Knowing fully why, he awoke with a start. The night had been an agonizingly prolonged one. A million thoughts and imaginations had formed and criss-crossed each other in the limitless expanse of his darkness. He had lain still in semi-comatose disquiet on the edge of a rickety bed on its last legs. A pallet which bore the combined weight of twice the number of siblings it was originally planned for, and underneath which lay his combined savings for a hard season of toil and sweat on the furrowed vegetable gardens carved out of the unforgiving hills.

Five hundred and seventy four rupees. That was what he had achieved out of the blisters on his palms and the tendons of his hinds. More than enough to get to Phaya and back. Enough to buy a new pair of shoes to replace the inheritance of his dying chappals. He had waited all night to begin this journey. It was time to get going.

He had been to the big city once, as a little boy of five. He had never since had an occasion to see either conurbation or parental extravagance. He remembered both well. Today he would relive that fond memory. If only for a day.

The expedition to Phaya involved a two-hour trek along a steep jungle track to a neglected highway, a three-hour ride on a battered Shaktiman to a dusty town on a slightly less battered highway, and a ninety-minute express run on a shiny new bus. The first part of the journey was free and depended entirely on the strength of his legs.

The second leg of the journey involved some patience and negotiation with a grizzled driver depending on the weight of his truck, the contents of its cargo, and his capacity for either greed or charity. The last leg was the one in which the legs rested while the rest of the body jumped and swayed about for the astronomical sum of twenty rupees. And then, he would alight and rubberneck to make his feet lighter.

It was all at once awesome and adventuresome. The same stuff his pagan ancestors did to venture into uncharted territory before they ran into the western wall of baptism and each other. In theory at least. Not that he cared or understood what those theories thought about themselves. All he wanted was to step into a new pair of shoes and get back home the same way he left it.

He climbed out and tried to calm down, to recover the spirit he had lost and found in sleep. He looked about the shadows in the twilight, trying to loosen the nervous tension that that hung heavily in the morning mist, and the clouds of cold sleep that begged him to float back to the warmth of his blanket. The room showed no signs of violence, although the door had never really recovered from the angry kick of a vicious jungle boot. It creaked nervously on its shattered hinges as he made his way out, and gratefully shut itself in to rejoin the undisturbed sounds of sleep left behind.

Only when the door closed did he understand the meaning of solitude. For a moment, he reflected on the significance of his snoring family, but he thought about it less with every patched-up-chappal step he took away from home. The clamor of roosters and dogs pursued him to the edge of the village. After that, there was only the noise of excited head and heart. He raced along the winding trail, trying to escape his own steps, which sounded huge and alien in the unfriendly undergrowth. In what seemed like a new record, he reached the valley below without a break or sweat. Going downhill was always the easy part.

The road in front of him had once been smooth and shiny and black. In paper at least. It was a rural legend repeated approximately once every five years by a motorcade of white cars and jeeps and dusty men, who proclaimed glad tidings of peace and prosperity using big words that no one, including themselves, understood. He had watched them come and go over the years with curious bemusement.

Maybe they were making a pilgrimage for atonement and appeasement to the jungle gods. That was what he had concluded. The jungle-gods-with-automatic-rapid-fire-shoot-first-questions-later did all the deciding anyway. And the wretched road could never tell the difference.

It lay about in bits and pieces, with debris scattered everywhere in unhappy extirpation. Its pleas for repair muffled, trampled, and overrun under the avoirdupois of retreaded rubber, and ground into the dust where it puffed in sullen clouds and finally settled in big orange stains on the weeds and grass at its fringes.

He blew away a fresh layer of dust on a freshly felled log and perched himself atop it. First leg of shoe expedition complete. Now all he had to do was wait for the four-wheeled beast that would stop here to cart away these dismembered remains of fast disappearing woodland. It shouldn't be too long now. He stretched out on the wooden limb and shut his eyes towards something more pleasing.

The roar of diesel brought him to his feet. A truck was coming towards him, but it was headed the wrong way. Maybe it'll stop here and turn around, he wished aloud. The truck rolled up and stopped. First wish granted.

"What are you doing here?" the man in green said in a tone most unfriendly over the barrel of a shiny black weapon.

"I'm on my way to Phaya, sir" he replied in his most sincere pitch.

"There's a curfew on. Some woman got shot while running away".
"You go on home now, boy, and don't run. We just might shoot you too", a cackle of draconian laughter erupted from within the truck.

He watched the truck drive into the distance and slowly turned around. He would come here again someday. Curfews don't last long enough. Nothing really did. Even his broken chappals.