strategies in human history.

All this, of course, is if you truly believe the tales about ISIS being the unstoppable juggernaut jihadist monster it’s claimed to be. If you accept that it’s an American tool to be used to oust Iranian influence from Syriraq, it all makes sense, though. Until America completely loses control of the situation, as it is in the act of doing.

I titled this article Don’t Lose Your Head. That’s generally good advice.  

It doesn’t work when you’re holding a knife to your own throat making sawing motions, does it?    

The Plateau and the Stars

                                               

“Don’t camp up on the plateau,” the woman at the village shop told me, as she put my purchases into a large brown paper packet.

I looked at her, surprised. “Why not? It seems a good spot to camp.”

She shrugged and looked away, her pretty face expressionless. “It’s just not...good. That’s all.”

“She’s right,” the other man waiting in the shop said. “Nobody ever goes up to the plateau, not at night.”

“Can you tell me why not?” I asked. “Wild animals? Bandits?”

“No wild animals except jackals, no,” the man said. “And no bandits either, of course.”

“I’ve never heard of bandits all my life,” the woman agreed, counting my money and still not looking at me.

“Then could you please tell me why I shouldn’t camp up there?”

The two of them exchanged glances. “Some people,” he said, reluctantly, “say they’ve...seen something. Especially when the moon’s new. And today’s a new moon.”

“Seen what?”

He shrugged. “One person says one thing. Another person says another. Who’s to know what the truth is?”

“Well, thanks for the food,” I said, picking up the packet and stuffing it into my rucksack. “I’ll see you tomorrow on the way back.”

The woman raised a hand. “You can camp here in the village, if you want. There’s space to put up your tent, or you can just ask someone to take you in for the night.”

I nodded and smiled. “Thanks for the offer, but I’ll take my chances.” In truth, I hadn’t come so far to pitch my tent in the village, and as for asking someone to put me up for the night, that wasn’t even something I was willing to consider. Besides, I knew these people of the highlands still harboured a lot of resentment for we of the plain, whom they considered alien conquerors. If I stayed in the village during the night, I might end up being robbed, or worse.

“You’re taking your life in your hands,” they’d told me back in the university, “going alone among the hill tribes. They still live in the eighteenth century in their heads up there.”

“They wouldn’t dare,” I’d laughed. “Primitives or not, they’re still subject to the law of the land.” I was sure I’d be all right, and so far I hadn’t seen anything to change my mind.

Still, I wasn’t stupid, and I wasn’t scared of “seeing things” either. Also, the sun was about to set, the shadows were getting longer, and I had to get up to the plateau and find a place to camp before dark. So I raised a hand in farewell and left the shop. I didn’t look back, but I could feel the eyes of the two of them on me all the way, and I didn’t doubt that they would be talking about me.

I felt a faint curiosity about what they’d be saying.

In the last golden sunlight of the day, the rocks of the plateau looked smudged, the shadows that dappled them violet and purple. It was still quite hot, but I could already feel the incipient chill of the night. It would be cold on the plateau, and I’d need a fire.

By the time I had found a good place to set up camp, the sun had long since set and it was almost too dark to see. But though the plateau was arid as a desert, there was plenty of dry scrub, enough for me to build up a fire, and by its light I pitched my tent and got ready for the night.

Later, after I’d eaten, as I sat looking up at the stars beside the fire, I thought about how far I was here from the city, much more than the mere physical distance. Back there, the streets would be crowded now, the malls and restaurants expecting the usual Saturday night upsurge of business, the police on the lookout for drunk drivers and drug peddlers in the night clubs. If one looked up into the sky, one couldn’t even see a single star through the blaze of lights.

Somewhere, far away but clear in the night air, a jackal called. That, too, was something that one would never hear in the city, where all anyone would ever hear was the endless noise of traffic and people talking. I listened to the jackal and watched the stars, and thought I’d soon crawl into my tent and go to sleep.

