A New Faith: Part 2: Chapter 16
Part 2
About a decade before the murders in Sequoia…
The same way the sun declined to set during the summer months, Kaija’s flood of tears stubbornly refused to ebb. The lush green valley and the impossibly beautiful waters of the lakes stretching out like a necklace of aquamarine jewels, always a sight that soothed her during trying times, was simply no match for the grief ravaging her soul.
She sat cross-legged next to Jaska’s grave for hours. Jaska, her reindeer, had been her favorite person by far. She couldn’t imagine her life without him. She remembered her mother bringing the baby reindeer to her when she was a teenager. She had been a moody kid. A loner. His infectious playfulness had drawn her out of her cocoon. He had, literally, never let her be alone, always wanting to frolic with her in the wilderness.
Then just like that, he was gone. It felt as if her heart was irreparably broken.
She had been away from Jaska for almost a year, the longest ever in their decade-plus relationship. Through the long winter, she had yearned to get away from the garishly lit Oslo and go to her cabin near Skibotn. Finally, in the spring, the governments of the three countries - Sweden, Norway, and Finland - had agreed to the Sami proposal. Instead of handing over the northernmost regions of their countries to mining companies, the Sami were to be made stewards of their ancestral lands.
One hundred thousand square kilometers of land surrounding the Three-Country Cairn, the intersection point of the three countries, was to be handed over to the Sami to do with it as they will. After decades of struggle, the Sami were finally going to be reunited with their land, their waters, their trees, and their beloved reindeer. Kaija, a precocious twenty-five year-old PhD candidate studying anthropology, had led the Sami delegation through those months-long arduous negotiations.
Her elation at this outcome had known no bounds. She had been looking forward to the formal declaration. But before that, she had planned to slip away from her colleagues and spend two whole weeks with her beloved Jaska. He was the best listener ever and she had a lot to tell him. His twinkling eyes always made all her problems seem distant and trivial.
The sojourn had started well enough. Her cabin had survived another brutal winter and was in a surprisingly good shape. Within a day, Kaija had it all cleaned up and ready for her vacation. The same day, Jaska had showed up as if he had immediately sensed that she had come to see him. Of course, he had! They were soulmates, after all.
It had been a glorious summer that felt even more joyous than usual because of the long period after which she had visited her wilderness respite. The warm breeze had smelled of clean water and humid soil. The plants and trees which had to make do with a very short summer, were bursting across the land as if they wanted to make sure that they took the deepest breath possible before the inevitable dark long winter buried them again under heavy snow.
The sun had always been there except when it was playing hide-and-seek with the thunderous clouds that would march across the sky. Kaija had lost track of the time of the day as she spent hours walking with Jaska and swimming in the lakes. Several heart-to-heart conversations had taken place and she had been looking forward to spending many such summers with him. Somewhere at the back of her mind, she had known that he was quite old and wouldn't be around for long. But still, she had deluded herself that he would be with her all her life.
There had been no warning at all, not that she had any contact with the rest of the world. There was no phone or internet service at her cabin. But more importantly, there had been no warning given by nature either. Around dusk, she had nodded off after a particularly wholesome meal of stew. Then the next thing she remembered was waking up drenched in sweat to the sounds of Jaska moaning in agony.
Dangerous heat waves had simultaneously been occurring in north America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Kaija would learn about those things much much later. At that time, though, she had been condemned to watch her beloved Jaska succumb to the debilitating heat.
She had fainted several times. Partly because of the heat and partly because she couldn't bear to see the suffering of her beloved friend. There had been nothing she could have done. There was no air-conditioning for the simple reason that her cabin was truly off-the-grid. She had used water to douse Jaska and herself to bring down their body temperature. But to no avail.
She had desperately fanned Jaska even though the humidity was so stifling that she could barely breathe herself. Shade had meant nothing. During one delirious moment, Kaija had felt that that was it - she and her soulmate were going to ascend to the heavens together. Away from this hellish weather. She had almost felt grateful for the relief that it would bring.
