Bilkees Beghum from the Godhra relief camp told a tale that seemed to confirm a recurrent pattern in the atrocities severed on the women during the Gujarat riots in 2002. She was stripped, gang-raped, her baby was killed before her, and she was then beaten up, then burnt and left to die.
Before they were finally killed, some were beaten up with rods and pipes for almost an hour. Before or after the killing, their vagina would be sliced, or would have iron rods pushed inside. Similarly, their bellies would be cut open or would have hard objects inserted into them. A 13-year old girl, Farzana, had a rod pushed into her stomach, and was then burnt. A mother reported that her three-year old baby girl was raped and killed in front of her, while elsewhere daughters reported on the rapes of their mothers, now dead.
Kausar Bano, a young girl from Naroda Patiya, was several months pregnant during the Gujrat riots. Several eyewitnesses testified that she was raped, tortured, her womb was slit open with a sword to disgorge the foetus which was then hacked to pieces and roasted alive with the mother. A day before the massacre, Sheikh, Kausar’s father, said he had taken Kausar to a hospital in Kalupur for a medical check-up. She was complaining of pain. The doctor had said she was likely to deliver in a day or two.
(Source: Internet /The Indian express)
From the unborn daughter of Kausar Bano…
Everything was perfect, amma!
The tang of the pickle you savoured,
The essence of the mud you once had
All reached me…
The radiant sun
Filtered through your womb to warm me.
I was very happy, amma!
Before long was I to breathe my own air
Before long was I to sense my own hunger
The moment for me to feel my own sun was soon to come…
I was blissful, amma!
The shadow of abba’s palm blessed me on your womb
I longed to see his face
I longed to have my abba
I longed to see for myself, the world outside your cover…
I was very happy, amma!
But one day…I gasped!
Like a fish without water
What unfamiliar touch,
Oh what was it amma?
That had desecrated,
the holy waters of my shelter?
It pained, amma!
Were you being dragged??
And then, I, nestled within you, was torn…
Torn from the lukewarm dim of your womb-
Through a blinding blaze…into a boiling furnace-
Was this to be my first sunshine?
It was a huge operation, ma!
I saw from my eyes,
The eyes, amma, that could never see,
Doctors and surgeons with tridents …
Were bent over you…and then
They shrieked…!
Why did they shriek, amma?
Were they happy on seeing me inside you?
As I came out, they gave me toys!
Toys to play with, amma.
Toys of fire!
Absorbed in my first and final play
I did not see you…
But in your cry of death
You must have sung for me, my last lullaby.
I was never born, amma!
And thus, never died.
Like the unborn hospitalized child in coloured water,
I was immortalized…
But here, there is no coloured water
Only scorching, parching, and searing heat!
How long will I have to burn amma?
(Translated from Anshu Malviya’s in Hindi)
I wish I could post the original one in Hindi (way more profoundly expressed there) but its not available on the internet and the hard copy of the poems is not in my possession.I translated it for my college magazine 2 years ago.
Those of you who were present in the recent poetry recitation in our department would be reminded of something similar that was recited there.(I think it was called ‘Lullaby’)
Friday, February 27, 2009
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Few shots of Vodka
Disclaimer: I don't stake any claims to the art of poetry. If the following work looks anything like one, it must be in a purely coincidental and sordid manner.
Head swirling,
Hurling
Thoughts, images
Sudden uninvited
In eddies
A sensuous ebbing of motion
Commotion
Limbs in retreat
Limp
A random delving
Into Adam and Eve,
Women drivers,
Kangaroos,
Fork as a phallus symbol,
The bell, the loo
P.S.: This fragment (there i go indulging myself even as the Romantics turn in their graves!) was written sometime in the beginning of the last year. It's been published once elsewhere and had another stanza to it. But i did away with it here. Firstly, because i didn't like it. Secondly, i like the way this fragment ends with the word 'loo', giving it a bathetic end, if u like.
Monday, February 23, 2009
red bricks; corridor; valentine's; MA
Red brick, from the corridors.
Stillness must seep into their veins
Everyone who sits on them is waiting, bored
making the bricks sad with their weight.
the hours must leave furrows on them,
like heavy metal grinding over soft rocks, marking them down.
empty rivulets of sand,
benumbed to their own violation.
she cannot stop her boyfriend
she doesn't want to 'suck him off' but she doesn't want to upset him
its Valentine's, not worth a fight.
Where does the line of desire stop,
does it go far?
Dreams have time for questions
but she doesn't ask him.
She is Time
She dreams of red-bricks from the Department
They could be her lovers; they should be.
Damned to sharing it,
they cannot force intimacy on anyone.
Had they resisted
they might allow their aggressor the audacity
and the category of a rapist.