And yet I did not feel like sleeping. It wasn’t the novelty of camping out, because I’d been doing that for days now. I found myself thinking about the people in the village below the slope. How did they spend their evenings? Did they even have a life in the evenings, in a little place like that? Was the woman I’d talked to, perhaps, in the arms of her lover now, or was she spending the dark hours alone?

I hoped, obscurely, that she had a lover. She was a very pretty woman.

That got me thinking of how the man and she had both tried to stop me camping up here on the plateau. Perhaps they’d wanted to harm me, though I’d thought it was unlikely. More it was part superstition and part the desire to scare the man from the big city.

Perhaps, I thought, they had a right to be resentful of people like me, so much richer and better educated than they were. But it wasn’t as though I’d chosen to be born in the city, and of the wrong ethnic origin as well.

Maybe when I went back in the morning, I’d drop back into the shop and tell them that I had spent a nice night up here, and that there was nothing to fear. Maybe they’d feel able to come out here sometimes, and watch the great glittering stars while listening to the call of jackals. Or maybe they wouldn’t believe me.

I shrugged to myself. It didn’t really matter whether they believed me or not. Meanwhile I’d enjoy the silence.

As I thought this, I realised that I could hear something. It wasn’t the jackals, who had stopped calling, but something else, a noise that I could not identify. It sounded like a crowd muttering in the distance.

It grew louder as I listened, and there was no doubt about it – it was growing louder and clearer, and quite definitely the noise of a crowd. At first I thought it was the village, which had got together to either forcibly drag me down from the plateau or maybe lynch me right here. But the noise was coming from the other direction, from out on the plateau.

And it grew louder still. It did not sound like the noise of other crowds I’d heard, though. There were shrill cries, and what sounded like harsh orders, barked out, and among them there were other noises – the squeak of a badly oiled wheel, the creaking of harnesses, and once, quite unmistakably, the lowing of a bullock.

It sounded like an army on the march.

And yet I could see nothing. In the starlight, the plateau looked bare as far as I could see.

A gust of breeze blew smoke from the fire into my face. Blinking, wiping my smarting eyes, I walked a little way from the flames, with my back to them.

And now I could see that the plateau was no longer lit just by starlight. There was a ruddy glow, as by a thousand torches, and in its light I could see the army coming. I stood where I was and watched them come.

Onward they came, nearer and nearer. By now I could see the torches themselves, their light flickering on the soldiers’ conical helmets, reflected off their leather armour, the tips of their spears and the brass fittings of their muskets. Bullocks strained forward in their traces as they towed the long cannon, their muzzles pointing backward, the iron-bound wheels of the gun carriages crushing the stones to powder. And in between, here and there, the tall silhouettes of war elephants rose above the mass like moving hills.

Closer they came, and closer. Now, I could see individual faces, black eyes peering under the brims of the helmets, beards pouring out over breastplates. They did not look at me, though the vanguard was only a few paces away, and I knew that they couldn’t see me. I was not there to them.

I took a couple of steps nearer. The first soldiers were passing me now, almost close enough to touch, but I could not feel the vibration of their steps in the ground. Nor could I feel the heat of their torches, and the dust of the plateau did not lift from their boots and from the hooves of their oxen.

Then I knew it was not a real army, at least not something real in the here and now. And as I stood watching, the main force passed, the cannon and war elephants, the ranks of infantry marching past, disappearing in the light cast by my fire. And now before me was another column, and this one filled with other noises, wailing cries and the crack of whips.

It was the column of the captives. And they were many. It must have been a successful campaign.

I stood where I was and watched them come.

The first prisoners were men, some of them still dressed in the garb of warriors, the remnants of their light armour stained with dried blood and caked with dust. There were others, weatherbeaten peasants in little more than rags, and here and there a few softer-looking merchants in richer clothes. They looked stoically at the ground, or sobbed piteously, as they passed me by.

And then it was the turn of the women and children. By now, I’d realised that they must be coming, but it was still a shock when the first of them arrived. They had been roped together, children separated from their mothers, and their cries rose above the rest of the noise like a litany of despair. There were only a few guards, and they strode up and down, occasionally shouting and raising their whips threateningly.

