Three Tragedies by Lorca

Read "Three Tragedies by Lorca" over the weekend: Blood Wedding, Yerma and Bernarda Alba. It is amazing how prophetic Blood Wedding feels--the mother mourning the death of her husband and elder son at the hands of an enemy family, a fate Federico Garcia Lorca was to share, albeit at the hands of the Falangists, who murdered hundreds of people during the Spanish Civil War. At the end of the play, the mother's younger, and only remaining son, is killed, and she sends all her well-wishers away:

"I want to be here. Here. In peace. They're all dead now: And at midnight I'll sleep, sleep without terror of guns or knives. Other mothers will go to their windows, lashed by rain, to watch for their sons' faces. But not I. And of my dreams I'll make a cold ivory dove that will carry camellias of white frost to the graveyard. But no; not graveyard, not graveyard: the couch of earth, the bed that shelters them and rocks them in the sky."

There's a saying I used to hear in Karachi: Ghore bechkar sote hain; Having sold the horses, we sleep. I immediately thought of this when I read the above passage. What an extreme and tragic example of having nothing left to worry about.