Sitting in the living room on a rather
Chilly winters evening, reading the life
Journal of a daughter whose parents,
Pakistani and Kashmiri both dead when
In an alternate narrative, the clock moves
As fast as it can, the sun rose and settled,
The people started their day with tea and
Are now ending it with chai. My sister, went
for her ritualistic morning walk and now is
Going for the ritualistic evening jog.
Sitting alone, all this while, trying to
understand the words which are so
beautifully woven into this fragile yet
strong piece of literature, using our
simplistic 26 letters, 5 vowels and
heaps of emotions, leveling the
memories which are to be remembered.
My father rose up from his usual chair,
sat straight, looked at me, said something
which went straight into the void that is
my head and left. My brother sat next
to me, hoping to get a reaction, starts
imitating me. Annoyance did set in
my mind, not going to lie but my face,
At the spike of page 61, "with our silence,
with our human need", it read. With
aggressive yet steady hand turned the page,
62, blank. BLANK; the kind of blank that is
put to prove a point and not for notes, the
kind of blank that demarcates something
bad from something good, the kind that
changes the narrative in it's entirety.
There's a sudden rustle in the house now,
like everyone took an energy pill and now
seek an out to let that energy flow. My
mother has started singing again and my
grandmother is telling us about something
from her past. All the more distracting is the
TV, in the back, trying its hardest to not let
I came back to the book, the blank pages
staring at me, as if mocking me for I couldn't
find the root, the meaning, the reason. The
blank pages, 62 and 63, imitating me, like
my brother, making my insubstantial heart
numb with heat. My hands rushed and
turned the page and in that moment
My father talking rather loudly at the back,
my sister thinking but with a resounding
voice. This house has never been this
convulsing but today it was. There were
sounds, noises, heat, chilly and voices.
The page turned, my head and my heart felt
the peace it was looking for. The blank pages
now making a lot of sense, found a new
meaning. Wrote by itself, the reasons for
their existence, the ink and blood from our
past, the lives so lost, the anger, the hatred,
the struggle; the struggle. Everything bare
on those pages as "Partition (August 15th,
1947)" read the page no. 65.