Alas, it wasn’t to be. Jaska had become quiet after a while and then had gently slipped away while Kaija had fainted yet again. It was a while before Kaija had woken up and that too with the sound of buzzing flies. That is when she had known that her worst fears had come true. Jaska was no more, but she had been spared.
The heat had eased off. An entire day had passed, as she had sat with his head in her lap grieving. The silent tears falling on his face had never stopped even for a moment. She knew she had to bid goodbye to her friend and promise him that one day they would be united again in the afterlife. She had buried him in the same meadow that he loved to prance around whether it was neck-deep grass in summer or knee-deep snow in winter. Through her tears she had smiled as she remembered the frolicking little reindeer.
She packed up her belongings, tidied up the cabin, and said one final goodbye to her best friend. The hike back to her car took almost five hours. She barely noticed the path as her thoughts continued to dwell on the tragedy for which she couldn’t find any explanation at all.
Heat waves were not uncommon in that part of the world. However, they were never that intense and nobody had ever gotten hurt by them. They had usually lasted a day or two after which relief would arrive in the form of thunderstorms. It made some people run to the hardware stores to get portable fans and air-conditioners. But, most people simply waited them out. The animals had plenty of lakes in which they could cool themselves.
This one had been different, though. She had fainted and Jaska had died. A hardy creature like Jaska who lived through major swings in weather had succumbed in a terrible manner. What had happened?
Loss of a loved one was a new emotional experience for her. She had no idea it could hurt so much. Physically! It felt like someone had placed a heavy load on her chest. There were moments through her hike when she couldn’t breathe. She stopped, bent over, gasping for every breath until the pounding in her chest subsided. She felt that her heart would just stop beating. She couldn’t understand what was happening to her.
She reached her car and switched on her phone to see if there was any signal. Only one bar registered and the spinning wheel indicated that all kinds of notifications were being downloaded, albeit extremely slowly. She sighed and started on her hundred mile drive back to Tromsø from where she would take a flight to Oslo.
She was just going through the motions, she knew that. Soon she would have to focus on the most important day in the lives of the Sami people. She would have to meet with her colleagues from the International Sami Council to discuss the text of the announcement that the governments of Norway, Sweden, and Finland should have sent. She kept telling herself that later she would have time to grieve.
She switched on the music player hoping that it would lift her spirits a bit during the drive through the desolate countryside. The dark clouds that had been hanging around the horizon when she had started her hike, were on top of her head. The wind gusts picked up and rain was splattering on the windscreen every few minutes.
The light turned into a an ominous shade of green, blue, and yellow - neither dark nor bright - as if nature was trying to tell her something but was not sure what words to use exactly. The summery pop music picked up by the radio jarred against the view which felt like it was becoming sadder by the minute.
It was all probably in her head. And her heart. Then the incessant pinging of her phone started. “What now?” she thought as she quickly sneaked a look at the screen of her phone. There were hundreds of notifications of all kinds clamoring for her immediate attention. That was unusual, to say the least.
Her family, friends, and colleagues knew that she would be unavailable for a couple of weeks. In any case, they were used to her being incommunicado when she went into the wilderness. Rarely had they tried to reach her. They also knew that she was unlikely to get their messages because of sporadic coverage but more importantly, they knew that she would have switched her phone off for the entire duration she was at the cabin.
She pulled off the road at the next turn-out and grabbed her phone. At that instant, there was a prolonged flash of lightning that lit up the whole valley through which the road traversed. The terrifyingly loud thunderclap arrived a few moments later and her car literally shook from side to side as if it had been in an earthquake. She almost dropped the phone in surprise. First the heat wave, now an unusually violent thunderstorm, whatever was going on with the world.
Some of the initial messages seemed to be about her, asking her if she was okay. The heat wave must have alarmed her well-wishers. Of course, they had been right to worry - she had lost her best friend and was still unable to stop crying for extended periods. But then, those messages quickly petered out and still the notification count showed that there were hundreds more.
She started praying that they had nothing to do with the announcement about the agreement between the Sami people and the three countries. It wasn’t. It was something so terrifying that she was chilled to her bones as she watched the videos and photos on the tiny screen of her phone.