Then – just opposite me – it happened. I saw the ropes slip from the wrists of a woman. I’d been watching her for some time. There was something curiously familiar about her slight form, the way she turned her head to look at the guards, and I’d been half-expecting her to try and make a break if she could. Even so, when it came, it was a surprise.

She came running right at me, up along the line, head down and arms and legs working, her feet silent on the ground. The nearest guard was quite far away, and for the moment had not seen her. Then there was a startled shout, she turned monetarily to look over her shoulder, her foot caught in the hem of her dress, and she fell in a heap, right at my feet.

I would have bent to catch hold of her, to pick her up and put her behind me, where she would perhaps be safe. But I could not move at all, not even to reach out my fingers to touch her hair.

And the guard was coming, running heavily, his boots flashing in the light of the torches. He reached the woman just as she’d struggled to her knees, and reached for her with one big hand. I couldn’t see his face, because he had his back to the line of torches, but I could feel his excitement and his anger. He said something, quick and guttural, his hand twisting in her dress and dragging her to her feet.

And then she turned and struck at him with a stone she’d been holding in her fist.

It was a blow as quick and graceful as a striking snake, and in other circumstances might have been as deadly. All it did here was bounce harmlessly off his helmet, leaving a smear of dirt on the metal. And it infuriated him, of course.

I saw him raise the whip and bring it down again, once, twice, a third time. And though she raised an arm to ward off the blows, she kept fighting, kicking at his boots, and still trying to strike at him with that stone. They fought together, so close to me that I might have felt their breath.

I think he would have killed her then, and I think that was what she wanted. But other guards had arrived by then, three of them, and they pulled the first one back. The woman was on the ground, her head hanging between her shoulders, her dress torn from her back and the exposed skin welling with blood from the whips. But she still tried to fight, weakly, when two of the guards caught her by the arms and dragged her away.

For an instant she looked back at me, and the light of a torch one of the guards carried fell on her face.

It was the woman in the shop, the woman who had told me not to camp up on the plateau. Through the dirt and blood on her face, through the tears, there was no mistaking her. And the guard, the one who had first come after her, in the light of the torch I saw his face, too.

Then they had dragged her back to the column, and marched away, to whatever fate awaited her. I did not know it, but I could guess.

And, suddenly, I could move again, but I had no desire to.

And as I stood there I wondered why I had come back to this place, this long forgotten battlefield, when I didn’t have to; why, when there was nothing to see here and no research to do that I couldn’t have done at my computer at the university, I’d come here, after all.

The history we’d been taught, the one I’d been researching, said it had been a clean campaign, that the armies had treated the defeated honourably. We weren’t like the others, the ones who took slaves and displaced entire populations in the course of victor’s justice.

I saw again that woman’s face, and I knew I would go back tomorrow, but not to the University. I could no longer research history, the history we’d been taught. Not after this. And especially not after seeing the guard’s face.

I knew that face well enough. I saw it in the mirror every day.

The army was gone. The night was dark and still, and when I looked back, my fire had burned down to embers. I must have been standing there for quite a long time.

In the distance a jackal called, like a mocking voice.

Head down, I walked back to the tent, and though it was cold, it was not the reason I was shivering all the way.

Copyright B Purkayastha 2014

A Word On The Scottish Independence Vote

Tomorrow, as I write this, the people of Scotland will vote on whether to break away from Britain to be, once again, an independent nation.

I’m not Scottish, I have never been to Scotland, and I will, as far as it’s possible to be certain about anything in this world, certainly never visit Scotland. Whatever Scotland decides won’t directly affect me.

But I am a citizen of one of the many nations which were enslaved, looted and ravished by the unspeakably vile British Empire. My people were one of many who were starved in deliberately induced mass famines by the British, their young men marched off to war to fight in Britain’s conflicts, their resources stripped to feed British factories, whose products were then sold back to them at gunpoint. My people, like others, saw the British come as missionaries and traders, and stay as conquerors and occupiers. They saw the British capacity for greed and perfidy, their utter and unscrupulous criminality.

