The Divide

The night is completely still.
Fear is rampant everywhere.
The countryside
Floods with running gutters of blood.
There are no street-lamps, no tramps, no drunkards, no story-tellers,
No beggars asking for alms, no dogs nor cattle,
No trace of even the occasional rodent
That scurries hurriedly through the muddy lanes.

The stench of brutality
Is what remains all over the place.
Stench
That belongs to gang rapes, mass murders, beatings, mutilations, and infanticides.
Then there are the twisted shutters, broken lanterns,
Burnt huts, charred frames - a body here, a body there,
Abandoned values, hardened emotions,
Zealously misused sickles and axes.

The violence overflows
And a part of it seeps into the moist mud.
Three or four hundred bodies
Lie buried since the Monday that passed by.
It was a full moon then.

More wheels
Screech into the silence of the night
- With the violence of the rattling engines,
With the violence of the ‘carriages of death’.

The dirty episode
Would go down the archives of time
Like a scar on the nations’ history,
Like a shame - discreetly hidden and nightmarish,
Like the shame of getting caught naked in public.

(This small poem, about the days of Indo-Pak partition, might not even come close to the actual pain and terror inflicted, or the agony suffered. It is just a minor attempt to remind that freedom comes at a cost, a great cost. It's sad that even to this day, no one refers to the early post-independence days as the ‘days of freedom’. They call them the ‘partition days’.)