That year, the summer in the northern hemisphere had been hot beyond comprehension. The temperatures had risen beyond fifty degrees celsius for huge swathes of humanity. So much so that they had no longer been considered as novel occurrences. The media had stopped reporting the new records created daily in some place or the other. Only the climate and weather nerds had looked at that data in abject terror.
What had been far more scary about that August was that the wet bulb temperature had risen beyond thirty-five degrees celsius in several places with sizable populations. Worse, the night-time temperatures in many of those places had not dropped by much. Together, those two phenomena had caused deaths in unfathomably large numbers over the course of just one week. It was estimated, that at least ten million excess deaths had occurred across several countries. Most countries had simply stopped counting and announcing the number of deaths as they neither had the capacity to collate that data nor the heart to do so.
Because of the Covid-19 pandemic, a grand total of twenty million excess deaths had occurred over 2020-23 across the world. At its worst, 100,000 people had died in a week during those three years. In the initial months of the pandemic, the world, literally, had shut itself down to try and prevent the spread of the deadly virus. The success of the vaccines had been stupendous and prevented tens of millions of potential deaths. But what could one do with a heat event of the likes humanity had never experienced? There had simply been no time to do anything.
The initial reaction had been of utter disbelief. The reports of the tragedy had started trickling in first over social media and then in a torrent via mainstream media. What had stayed with viewers were the videos showing entire villages and towns strewn with bodies with no obvious signs of violence. People of all ages had simply keeled over and died. Their brains had shut down as the bodies could no longer cool themselves because of the deadly combination of the high temperature and high humidity.
The event had been so surreal that most people had promptly slipped into denial without even realizing it. All evidence had been refuted as fake. It had been in nobody’s interest to accurately tally the number of deaths once the excruciating job of disposing of the bodies was over. In most of these places, the military had been called in to dispose of the bodies. The world had glimpsed the mass graves and mass cremations during the Covid-19 pandemic. This time around there would be no video records kept by anyone simply because no one had the ability to sufficiently distance themselves from the tragedy to hit the record button on a camera. Most of the military personnel who had been assigned this task were emotionally so broken that they would soon be discharged on medical grounds. The trauma would stay with them for the rest of their lives many of which were cut short because of suicides.
Kaija, already struggling to cope with Jaska’s death, couldn’t deal with this catastrophe at all. She simply stopped talking. Her eyes were empty, as if there was no heart or brain left in her body that would tell them what to show. There was nothing to show. The body was an empty shell.
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She had no recollection of those first three days after she had come back from her cabin. The survival mechanism had kicked in and the mind had refused to record those horrible memories in order to protect itself from complete disintegration. Somehow she had managed to drive to Tromso and catch her flight to Oslo.
On the fourth day, she was sitting in the corner of the conference room at the International Sami Council’s office. She heard some voices. It seemed that some of her colleagues were shouting at each other. She was puzzled. The last thing she seemed to remember was leaving her cabin. How did she get here? How long had it been since Jaska left her?
More than ever she wished she could hug Jaska and bury her head in the fur of his neck to escape from all this. As these questions tumbled around in her mind, she realized that large fat tears had started flowing and she was again helplessly sobbing. The images in front of her eyes blurred and the voices started fading as all she could hear was Jaska’s weak whimpering.
Simone hurried over to her and sat down next to her. She quietly hugged her for a long time and waited for Kaija’s sobbing to subside. Slowly, Kaija’s tears stopped and heaving one deep breath, she looked up over Simone’s shoulders at her colleagues.
“I am okay now. Thanks Simone!” Kaija said softly as she extracted herself from the warm hug.
“What day is it?” she asked.
“We are two days away from the announcement!” shouted Hans.
It was a strange exclamation. There was joy in Hans’ voice but his face seemed stricken. With a massive jolt, Kaija remembered the news she saw on her drive back to the city. Oh my god! That had been no nightmare. That hadn’t been her mind playing tricks on her because of her grief. It had been real. It had happened.
She started shivering and Simone tentatively moved toward her again in case Kaija collapsed. Simone was puzzled. The expression on Kaija’s face had been of shock and also of some sudden realization. But that didn’t make any sense. She had just been crying.
