We are still fighting.
I stand by the roadside, caught in the maze of a world on full throttle. A passing rickshaw kicks up dust in the air as it speeds by and, for a moment, I am lost in a cloud of a thousand particles floating in the air, some aimless, undirected; others following the rickshaw as if it lead them all onto a higher purpose.
This city is a gigantic Hydra; it never dies, and by its own magnetic bustle, draws in strangers until they become natives. In the morning, with the sun blazing down, a network of bees emerges, all moving about with purpose. And when the sun hides, under the watchful eye of the moon, the city twinkles innocently, a child in the crux of a soft-sung lullaby.
We all walk by.
No one looks at the wrinkled, old man in the corner. When he was seven, he ran, with nothing but a burlap sack, to catch a train that would take him to independence. He saw his father impaled on the end of a sword, from behind the sacred bushes that saved his life. There was blood on his hands.
No one looks at him.
And the child; he sits and stares and, sometimes, a small voice issues forth, asking for change- begging for mercy. Who does he beg? The people who cannot hear him, the sun that cannot see him? Or does he beg the God who is busy with bigger plans?
Who does he beg?
There is a spatter of red on the roadside; the betel chewing saliva of men staining the road with their self-proclaimed virility. Under the glare of the sun, it glitters crimson, like blood… their blood; one, ten, a hundred of them, lying over blood-spattered books. He cried, and his tears turned red, he cried because his best friend was lying dead in his lap, he cried because his eyes were still wide open, and he could not shut them.
They killed them all.
And Hell gushed out its tears, and Heaven cried out its lament; we carried a hundred and more tiny coffins on our grief-ridden backs with nowhere to bury them. After all, where do you lay down a child?
It is a beautiful place, I have heard. The valleys are lush and green, and the air is pure, clean; the work of angels. But the valleys are splattered rouge, like tiny roses peeking out, almost blooming, but suddenly dying. They divided the land, but they could not stop the bullets- they never could stop the bullets. It rained again last night, the incessant pitter-patter of pellets, and she is dead. There was a smile on her lips; it was her fifth birthday and Amma had made phirni and lavas, and Abba had bought her a new doll. She ran outside with her new friend, and showed her the stars and the sky, and welcomed her home. Tomorrow, when she saw the other girls, she would show off her new friend. But she is dead.
Even as I stand in the heat, I see faces look in my direction and then quickly turn away; I see gazes hastily averted. They leer at me, and perhaps they talk about me with hands cupped to each other’s ears, trying to conceal spoken thoughts. But I know what they say. I know- I have heard the whispers filtering through the slits in the dirty curtains with the sun. They whisper about me, about my body and its bulging inefficacies, about my weak hands, my clothes.
“She asked for it.”
Behind the walls, I hear them whisper too. The wind carries their voices, and I have heard them. They have never seen me, but they do not think that I am human. They look at the scarf on my head, and see a ticking time bomb. I hear them calling me names, giving me labels… sometimes softly whispered, sometimes loud and ringing.
“Terrorist,” they hiss, faint, menacing.
And they turned the Muslim boy out of the country. They took away his land, and his home and they kicked him out like he was a vexatious rat prying and nosing and nibbling someone else’s food. “It’s ours!” they say, “We built it.” But he is a plumber, and he has fixed a thousand pipes; “I built it too.”
Behind me, workers hack away at a giant structure proposed to be the tallest yet. How tall? Perhaps it will reach the clouds. I can see the foundations it stands on, countless bodies heaped one upon another; a slave, a doctor, an engineer, a man lain with a soldier’s deference, a little girl with a ragged doll clutched in a tiny fist.
Perhaps it will go right up to heaven.
They say we killed their children, so they will kill ours. We have been told we are fighting for peace, but what is the purpose of such a crusade? A battle to end a war?
A rickshaw finally stops and I climb in, watching the people come and go, hurrying by as though today was the day it would all change, the sheer monotony of a country at constant war. As we pull away, dust rises in the air, and lunges after us, perhaps hoping that this one would lead them somewhere. All around me there is a honking and wailing, a sorrowful sound, a desperate call for help.
I have heard these sounds before countless times; I have heard their music; it is sweet, gentle, a melody of anguish; the convergence of all the beautiful things in the world to make a mournful echo of all the pain and suffering we try to hide. It makes you forget, sometimes, the sounds of helpless cries and screams; blocks out, for a blissful minute, the roar of hostility. I have heard the sound of music.
The pierced, jagged pieces lay scattered about, stepped on. I see a myriad of others, in the earth, buried beneath the asphalt road, in the gigantic mansions of the rich and the crumbling shacks of the poor, in the weeping of the skies. Their silhouettes are captured, wavy, undulating in the streams; they left behind pieces of themselves, a listening ear pressed against a tiny beating heart, calloused hands, hard and dirty with long hours of labour, chapped lips ready to say goodbye, wrinkled feet running, almost flying. They were gone, but not quite.
“These are sacrifices that must be made,” they say. “How else will it stand? How else will our building stand?”
And so we fight.
