The lights hovering above blink in and out. On the hard mattress, Ismail Puok lies motionlessly before the flickers of turquoise beams. He wonders if these illusions he is seeing is too an aftermath of anaesthesia, then vainly attempts to lift his numb fingers, surveying the effacing, russet-coloured paint on the walls. On the verge of death, the torrid air seems more suffocating than ever, trapped within the never-opened, seemingly neglected windows as silence festers the room into a dungeon. But he knows that he is in the same castle once pervaded with tittering and patience challenged by expectancy. The room that had staged the birth for his younger brother Ahan.

His father had once told him that the name Ahan means the “first ray of light.” The sunrise. A scene of glistering and golden veils of light unfurling athwart the horizon, twirling among the paleness of clouds and replaying above him every day, akin to a broken audiotape. As a child, he had always known why his parents had given his brother the name; because in Sudan, watching the sunrise is a ravaged dream, a luxury that the civil war has thieved from everyone and, which his parents aspire to retain.

Yet, that was during the first five years of the war. Now, praying for the war’s end and for the sunrise is no longer practised, if not chaffed at. For a body like his that has ceded its kidney for his brother’s medicine fees and for a heart that has grown immune to the bombarding of gunshots and screeches of deaths, the rising sun merely unfurls another day of labour, waiting, and anguish.

For wherever they flee, toil to mingle in, and camouflage themselves with the forfeiting of puerile hopes of returning to the bygone country, the rising sun is still obliterated when discerned through the same pair of bruised, Sudanese eyes. For the hearts of the people waiting for immigration, people who collect shrapnel for living, people waive their organs for money, people whose ears are impaired from denotation, forever deafened from the calls of their lovers, people who wake amid the night in a new land, their souls still fighting an erstwhile war- for people whose lives are trampled by the military, whose faith are splintered by war, are blind towards these shafts of light, these frivolous hope, these over-indulgent promises that they can never imbibe again.