Not for nothing has Britain earned the name of Perfidious Albion.

The British came, they sucked us dry, and they left when there was nothing more that they could profitably extract. And they did it over and over again, all across the globe, from West Africa to South East Asia. The only lands they didn’t strip bare were the ones they seeded with their own colonists; Canada, New Zealand, Australia.

Is it a wonder that I believe Britain has lost all right to exist?

It’s another interesting thing, which most people should have noted by now, that when it comes to referendums on independence elsewhere – Kosovo, say, or South Sudan – the West is all for it, and pours considerable resources into ensuring the results will go in the desired direction, even though the end result is always chaos and infighting. However, when these referendums are to be held in places where the main country is a Western puppet, like Moldavia or Ukraine or Georgia, they are as much against them as they are for them in nations which aren’t friendly to Uncle Sam, even though the reasons given by the secessionists – majoritarian brutality and oppression – are the same as those America and the EU support, and usually with far more credible evidence.

And when the secessionist referendums happen in their own countries – Quebec, say, or Catalonia, or now Scotland – they are as strongly against them, even though the prospective new nations are guaranteed to follow the same “democratic” traditions as the parent nations. Oh, when it comes to preserving their own territorial integrity, anything goes, including open threats and blackmail.

Double standards which would seem strange to anyone who thinks the West is as honest as it claims to be.

So this is my message to the Scottish people:

Dear brothers and sisters:

You have the opportunity to rid yourself of the vilest, most evil political construct ever to exist, the British Empire. Please do not throw away this chance.

If you choose to stay on as part of the British Empire, what will you have to look forward to?

- Continued exploitation at the hands of the English, who suddenly realised their “love” of you when you announced your secession referendum. Remember your emphatically left-wing tradition, drowned out by the inheritors of Thatcherism and their comrades in arms in England.

- Continued slavery to the whims and fancies of the United States of America, with your young men being sent off to fight in its imperialist wars in the name of a “special relationship”.

- The continued opprobrium of the world, when the government in London continues to shelter terrorist warlords and criminal oligarchs, and keeps repeating transparent falsehoods in the interests of the Evil Empire.

- The anger and disappointment of other prospective new nations, who are looking at you with hope, in the belief that your independence will go a long way towards validating their own.

Help end Britain, a name which should no longer exist outside the history books. If you miss this chance, your children may not forgive you.

Also remember this: you’re voting for independence. The vile British Empire, on the other hand, is fighting for its survival. If Scotland goes, how long can the English hold on to Wales? Northern Ireland? Even Cornwall? The colonies dotted around the globe, like the Islas Malvinas and Gibraltar? Britain knows this, and will do anything – anything at all – to ensure its continued existence. Unless you vote by a very considerable margin for freedom, the vote could easily be rigged to read the other way...and it will.

They claim that if you vote for freedom, you'll be worse off. So why is it that they are now coming, hat in hand, to beg you not to break free?

Vote in large numbers and vote for freedom and liberty.

All the best to you. 

Three Wishes

Five paces from the edge of the cliff, the little man who had been leading Silvana paused. “There,” he said, in his reedy voice, “the edge of this cliff – that’s the end of the world.”

Silvana frowned and looked at him suspiciously. “How do I know you aren’t trying to cheat me?” she asked. “How do I know you won’t just run off while I’m looking?”

The little man grinned, his beard wagging. “You could always use one more wish to make sure I don’t go,” he said cheerfully.

Silvana shook her head and darted out her hand, grabbing the little man by the shoulder. “Not so fast,” she said.

“Hey!” The little man squealed and wriggled, but Silvana’s grip was firm – as firm, in fact, as the trap she’d rescued him from an hour ago. “That isn’t fair!”

“Look who’s talking,” Silvana said. “You promised me three wishes for freeing you. You’ve got to fulfil those wishes.”

