Memory Fragments

"Ugh!"

A painful grunt left my mouth as I slowly got my consciousness again and felt my head cracking open. It felt like my brain was swollen but gradually the swelling was subsiding, easing the pain. The headache was too much to bear but it was gradually declining as pieces of strange memories entered my mind. They were peculiar memories which I was not the owner of!

Keeping my eyes closed I started to put the pieces together of those fragments like a puzzle. These memories, they belonged to a boy who can only remember that he was born in a very old hut made up of straw and mud, under a night sky filled with beautiful and colorfully glowing stars…and nebulas? I didn't see his mother or father in the fragments; poor boy was just put in another worn down hut with 7 other children.

'The memories are missing until the boy gets to the age of 7.' I couldn't find any other fragment in between the previous memory and one of much older date. So I left the matter there and went through the available memories. As I pieced many fragments together and created a picture, the picture started moving like a movie!

***

"Hey kid, what's your name?" an old man holding a hoe said in a tired and sad voice. He was sitting beside a farmland, probably resting in the night after a whole day of toiling laboriously in the field. He was staring at the night sky filled with colorful stars. The sky looked like a beautiful galaxy as seen in a planetarium.

"Alex. My name's Alex." replied a kid who was only 7 years old. He was as skinny as a skeleton! He looked small and malnourished, his cheek bones protruding out and his brown eyes would have looked deep and beautiful only if they were not so lackluster. He was the kid whose memories I was piecing together in my head. The kid was breathing heavily, gasping for air. His skin and clothes were filled with dirt. He too was sitting and grazing at the stars beside the old man. If not for the dirt on them, they would have looked intellectuals or poets!

The old man then broke the silence by asking the child, "Do you know who your parents are?"

Without changing his gaze, Alex innocently replied, "I don't know who my father was but I know that my mother was a whore." Hearing that last word the old man turned towards Alex but without changing his gaze, Alex continued, "I don't know what that means, the masters keep calling me the 'son of a whore' and a guy once told me that my mother was a whore and that she's probably dead now." There was sadness in Alex's eyes. He then shifted his gaze from the stars towards the old man and asked, "Do you know anything about that? Can you tell me what that means?"

The old man's eyes got slightly wet on hearing the innocent words of the young boy. He smiled and replied, "I'm sorry young man but I don't know anything about that. Although I'm pretty sure your mom is happier wherever she's now." The old man knew very well what happened to the old batch of 'breeders' and how they died due to a small mistake. None were spared.

Alex turned his gaze back to the stars. After gazing for a few seconds he asked, "Oh! By the way old man, you never mentioned your name! What is it?"

The old man smiled and said with a reminiscing tone, "Not everyone is as lucky as you Alex. Not everyone gets a name in this world."

Alex looked at him with a sad face. Not having a name meant that their existence was denied by the masters ever since they were born. There was nobody to feed them anything, not until they would start earning a minuscule amount of food by working under the masters. Although the food here was barely edible but atleast it was enough to prevent someone from dying of starvation. But they didn't even have that privilege.

Alex looked at the farm and thought, 'I wonder how he survived and got himself a farm like this. He even got the masters to send him slaves to work on his farm!'

The old man looked at the skinny boy and taking out a fruit from his rag he said, "The food they provide is not nutritious enough for a growing kid like you. Here, this is a starlight fruit; it's very sweet and has many vitamins and minerals in it. It's the only fruit that can grow in the starlight, in the absence of daylight, is not poisonous and is easy to digest." He handed Alex an apple like fruit which had a star shaped crown on top of it. The fruit had a dull shade of yellow but the star shaped crown was glowing with a very low purple hue. It looked so beautiful that I got slightly enthralled by its beauty! "In this whole village, only I know how to extract its seeds!" he said with a prideful smile pulling me out of my enthrallment.

Alex received the fruit with gratitude and started eating it like a hungry monkey. Both the old guy and I smiled simultaneously on this scene. When Alex was done eating, the old man said, "Good, but I can only give you one fruit a day and it will not be free. You'll have to come to the field everyday and do the same amount of toiling you did today to earn this fruit.

Alex nodded and said, "Thank you" before turning to the night sky again.

***

Whoosh!

The scene stopped. The scene infront of me then started to move with a rapid speed as if I was fast forwarding through a movie.

The scenes were broken as those were the fragments I couldn't fit into the puzzle. They were like an incomplete puzzle with missing major pieces. I stood in the white world when the 'movie' stopped at a scene and I played it.

***