18/09/2025
Scarecrow
The sea is never silent here. Even when the waves lie flat as hammered tin, there is a sound beneath the sound — a pulse, a breathing, as though the ocean itself is alive and waiting. And when I walk along the ragged shore, I feel it watching me like the crow perched on that crooked post, its head tilted, one beady eye fixed, unblinking.
Perhaps the crow knows me. Perhaps it remembers when I arrived here, a thin boy with salt in my mouth and no name in my throat, only a number pressed into my hand — 566. A number that sticks to the tongue like rust.
These huts of ours, stitched together from palm leaves and tarpaulin, do not deserve to be called homes. They are skins stretched over bones, trembling whenever the wind remembers its strength. And inside these huts we — the exiles, the boat-people, the nameless — wait as though waiting were life itself.
Children grow without learning tomorrow,
old men count days that no longer exist,
women stare at the horizon
As if it might give them back what was taken.
But the horizon gives nothing. It only stares back, as empty as the crow’s eye.
There was a time when I thanked God for letting me live. I had escaped rifles, bayonets, fire licking at the rafters of our lane-home in Lanka. I came to this shore believing I had been spared. But soon I discovered there are cruelties sharper than bullets. What is mercy worth when it reduces you to a statistic? When your only proof of life is that someone, somewhere, has written your headcount in a ledger?
I should be grateful. We eat because strangers toss grain in our direction. We clothe ourselves because kindly people send boxes of old shirts and saris. Yet every mouthful tastes of charity, every thread smells faintly of someone else’s body. I try to swallow and tell myself: At least I live. But a voice inside me asks: Is this life? Or merely the absence of death?
At night, when the camp sleeps, the boats come again — black shapes sliding through black water, carrying more faces hollowed by fear. They stumble ashore, and it is my job to count them. Perhaps that is why I never forget numbers. Perhaps that is why I cannot forget mine. Five hundred and sixty-six. A number that does not pray, does not dream, does not even die.
The wind here is salt and iron. It dries the lips and cracks the tongue. Sometimes I feel I have been standing on this beach forever, waiting for something nameless, a verdict from heaven or from history. The waves keep bringing the same question:
Who are you? And I have no answer. How does one answer without a country? Without identity? Without even a name?
“This is how I begin the preface of my book Refugee No. 566 – A Story in Exile By R. Shyam Nair. The book is now available in all major stores, including Amazon, Google Play Books, Apple Books, Smashwords, and many more. I’d love to hear your reviews and feedback on it.”
R Shyam Nair
