The Winnowing Waves

The sea sang lullabies to them at night in the small coastal town of Malabar where memories of men in boats carrying merchandise from Arab lands had been permanently inscribed into the sands and infused into the blood of their ancestors. The briny breeze sang ballads to them during the day in a dialect of their own. The winnowing waves tossed the lives of Fouziya Aminu and Nabisa here and there sometimes on the swirl of a rising cusp sometimes at the mercy of the receding sands. Far from those shores in a village in the North where the loo winds doused their dreams with dust and the mustard fields stretched as yellow quilts in the Winter Anita and Pyaari knit their own tales through the seasons. And destiny decided that their paths should cross.