Dalrymple called it the ‘Great Divide’
But I wonder if the Padma whose
Waters still gurgle in my grandfather’s memory
Has turned away from the outfall near
The colony where he now resides. Do the waters of
The Hooghly remind him of the fisherman of Faridpur
With their rugged boats and frail nets who taught him
To swim like the hilsa? My grandmother complains
That he is too gullible and child-like. I see in the folds
Of his eyes the terrible massacres in the border
Jungles which stilled the blood in his boy’s heart
Before he could gather leaves for the dead.
I know he dreams of the canoes and the mangroves
Where he saunters around all day with playmates
Jumping on cracks and catching bugs. This
Colonial realm only reminds him of
The face of his newborn sister whose
Lullabies were replaced by dirges of the dead.
He survived 1947 only to see ‘65, ’71, ’84, ’92 –
Stoic as he watched the men he once knew
Rape and kill and main and loot
All for some lines in the dirt.
Sometimes at night he tells me that
The air smells the same as it did in Dhaka
Of green chilli, of the tangra cooked
In his mother’s kitchen, of the togor flower
Marred beneath the feet of girls plucking them.
Sometimes his memory becomes the
Beloved who left him. He is old now, clutching
At the seams of the fading countenance of
His martyred mother whose thin voice
Still puts him to sleep. He has loved his life
Like an ascetic looking for unison with the
Ultimate Truth. How was he as a boy of rural
Bangladesh – playing picnic with utensils of tin
And stone, swinging from banyans during the heat of
Summer – how was he before the riots uprooted him
Only to put him on trains destined for the
Other side of bloodbath? His memory is at war
With the statistical apathy of history.
He lives to tell the tale, but he is old now,
And clutching at the seams of the white funeral cloth
Blotted red with his mother’s last footprint. He imagines
A lullaby his sister would have heard
And he sings it to me sometimes when
He thinks I am in the depths of slumber.
Aishi Saha is a postgraduate student studying at the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. She has grown up with stories from the 1947 Partition passed down by her grandparents who lived during the tumultuous times. She is an editor and literary critic at the Monograph Magazine, and the journalism blog editor of the Chromatic Scars Review. Her poem ‘In the Memory of Hind Rajab’ was published last year in the Literary Druid, an international peer-reviewed journal.