Saffron and emerald, with blood in the middle

We grow up in a time where stories of survival and sacrifice are told in quiet living rooms, in opulent halls that were built up from nothing. Those were different times back then. The second biggest war had  just ended, and mud-faced men returned home to the land of the enslaved where revolution was spread  like the gunfire it was made for, showering the masses with the blood of their brothers.  

Of course, they were brothers no more.  

The loyalties that lay between saffron and deep emerald tore the land apart. Rivers were carriers of wet  cremations as bloated bodies filled the sights of villages far away from the freedom struggle. No one  knew for sure where their home lay; the crown forgot to inform all what lay on either side of the line  struck across paper.  

We are the descendants of fathers who collapsed at fences of barbed wire with legs swollen from weeks  of up-righteousness; he hadn’t known which side he belonged to. Grandfathers raged in the streets for  vengeance wreaked upon their daughters, their nubile bodies holding tatters of their cloth and dignity.  They roamed the streets, lances in hand, and were shaken out of their maddened stupor to find their  brothers weeping over their impaled daughters; there had been two swords in her that day. Others were  lost and left beside tracks to be found, others found love and never returned to family.  

We are the blood of those who were left for dead, who slept with the cold bodies of women-to-be, who  pillaged and slaughtered those who were not kin while feasting with their brothers and sisters in faith. We  are the children whose hands are stained with the blood that continues to drive our land apart.  

In a time where cruelty was as commonplace as the fires that dotted cities, we are horrific storytellers as  conditional freedom is touted once again. Know that while our arms may not bear the bruises that our  foremothers did, as their gold was taken from them to start anew, we hold the crushing weight of the  freedom that we have. Ours is a nation born of bloodshed unlike any other, for then, men that lived on the  same hillside then shot to kill from the opposite sides of the mountain. Where all lost sense of what was  human and kind and made perversions of those unlike them. The beginning of our nation was a perversion  for men raped corpses, thieves were canonised as water from wells was made sweet from dumped sugar,  and for a while all that determined your faith was pulling down your pyjama in the middle of the gali.  Mistakes were made while everything was in order, and mistakes were removed.  

So was the order. 

We are the students of a history our textbooks no longer tell us but our poets, our storytellers, our writers  do, for no words belong to either side; everything that was done was done to one another. In the simplest  of ways, in the angriest of ways, what went around came back around that very instant. Pigs were  slaughtered in mosques to feast, and across the corpse-border beef was sold at mandir thresholds.  ‘Turkeys’ cowering in bathrooms were a favourite for the crusaders; survivors ratted them out. They were  killed kosher on the platform, to leave the carriage clean.  

Metal that wasn’t blood-stained was hard to come by in those days.  

Our children will not understand what it was like to murder neighbours, to sniff out families hiding in  darkness. The Third Reich had war tribunals because there were names, generals, guns. Here, we have  family, friends, lovers, so what would happen if the blood debt had to be repaid? Lahore and Jullundur  

were the recipients of trains of the dead, blood pooling the tracks, painting the gaihun13 fields as they  roared passed the crusaders. Hindu and Muslim and Sikh was all that mattered - not humanity - for even  dogs were claimed and killed by each side as soldiers defended what they had won. A good soldier  doesn’t ask, he is only supposed to shoot at his comrade in the War. A woman is not supposed to be  asked, she is to be taken, and sold, and bartered. The very clothes you wore were symbols of resistance or  of subterfuge and enmity, and while family-friends completed assignments for men with torches and  gasoline, the motherland burned with the ashes of those who were cremated in their homes, who were  cremated in a land far away from their homes and it was enough.  

IT WAS ENOUGH. 

For we were remade from an empire to cowering children as homeowners opened their houses to be  looted, fathers sacrificed daughters to be stripped and thrown with the naked masses that collected in the  truck. Sardars were shaved of their religion while snipers shot from the rooftops,  

“How would a child know I have run out of bullets?” 

My foremothers and forefathers asked for death after days of hiding, death… 

true freedom was all they desired. We are all survivors of the cities that burned while laddoos14 were  handed out to celebrate the bonfire of civilization, of children who saw jelly where blood met ice, of men  who were cheated by sleeping with a girl of their faith. A pimp who looked out for his whores was the  most honourable of them all. Yet, as we are plagued again by fires, and camps mark foreheads with  saffron or emerald, these stories are retold as reminders, as echoes.  

As mirrors.  

We are the children who grow closer to the centennial of our rebirth born of atrocities, and we sit dining  with the children of those who murdered and pillaged and looted. Truth is recorded, truth is untruth, and  the stories of our founding mothers and fathers are all we have left.  

Who knows,  

maybe their stories lied to us too.