1 min read



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.

Comments
* The email will not be published on the website.