P.S; The corridor where everyone sits outside class, has red bricks under the concrete platform on which we sit and chat, and where, on a particular cold January afternoon, the sunlight falling on one's thighs can be more than the meaning of the word 'orgasmic'. The above poem was written on the thirteenth of February, and was put up first on my blog.
This is something I wrote for the magazine when they asked for entries on "Life before and after MA" but it couldn't be published because I was a little late. Anyway, its nothing, just a couple of lines. here goes:
So much of what we read, what we are supposed to work on, think about, is about desire. An excess or a lack of it. Either a divergence from or a convergence on it. Or love. Even pain can be derived from there. And yet people say that MA is 'depressing', that everyone is estranged from one another here.
Too much theory has made voyeurs out of lovers, deadened us to any real emotion, any real praxis. Everything can be read or written about, in a novel, play, poem or essay. Or so we think. People who deal with words, rhetoric, syllables, do not do enough to deserve a life entirely devoid of substance, or do they?
"Oppressed by the figures of beauty" is a line from Chelsea Hotel No. 2, a song by Leonard Cohen. It has more than a tangential parallel with our classroom.
-Anonymous
What I write is not mine, it belongs to tradition. Not the tradition I've read, but the tradition I am.
Stillness must seep into their veins
Everyone who sits on them is waiting, bored
making the bricks sad with their weight.
the hours must leave furrows on them,
like heavy metal grinding over soft rocks, marking them down.
empty rivulets of sand,
benumbed to their own violation.
she cannot stop her boyfriend
she doesn't want to 'suck him off' but she doesn't want to upset him
its Valentine's, not worth a fight.
Where does the line of desire stop,
does it go far?
Dreams have time for questions
but she doesn't ask him.
She is Time
She dreams of red-bricks from the Department
They could be her lovers; they should be.
Damned to sharing it,
they cannot force intimacy on anyone.
Had they resisted
they might allow their aggressor the audacity
and the category of a rapist.
P.S; The corridor where everyone sits outside class, has red bricks under the concrete platform on which we sit and chat, and where, on a particular cold January afternoon, the sunlight falling on one's thighs can be more than the meaning of the word 'orgasmic'. The above poem was written on the thirteenth of February, and was put up first on my blog.
This is something I wrote for the magazine when they asked for entries on "Life before and after MA" but it couldn't be published because I was a little late. Anyway, its nothing, just a couple of lines. here goes:
So much of what we read, what we are supposed to work on, think about, is about desire. An excess or a lack of it. Either a divergence from or a convergence on it. Or love. Even pain can be derived from there. And yet people say that MA is 'depressing', that everyone is estranged from one another here.
Too much theory has made voyeurs out of lovers, deadened us to any real emotion, any real praxis. Everything can be read or written about, in a novel, play, poem or essay. Or so we think. People who deal with words, rhetoric, syllables, do not do enough to deserve a life entirely devoid of substance, or do they?
"Oppressed by the figures of beauty" is a line from Chelsea Hotel No. 2, a song by Leonard Cohen. It has more than a tangential parallel with our classroom.
-Anonymous
What I write is not mine, it belongs to tradition. Not the tradition I've read, but the tradition I am.
What the Thunder Says?
Standing on the bridge, he was continuously looking down the turbulent water of the river Yamuna. The river water glistened every now and then by the lights of the cars which were crossing across the bridge. This hide and seek of light and darkness fluctuated his intentions. Being a graduate in English Literature, he had read Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be...’. During those days he used to be dynamic and animated while reading his texts but he was so churned up by the critics and their obtrusive presence that he could hardly find out his own intrepretations of those lines. Thus a subject which he had chosen to chisel his creativity, interred his originiality and made him as mechanical as a student of a university, located in a metropolis.
At an age of twenty-nine, the gap between his goal - rather the goal of his parents, relatives, village and his entire community; and his efforts - seemed as distant as the abyss existing between dream and reality. ‘People say, the water of this river is no better than a drain’, he ruminates on. He cannot find it and wants to find it neither. It’s already past mid-night, and for the first time he has come here. The only question which poses before him is: can this river be a gateway to success to him, far from the utter fiasco of this world, where the boundary between success and failure per se will be as flimsy as a spider’s web.
His parents, who were basically farmers, always wanted to see him as an I.A.S. Officer. Four years ago, he came to this bustling city, having only this aim in his mind.
‘Is this the beginning of life?’
‘Is this the end of life, nothing exists outside it?’
These thoughts were hammering his mind as somewhere lightning thundered.
As an undergraduate student, he was one of the most promising students, the best one in Patna University.
‘But, was I the best one here?’
‘Perhaps not’, the answer echoed from the inside of his mind like a sharp bullet.
‘Didn’t I swot hard to be one!’
‘You did, but it continued for only a few months, afterwards you were lost in the maze of this city.’