“All right,” the little man muttered. “So look at the end of the world and have done with it.”

Silvana stepped closer to the edge of the cliff and looked. The end of the world wasn’t very interesting. Just lots and lots of emptiness, with nothing to see, not even any stars. She quickly grew bored.

“Well, what now?” the little man demanded aggressively. “What do you want next?”

Silvana looked at him thoughtfully. “This isn’t going quite the way I expected,” she said. “I’d always imagined that you fairies were happy to give wishes to anyone who did them a good turn. But you aren’t happy about it at all.”

“It’s not so easy, giving wishes,” the little man grumbled. “You think it’s so easy? We only have a limited amount of magic that we can do, and wishes take up more of it than you imagine. So, what’s your next wish? Let’s do it and get it over with.”

Silvana went down on one knee and looked into his face. It was an even uglier face close up, with tufts of hair growing in random directions and a nose like the beak of a bird of prey. “Why are you so unhappy?” she asked.

“Unhappy?” the little man snorted. “I’m not unhappy. It’s you lot who are.”

“We are?” Silvana blinked, surprised.

“Of course you are. If you weren’t, would you want wishes? You’d be happy with what you had.”

Silvana thought about that a bit. “Do you know,” she said, “you’re right.”

The little man glowered. “Of course I’m right.” He kicked at the ground angrily. “All these centuries, I’ve been asked over and over for wishes. It seems to be all that people want. Do you suppose I haven’t seen everything that people want, over and over? I know everything they’ll ask for, and I even know how those wishes will turn out. But do they ever learn?”

Silvana looked at him. “Can you tell me something?” she asked. “Has anyone ever been happy with the wishes you’ve given them?”

The little man smirked. “Never. They ask for money or beauty or health, and afterwards they all wish they hadn’t. It doesn’t come free, you know.”

“I’m beginning to understand that.” Silvana nodded. “What were the wishes the last person wanted?”

The little man shook his head. “I can’t talk about that, but I’ll tell you this – his last wish was to have never met me in the first place. Now, what do you want for your second wish?”

Silvana smiled slowly. “Just this. I want you to be whatever you want. Anything at all.”

There was a brief pause. And then there was a puff of light, and something bright went leaping up into the sky. And from high up above came a shout of joy, shivering down Silvana’s spine and to the soles of her feet.

She didn’t regret the third wish at all.

Copyright B Purkayastha 2014

Message

Note: I wrote this story for a SF website which had a word limit of 1500 words. It rejected the story, so I'm free to republish it here.

   **************

 

On the scoutship’s forward vision screen, the planet ahead was perhaps the most beautiful thing the men inside had ever seen.

 

“It’s beautiful,” Captain Randy, nicknamed “Red”, said.

 

“Beautiful,” the engineer, Jay Matous, agreed.

 

The electronics officer, Conrad King, nodded his shaved head.

 

It was a world of blues and greens, soft pastel colours of seas and forest-shrouded continents, over which sheets of white and grey cloud drifted enticingly. It was heart-achingly reminiscent of far distant earth.

 

“Even though the probes had said this planet was suitable for life,” Red Randy said, “I’d never expected anything like this.”

 

As the scoutship slid through the upper atmosphere, the landscape below grew ever clearer. They could see immense, forest-covered plains, expanses of prairie, and mountains that looked as though they might reach up and touch the sky. Mighty rivers wound their way through the continents, to drain into seas green with life.

 

The scoutship descended on a verdant valley, landing by a little stream, near a line of tall trees.

 

For a long time nobody wanted to move. Through the microphones on the outside of the ship they listened to the nearly forgotten noises of wind and the distant cries of birdlike animals.

 

“Send out the robots,” Red Randy commanded finally. Matous pressed several buttons in sequence on a keyboard. A panel in the belly of the ship slid open, and the robots crawled out on their spindly, spiderlike limbs, waving their many metal jaws in the air. Soon, they were digging into the ground, sucking in air samples, and tasting the water of the river.

