Excerpt from The Hand of Divine Justice: Prologue II
We are all heroes of life.
Grandma took deep breaths of the fresh air coming from the mountains while walking, at my side, the lengthy street leading to the poorer city suburb. She seemed tired, and her features were a look of concern and hopeless resignation at what was likely to confront her. We were on our way to visit people she knew—people who had recently experienced major setbacks she had told me. Grandma wasn’t a very talkative person, even at the best of times; and I usually followed her without asking questions, most of which would only have been met by stony silence anyway.
“How long are we going to stay there?” I finally asked her.
“As long as necessary. Don’t worry, we’ll be back before nightfall,” Grandma reluctantly said just to humor me.
We were carrying as many pots of cooked meals as we could, along with freshly baked round bread and a multitude of small containers of her concoctions. These frequent trips used to sadden me, but I couldn’t refuse to accompany my grandmother who was now old and couldn’t carry the pots and jars alone. How often she visited these families in distress was hard to determine because it mainly depended on her personal schedule, which was chaotic at best. Nevertheless, it was a staggering burden for an old woman.
We approached a crumbling house that had small holes in the walls, instead of windows, and a shaky wooden door. Inside the house, the floor had no tiles—only a thin layer of cement. The walls were depressing as they were made of red mud and the light barely penetrated to the inner side of the room. In the room itself, the many children were too emaciated for much movement or games while their parents lay almost comatose on a mattress placed on the bare ground. The dwelling smelled of squalor, of death even. Despite my familiarity with this environment, I recoiled from the smell instinctively, and a cold sweat ran down my spine.
“May I please stay outside?” I asked her.
“Of course,” replied my grandmother, who had meanwhile set out some food on the tiny table. The hungry children instantly grabbed it up. While they were gorging themselves, Grandmother drew near to the sick parents and patiently hand-fed her soup to them. I stood outside, ashamed of my weakness and inability to lend her a hand. I tried many times to enter the small room, but I retraced my steps immediately as soon as the terrible odor penetrated my nostrils. It was pitch-dark when we left the area with only her empty pots.
We walked silently, lost in thought when for the first time my grandmother felt the necessity to scold me. “You should never show your weakness because, for one thing, it upsets the people you visit,” she said to me in a harsh tone. “Further,” she continued, “life is totally unpredictable. You never know when and how each one of us could be in another person’s shoes. I hope you realize that,” Grandma said.
“I do, and I truly wanted to help you; but I felt dizzy, and I almost vomited up everything in my stomach. I am so sorry, Grandma. I’ll do better next time,” I said to her.
“There will not be a ‘next time’ for some of them, and their children will become orphans,” she replied coldly. “It may be too late for them.” Her dry eyes looked at the dark skies and me, as I lagged behind and witnessed her silent frustration and anger that she so badly tried to conceal.
“Please speak to me, Grandma,” I begged her.
But Grandma talked pathetically as if to herself: “Life unravels itself and not always in the best of ways. Can we really recount the true saga and the sorrow of generations of families marked by tragedy? It was as if they were predestined to suffer. Was it all man-made? Was it avoidable? ‘Simply fate,’ one person could say, and others would blame a society dogged by rigid social rules and sanctions. We can all howl in the wilderness at poverty and lost humanity. Fat lot of good it will do us or them,” her voice echoed in the wind.
This, then, was my grandmother and I, as a young demoiselle, experiencing firsthand the levels of poverty in the city. “It was even worse decades ago,” Grandma said. “But personal tragedy never comes just from poverty alone—for some people, yes, maybe! There are, however, stories about places where social stigma and disgrace in the community are piled on top of the suffering through poverty.”
For the first time, I sensed what was deeply rooted in her, the true aspects of her thoughts which she had never shared with me or with anyone else previously. Silently, I clenched her hand. Her skin was rough, and her fingers were gnarled like vine stems.
