In the potter's village: Chapter - 1

Karim was a trader in the village of Khemnuur, located 8 miles off the Southern coast of the Persian Gulf. People around him would cry foul at the elements that surrounded them; the land that knew not how to give, days that would run long and harsh, with the unforgiving sun adding to the tyranny of the despot sheikh; water that was scarce and precious, and the sky which they knew only as home to scavenging vultures, the symbol of a mortality which they knew all too well. While such strife tainted life all around, he knew there was something ethereal underlying all of that; he could always feel a sense of transience in all that surrounded him, in fact in life itself. It isn't that he wasn't a man of the world, for he had seen a lot as part of the dealings of his vocation and was sharp as per the requirements of his trade.

Very often he would think to himself, just how and when his outlook to the world, and to his existence in it changed. Each time he would manage to trace a few steps further back, only to be interrupted by some calling of the world outside. The last few times however, he had reached a wall at one point, and couldn't see any logical connect ranging further. He was thus convinced, that that point in time, in the course of his life, must have been when he took the fateful turn. To term it as 'fateful' might seem hasty at first, going by the lack of observable change in anything about him, but that was just it. Nothing changed in his life on the outside, with his work continuing with no noticeable change in fortunes, his family life, consisting of parents and a wife, carrying on without alarm.

The fatefulness justifies itself only, and completely at that, when one looks at how he changed in his own eyes, away from the reach of the bystanding world. It is hard to describe experiences such as that encountered by Karim, owing to the afore-hinted intangibility. The entire universe seemed more mysterious, more alive than ever before. Layers seemed to surface in anything he probed into, revealing that there was a lot to be discovered still, with a lifetime perhaps being too short to satiate all such explorations.

The wall at which his recollecting trails now seemed to end, which signals the most likely turning point of his life, was a surprisingly hot day in the month of October, 3 years back. It had begun as any other, with a trip to his supplier of African merchandise, Wajid. Once done with the business, Wajid had called on Karim with an uncharacteristic call. With a glint in the eye, he spoke of an additional 'import' on the ship due to arrive that night. It was a man named Rahman, from a distant land in Africa, who was known to be one of the most masterful potters ever seen.

Karim would go on to welcome Rahman later that night, and his life would never be the same again.