Outlanders by San Tuathaigh;

Author:San Tuathaigh;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 1)
Published: 2019-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

Illumination

Burma

I

A guard was humming outside. Azhar blinked as dawn flooded into the cell – sun split between bamboo bars, spilling in stripes across the earthen floor. A fetid stench hung about, that of hard-worked, unwashed bodies. He mouthed a prayer through cracked lips. So began day twelve at the plantation.

A latch rattled and the door swung open.

‘Right, you swine, to your feet.’

Azhar stared at the black boots: tight laces, tucked trousers – baggy and olive.

‘Come on, kala, get busy,’ said the voice.1

He gazed up the olive legs: firm belt, new holster, baton gripped by a vein-bulging hand, ammo pouches, and shirt pockets stuffed with cigarettes – to the sneering face under the cap. The soldier had the red badge of the Tatmadaw, the Burmese military, on his shoulder, and an alcoholic fume wafted down off him as Azhar creaked upright: head going light, belly rumbling.

Outside, a cluster of guards sucked on smokes, spitting tobacco flakes and taunts towards the stream of prisoners filing out of the huts. One had an assault rifle cocked on his hip, another held an Alsatian: poised, licking its chops. The prisoners were counted and parcelled out into teams in the yard, sunlit barracks to one side, the edge of a grove on the other: ranks of cashew trees throwing their shadows westward as the sun shimmered aloft from behind the distant hills.

They trudged into the foliage. Among the low canopy the workforce shuffled, plucking and placing into baskets the precious fruit of their labours. Sweat gathered on brows and soaked armpits, flies buzzed in the dead heat and soldiers lolled about, rifles slung. Azhar and his cousin were working side by side – they had been abducted together. Azhar glanced around, leaned across.

‘If we stay here, Tuahid, we’ll die,’ he whispered.

Tuahid did not reply, just kept picking.

‘We get weaker by the day,’ Azhar continued. ‘If we don’t do something soon, it’ll be too late. We’ll be like … them.’

He nodded towards a pair of wretches – sharp cheeks, blank eyes – harvesting robotically nearby. His cousin dropped his arms, slouched.

‘We must be brave,’ said Azhar. ‘We must escape tonight.’

Tuahid snatched a cashew apple, seemed about to crush it, then placed it into the basket. He sighed.

‘You are right,’ he said. ‘What is your plan?’

II

Azhar explained his simple plan in a moment and in another moment his cousin agreed. They had all day to ponder it, its details, its time frame, its chance of success. There were risks, vagaries and consequences to conjure. Azhar tried to focus on the cashews, tried to put only his next foot forward.

His mind drifted to his childhood. He had come shrieking into the world, thirty years earlier, among a cluster of cabins on the outskirts of the township of Maungdaw, in Rakhine State, western Burma. A tree stretched above the gable of his family home. As a little boy he had longed to climb it. There were many futile efforts and scratches. One sunny day, however, he succeeded. From its

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