“What happened Kaija? What’s going on in your mind?”
“I… I just remembered… that horrific tragedy. I… it all happened… didn’t it?” Kaija said, more a statement than a question, not aimed at anyone in particular.
“Yes. It is terrible. But if you just remembered it, then why were you crying earlier?”
"I lost Jaska. I mean… Jaska died when I was with him last week at my cabin.
He just couldn’t survive the heat.
I miss him so much.”
A moan escaped her as the pain in her heart returned.
“And then on my way back to Tromso, I stopped to check my messages and I saw the news…”
“Oh dear! I am so sorry to hear about Jaska,” Simone replied with moistening eyes.
In a trance, Kaija got up from the chair and walked to the window overlooking the courtyard. It was a bright afternoon. In her heart, though, the darkness had settled back in.
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The day before the signing of the treaty, Kaija managed to pull herself together long enough to finalize her speech. The heartache was still there. She was able push it into the background for those brief periods of time when she was talking with her colleagues or working on her speech.
In one of those rare periods of normalcy, the thoughts of the global tragedy swept through her already debilitated mind. All she could think about was the pain felt by the families, friends, and communities that had lost loved ones in the horrific tragedy. Millions had died just like Jaska. Tens of millions more had suffered through the heat just like she herself had. And hundreds of millions were now heart-broken just like she was.
Her pain would ebb over time or at least she hoped it would. It wouldn’t happen to her again as there would always be only one Jaska in her life. But for all those hundreds of millions heartbroken people, the possibility of similar tragedies happening repeatedly was very high. In all likelihood, the ones who had died would be the blessed ones. The ones who had survived would be the cursed ones as they would have to live day after day through the heartache the same as Kaija.
Billions were living in places that were in the crosshairs of future climate disasters with almost no hope of getting any material support for coping with them. They were condemned to death or something even worse, living long enough to suffer through repeated catastrophes while also carrying the burden of unending sorrow for the rest of their lives.
How could the rest of the world be okay with this? Kaija’s world had hitherto been a compact one. She had not really been aware of the world outside of the Nordic countries. In fact, she had never even traveled outside of that region. She had lived in a bubble that consisted mainly of Sami people. The pandemic had made this bubble smaller. Every now and then when she had to spend time in one of the major cities such as Oslo or Stockholm, she had run across people from other parts of the world. Sometimes she had ventured beyond her comfort zone and attempted to taste non-Sami food. But those occasions had been rare.
Those people who had lost someone in the global tragedy were complete strangers to her. She would have been hard pressed to even point those locations out on a map. She knew no names and she certainly wouldn’t have been able to put a face to any name she may have come across in the news. But she was connected with those people in a very fundamental way. She knew their pain. She had experienced their pain. She knew who they had become after the catastrophe and what they were going through without ever meeting them.
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Finally, the day arrived. Kaija was the one who had made this day happen. She was the one who had worked tirelessly to cajole and press the governments of those three nations to allocate at least ten percent of their land mass to be autonomously managed by the Sami. Nights and days, weeks and months had passed in coming up with the arrangement as none of those nations had been willing to even consider such autonomy. But Kaija was that unusual combination of intellect, passion, and compassion who had made it a reality.
The Sami would be designated as the sole “Stewards of the Land”. However, they would have no rights to exploit the natural resources in their domain. Not that the Sami had sought autonomy to exploit nature in the first place. On the contrary, the Sami had always held nature as sacrosanct. In fact, they had sought autonomy over their domain to limit the national governments from exploiting nature.
The text of the treaty had been finalized in late July just before Kaija went on her vacation. All that was remaining was the formal signing that would kick off a month of celebrations. Of course, in the light of the global catastrophe, there would be no celebrations of any kind.
On the morning of the day when the treaty was to be signed, Kaija sipped a cup of chamomile tea and some toast at the hotel’s breakfast counter. In their excitement about the day, most of her colleagues had already finished their breakfast and were eagerly glancing at Kaija every few minutes to see if she was done. They were all going to walk over to the venue of the press conference - the plaza in front of the Nobel Peace Center.
