Many, too many humans snaked along. Trudge-trudge- in a pathological slowness of undetectable movement. Little, too little we crept over lands and dawns and dusks of time. Our feet dragged heavy, raising a thick cloud of dust - a cloud of homogenous gloom, obscuring faces, obscuring vision-vision of destination and of future. We became bodies skinned into crooked lines as flesh disappeared into beady dew forever dotted on the brown - the brown of skin of the land browned by the temperate sun (that knew neither of equality nor of differences) that basked the fused roots of their simple past of the confused now. ‘Now’ that was partition, partition that was the connection between lands and between time. We were in the ‘now’, that seemed to exist but autonomously, between nostalgia and anxiety of future. Stuck, stuck, stuck endlessly on the line that was a rational scribble by a rational man who was not so brown. But some men, brown men whose names we heard from those rectangular radios and spotted in black and white, were supposed to be divine intervention and Ah! Yes! they did intervene! They did draw a line! A line on a paper, that became a scar on land and in the minds of people. It is a dirty, uneraseable scar and everyone has to live with the mark on the forehead.
A narrative in past tense, you might think that we managed to break free, that the ‘now’ has become ‘then’ and seek comfort in it. But I refuse to give you the choice of comfort and so I clearly tell you that we are still stuck. This might very well be my grandmother’s story but since it became a part of my consciousness, it is a part of my ‘I’ and hence a part of me. So it’s her story, my story, your story, anyone’s story, every one’s story. They might not be facts or fiction or could be both.
We might have tumbled into one of the either sides of the scar but it’s as strongly etched as ever. It pricked raw and fresh when we tried to scratch it with wars. It hurt when drenched in crimson. It reeks of our stupidity and reminds us of our fused roots, when we lived without a mark, a mark in our mind. Perhaps the scar doesn’t even exist. Perhaps it’s not even the Radcliff line. How could we blame one, few or many people for the scar, hold anyone responsible? Perhaps it just exists because we allowed it to exist in our mind. Perhaps that is why we are still stuck.
A narrative in past tense, you might think that we managed to break free, that the ‘now’ has become ‘then’ and seek comfort in it. But I refuse to give you the choice of comfort and so I clearly tell you that we are still stuck. This might very well be my grandmother’s story but since it became a part of my consciousness, it is a part of my ‘I’ and hence a part of me. So it’s her story, my story, your story, anyone’s story, every one’s story. They might not be facts or fiction or could be both.
We might have tumbled into one of the either sides of the scar but it’s as strongly etched as ever. It pricked raw and fresh when we tried to scratch it with wars. It hurt when drenched in crimson. It reeks of our stupidity and reminds us of our fused roots, when we lived without a mark, a mark in our mind. Perhaps the scar doesn’t even exist. Perhaps it’s not even the Radcliff line. How could we blame one, few or many people for the scar, hold anyone responsible? Perhaps it just exists because we allowed it to exist in our mind. Perhaps that is why we are still stuck.