 

It was not long before the data began flooding in. It was even better than they had thought. The air wasn’t only breathable but the water in the stream perfectly potable. There didn’t seem to be any overtly hostile wildlife. It was wonderful, it was paradise.

 

“ Call it Paradise,” Conrad King said.

 

“Yes,” Randy agreed. “That’s a good name. What do you think, Jay?”

 

Jay Matous was looking intently at the little screen displaying information on electronic emissions. “Look. We’re picking up a modulated signal.”

 

“What?” Conrad King asked. “There shouldn’t be any such thing here. It’s a pristine planet.”

 

“Is it?” Matous asked. “See for yourself.”

 

They all peered at the screen. The message was faint, but quite undeniable.

 

“It’s coming from near the sea up north, the one we flew over,” Matous said. “But there weren’t any signs of a signal station there.”

 

“We’re going to have to go and check it out,” Captain Randy replied. His bearded face was grim. “If this planet is inhabited, well...”

 

Nobody said anything. They all knew what it meant if the planet was inhabited.

 

Recalling the spidery robots, the ship rose from the little valley and crossed cautiously back over the continent. But apart from large flights of birdlike animals they saw nothing in the air, while the savannah below was only covered with herds of creatures resembling elephants, antelopes and buffalo. And apart from the faint whisper of the electronic signal, which strengthened slowly as they approached, the antennae picked up nothing else.

 

“The signal is coming from directly below us.” King pointed at the screen. “But there’s nothing there except the beach and some trees.”

 

“We’ll have to land and take a closer look,” Red Randy ordered.

 

On blasting downward jets, the scoutship settled down on the beach, fusing a patch of sand into black glass.

 

“It’s coming from somewhere behind that hillock over there,” Jay Matous said, pointing to a jagged column of stone rising in the middle distance. “I’ll send out a robot.”

 

“Do that,” Randy confirmed. “Conrad, what about the signal?”

 

“I’m running it through the translator software,” Conrad King said. “It looks as though it were made to be easy to translate. I don’t know what that could –”

 

He was interrupted by a shout from Matous. “Look at what the robot’s radar’s showing!”

 

They turned to the screen on which the robot’s ground-penetrating radar’s images were displayed.

 

“It’s a city,” King said.

 

“The ruins of a city,” Randy corrected. “It must have been a huge city once, but it’s all buried now.”

 

They looked down at the lines and circles on the screen, the broken rectangles of crumbled buildings and collapsed channels. “Must have been impressive, when it was new,” Conrad King said. “What do you suppose happened?”

 

“Who knows?” Red Randy clicked at a computer and whistled. “From the estimated rate of burial of the ruins, this city is at least ten million years old.”

 

They thought about that. “Imagine the strength of the power source,” King said at last, “to be able to keep going so long.”

 

“It must have been much more powerful once,” Matous replied. “We’re probably just in time. Another few hundred thousand years and it would be gone.”

 

“Wonder what it says.” Randy scratched at his beard. “It must be important.”

 

As though on cue, there was a beep, and a screen on the far side of the cabin lit up.

 

“The computer has deciphered it!” King exclaimed.

 

A synthesised voice began to speak.

 

“To whoever receives this message,” it began, “greetings.

 

“Welcome to our planet, which was once fair and beautiful, and is now a gutted ruin.

 

“Once, we had a lovely world, filled with wonder, on which, for uncounted millions of years, the cycle of life moved on. But then, by a mischance of genetic shift, it produced evil beyond imagining – us.

 

“For we were greedy. It is difficult to emphasise how greedy. We destroyed this fair world with our greed, we ripped her treasures from her breast, and turned them to poison smoke tainting the skies. We fought wars among ourselves, to gain the right to rip ever more of those treasures, to make ever greater amounts of poison, and the more we got, the more we wanted. We killed ourselves in our fight to become ever richer, endlessly.