Kaija was deep in thought. Simone assumed that Kaija was going over her speech. They had all read it and provided feedback to her. It was a good speech - dignified and replete with compassion for nature. The Sami could finally look forward to a self-governed future after centuries of being largely ignored by the dominant Scandinavian society. Kaija was exactly the right person to deliver that speech. The numerous compromises and assurances that Kaija had managed to wrangle from the three countries was quite an achievement from a purely diplomatic perspective. Simone thought that young Kaija could easily become one of the leading global diplomats if she decided to follow that path.
The only black mark against this achievement was the utter lack of interest shown by the Russians. They hadn’t even bothered to talk with the Sami, let alone come to the table with the other three countries. The tensions between the Nordic countries and Russia had continued to simmer ever since Russia had launched its long and brutal campaign of annexing those countries that used to be part of the erstwhile Soviet Union. Norway had rapidly become a major provider of oil and gas to Europe which had decisively reduced the market for Russia’s main export. That had severe consequences for the Russian economy and in turn the domestic politics. Since then, the Russians had simply embargoed all serious conversations with European countries.
Hans couldn’t help himself and started nagging everyone to start walking to the venue. Kaija was the last one to get up from her breakfast table. She looked calm. Nary a sign of the nervous wreck she had been over the past week. She looked focused and grim. Maybe, she was summoning up all her strength for the day, Simone felt. Although, that wouldn’t explain the intense sparkle in Kaija’s eyes. Kaija rapidly strode up to her colleagues and then continued to go past them instead of slowing down to exchange pleasantries - almost as if she was on a mission and did not want to be distracted by anything.
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Quite a large crowd, maybe in hundreds, was gathered at the venue. The majority, obviously, were the Sami dressed up in their traditional attire. Of course, there were numerous supporters of the Sami in the crowd, too. There was some singing going on. But the exuberance was muted at best. Probably, most folks simply wanted to get through this event as quickly as possible. The global tragedy was, no doubt, continuing to weigh on everyone’s minds.
As the clock struck 9 am, the various dignitaries stepped onto the stage. The Prime Ministers of all three countries had decided to bless this event with their presence instead of merely sending their respective Interior Ministers. The four women - three Prime Ministers, all in their first terms, and Kaija - sat down together at the table placed on the stage. The treaty document was laid out in front of them on the table. As per the sequence determined before the event, the Swedish Prime Minister affixed her signature on the agreement first followed by the Norwegian PM, the Finnish PM, and finally, Kaija.
There was a brief but raucous moment of applause as the press snapped pictures of the four women, proudly, holding the treaty together for the world to see. All three PMs were smiling broadly. But Kaija continued to look grim throughout the signing ceremony. If anything, her stare became even more intense. Simone was getting a bit worried. I hope the speech goes well, she thought to herself. Fingers crossed!
The three PMs delivered their remarks, again in the same sequence in which they had signed the treaty. While the remarks were all delivered in their languages, the content of all three speeches was more or less identical. It was mostly about patting themselves on their backs for finally managing to do right by the Sami. It would play very well on the evening news later that day and in the newspapers next morning. Their supporters would applaud them while their opponents would try to find ways to criticize them. Within a couple of news cycles, this treaty and the event would be lost in the noise.
After the Finnish PM sat down to yet another round of polite applause, the TV cameras swept over to Kaija. Just for an instant, uncertainty flashed over Kaija’s face. It was quickly replaced by the grim look as she stood up and walked to the podium to deliver her speech. It would be among the most purposeful ten steps from the chair to the podium that the world would witness.
The dilemma that Kaija had been mulling over for the past twenty-four hours was resolved. She brought out a copy of the speech and laid it out carefully in front of her on the podium’s table top. She pushed an errant strand of hair back behind her left ear. Then took a deep breath and tried to slow down her racing heart. Another deep breath and clearing of throat got the small audience fidgeting. She looked up from the paper, squared her shoulders, and announced forcefully, “we, the Sami, extend an invitation to all the people affected by the global tragedy to re-locate to our land where they are far less likely to face the harmful impacts of climate change!”