Night Unending

Night Unending

The gentle breeze passes scherzando about them but they do not feel it, the rippling waves crash against the shore but they do not hear it, the lazy sun emerges from its blanket of pink tinted clouds but they do not see it. And yet they are neither blind nor deaf, just insensitive to the world of nature and of men, to the din around them and the emptiness within them.
These are not mere rhetorical phrases to amuse an armchair lounger because the pain behind these words is unspeakable, and the story so sad, it made the critics cry. I don’t think anyone can forget the holocaust that occurred two years back.
“It is probably the saddest record of human ego”, echoed my friend Sam, wishing it had never happened. Alas! Just over two years ago the scientists of the International Federation of Nuclear Sciences had managed to isolate a radioactive element which was hitherto unknown. This element was some 2,500 times more powerful than any known radioactive element. The may-have-been-well-meaning-scientists speculated how much power could be harnessed from just a few kilograms of it—enough to power the world for the decade to come. Their complacency, however, led them to ignore the power of annihilation it possessed.
“Who let these morons enter the federation anyway? Didn’t they even realise how many lives they would be jeopardising?”, hissed Sam, out of gritted teeth. Sam, a photo journalist, had made a well acclaimed documentary on the nuclear explosion which we now sat watching in melancholy.
The Federation, in its crazed urge to test this new element, had straightaway put it to use in a reactor, without ensuring that it was secured of leakage. It showed magnificent results for a while and the media lauded their discovery as a major milestone in science. Then as that black Thursday dawned, no one knew what it had in store for them. The fission sequence was initiated and within hours of it, the people living in a radius of about 80 miles began choking, suffocating, developed sudden allergies and dangerous asthmatic coughs. Before the most “erudite” scientists could discern the cause, the cause revealed itself.
A mushroom cloud of unending magnitude rose to engulf the skies. The world was plunged in chaos, that is the world that had not perished already. The day was plunged in the doom of darkness and hysteria prevailed because the reactor was still hissing death at the world.
Sam and I sat watching the tape on which were recorded the most gruesome spectacles of human error. There were but a few survivors who had been deformed to a state worse than that of lepers. And there was an even lesser number of people who came forward to lend a hand to these “hibakushas” for the fear of their own lives. For these living dead, the day dawns into yet another terrifying night—a perpetual night. There is no day for them, the most awaited death doesn’t seem to come to their rescue, the sense and perception of everything including fear has left them. There faces are carved out of rotting wood and their eyes are merely the glimpses of sleepy hollows
For them, each day is a part f a night unending; and the silhouette of their dead lives passes before them, a shade darker than the darkness of this night itself.