A day before independence

By Anupama Bhargava

Girls, of about the right age, in ragged overalls had been released like bended breathes from the unknown clutches to race towards their homes,
And then the exported laughter on the horses, like the bullets ripping through the human line, had chased them to the ruins.

The wavering successors of the land had watched helplessly towards the horizon, under the common sun, also sharing with

Mothers, clutching their babies tight inside the burgeoning
stomachs, (some)

Already planning to boil their girls dead in their (mothers’) milk.

Wives had cried blood anyways, even if their

Boys had stood stiff but alive by their father’s youthful hands that weren’t stretched with the fighter’s spirit to be scorched by fire after being tormented and wrapped in plastic,

Or simply falling down dead cutting the wind,

Holding the heat of the bullets inside them,

All this while drawing a line between living and dead.

Even the remnant bones had refused to cast shadow under the jaundiced sky, out of fear of the gentlemen in white gladly sipped wine with too blatant a nudity, exhaled up to every heart that were now

Supposed to live with knowledge that they have lost all what was once their and now they must live unaware of everything but the whistles blown out for them to sprint over the hurdling bodies to their masters.

And weeping tears thus begun to narrate the sobbing tale,

"The whites all already had stolen the money, the gold but this is how they began to steal life."

Because then,

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posted 17 June 2003