 

“There came a time when so much of our world had been destroyed that there seemed nothing left to destroy, but still we continued. Maddened monsters of the dark, we gnawed away at ourselves, somehow trying to postpone the inevitable reckoning to the morrow, and pretending that it would never come.

 

“At last, though, there came the day when there was nothing left. We had cut away our own roots, and everything was tottering, ready to fall.

 

“There were those of us on that day who demanded that the most terrible of our weapons, those which were so destructive that nobody had ever even attempted to use them, be finally unleashed. They suggested that we – rather than leave anything behind us – destroy all life, and take it all with us, into oblivion.

 

“Fortunately, there were others – those who urged that what was left of other life should be given a chance to take back the planet we had looted from them, and perhaps – over time – make it fresh and beautiful once more.

 

“But there was no question about ourselves. We had had our chance, and we had thrown it away. On this everyone, at long last, agreed: our species had to go. We no longer deserved to exist, so we chose extinction.

 

“As I compose these words, through the window by my side, I can see the sky that is so grey with the haze of pollution that it has not cleared even in the decades since industrial production collapsed. Out to sea, the oily waves glimmer with poison. Is it my foolish fancy that someday this sky might be blue, and the ocean fresh and filled with life again?”

 

All three men instinctively turned to the viewscreen showing the ocean. Near the horizon, something vast leaped out of the water, turned a joyous somersault, and crashed down in a burst of spray.

 

“I am among the last of my species,” the voice continued. “After we are gone, the planet will return to its true owners – those who kept it unspoilt and ever-renewing, until we came along and stole it from them.

 

“If anyone should hear this message, this is our farewell, and our request to you; do not do to your world as we did to ours. There are things that are worth living for, and material advancement at all costs are not among them.”

 

The message ended. The three men exchanged glances.

 

“There’s that thing again,” Conrad King said, as the vast beast burst out of the water on the horizon. “Let’s fly over low and see if we can harpoon it.”

 

Red Randy wasn’t listening. “We’ll have to see how fast we can colonise this planet,” he said. “There’s plenty of space, once we clear away all these useless forests. As soon as we can ensure that there aren’t any dangerous pathogens, I’ll send a report –“

 

Jay Matous was replaying the message. “Weapons,” he repeated. “Where are those weapons?”

 

Creeping up from over the hills, night was coming.

 

 

Copyright B Purkayastha 2014

Raghead: Drone Man At War (Part II)

* http://news.antiwar.com/2014/09/12/moderate-syria-rebels-sign-non-aggression-pact-with-isis/

** http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/bush-plotted-to-lure-saddam-into-war-with-fake-un-plane-465436.html

*** http://news.antiwar.com/2014/09/14/us-would-attack-syrian-military-if-it-fires-on-us-bombers/

Copyright B Purkayastha 2014

Broken Ground

Last night I stood on a wide open field

Covered with rubbish. The ruined walls of a bombardment

Tattered blue polythene from a refugee camp

With a child’s doll

Poking its head out from under it

To see if it was safe to come outside.

It was a field without a blade of grass

Watered with no water, 

Where nothing grew

But broken stone.

And around, streets hummed with traffic

Cars and shops and people.
Life moved on.

I stood on this open field

And looked down on a wooden board

Half-stuck under a block of stone.

Perhaps a shop’s broken signboard

Perhaps a message from the Universe.

All I knew was, this was what I’d come to find

It was very important to me

And perhaps to everything, else as well.

Then it was that God and Heaven came up to me. Two sad men

Once tall, now bowed, with drooping moustaches

And hollow eyes.

They came to me on that broken ground

And looked at me and said - 

“We surrender, we have lost.

We admit it. Take us prisoner

And do with us what you will.”

So I said to them, “I can’t. I don’t have time.

Please find someone to surrender to.

And don’t drop sweet wrappers on the ground.

It’s already littered enough."

And then I went on trying to free the board

And a corrugated sheet of iron

Leaned sideways, and fell

With a hollow clang.

(This was actually a dream from last night. Interpretations welcome.)

Copyright B Purkayastha 2014