Five years ago when his mother came to know about his second girlfriend Shamma, back in Patna, she had burst out in anger: ‘Never expect from us that you will bring a whore of any caste, who doesn’t even know how to put on clothes, and we will accept her as our bahu.’ Her tirade continued. ‘Have you any sense how your father sends you money by curtailing our daily needs? Send the boy to Delhi, he will be a Krishna Kanhaia’, she added apprehensively.
And, when he was to leave for Delhi, his mother - who was forty-five but looked fifty-five - shed tears for hours, but not before making him swear: ‘be away from sex and wine’. He felt proud, having been treated as Gandhi, going abroad. Unfortunately, he tasted both, enjoyed both, and longed more for it, and whatever was lacking, was fulfilled by his friends or foes, he couldn’t distinguish.
In the beginning, when he was focused on his studies, sometimes his friends jeered at him, rather at his naivety.
‘So, Gandhi wishes to be away from sex and wine.’
‘What! Want to be loyal to your girlfriend, who is one thousand kilometers away from here.’
‘Come on, buddy, man or ...’
Fortune’s wheel changed, and he started believing in pluralistic discourse, especially in the matter of girlfriends. He stumbled. However, tried to compensate for his past frivolousness, but the proverb, ‘It’s never too late to mend’, did not seem to be enough to exculpate him from his inevitable fall. He couldn’t cross the barrier of ‘U.P.S.C. Mains’.
‘My brother will perform some feat, which nobody has ever done in my village. He will be a big officer, earn a lot, and will pay off my dowry’, his sister kept on thinking. ‘Oh! This bloody dowry.’ Her entire hope from future perspectives rested on her brother’s success or failure. His father was one step ahead in building castles in the air. He had already dreamt how to invest the money which he was supposed to get in his son’s marriage. Had the things been under his control, he would have become another Mittal, with that money of dowry. A second Mittal, and would have sat on ‘Peacock Throne’. Another Shahjahan, or another peacock.
He loves his sister the most, as she is someone who is miles away from pretence. A thought of her brings two drops of water on his swollen cheek. But, again it’s tears or rain-water, he is unable to differentiate. He had read Keats: ‘My heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains.’
Suddenly, he wants to flinch from his present invention, but what will he reply to his relatives and neighbours. They will certainly sneer at him. ‘Look! S.P. sahib is going’. More than his failure, he is afraid of these backbiters who wield more power in society than the state-owned repressive apparatus. His flow of thoughts is disrupted by the sound of another lightning, as if it were a shot to inaugurate a game, signalling the beginning of a major sport event, his jump into the river. A jump into the future, which is no future; to a new life, which is no life. Certainly, for that acrobatic feat, he needs to muster up more courage, at least more than a Chinese gymnast.
At an age of twenty-nine, the gap between his goal - rather the goal of his parents, relatives, village and his entire community; and his efforts - seemed as distant as the abyss existing between dream and reality. ‘People say, the water of this river is no better than a drain’, he ruminates on. He cannot find it and wants to find it neither. It’s already past mid-night, and for the first time he has come here. The only question which poses before him is: can this river be a gateway to success to him, far from the utter fiasco of this world, where the boundary between success and failure per se will be as flimsy as a spider’s web.
His parents, who were basically farmers, always wanted to see him as an I.A.S. Officer. Four years ago, he came to this bustling city, having only this aim in his mind.
‘Is this the beginning of life?’
‘Is this the end of life, nothing exists outside it?’
These thoughts were hammering his mind as somewhere lightning thundered.
As an undergraduate student, he was one of the most promising students, the best one in Patna University.
‘But, was I the best one here?’
‘Perhaps not’, the answer echoed from the inside of his mind like a sharp bullet.
‘Didn’t I swot hard to be one!’
‘You did, but it continued for only a few months, afterwards you were lost in the maze of this city.’
Five years ago when his mother came to know about his second girlfriend Shamma, back in Patna, she had burst out in anger: ‘Never expect from us that you will bring a whore of any caste, who doesn’t even know how to put on clothes, and we will accept her as our bahu.’ Her tirade continued. ‘Have you any sense how your father sends you money by curtailing our daily needs? Send the boy to Delhi, he will be a Krishna Kanhaia’, she added apprehensively.
And, when he was to leave for Delhi, his mother - who was forty-five but looked fifty-five - shed tears for hours, but not before making him swear: ‘be away from sex and wine’. He felt proud, having been treated as Gandhi, going abroad. Unfortunately, he tasted both, enjoyed both, and longed more for it, and whatever was lacking, was fulfilled by his friends or foes, he couldn’t distinguish.
In the beginning, when he was focused on his studies, sometimes his friends jeered at him, rather at his naivety.
‘So, Gandhi wishes to be away from sex and wine.’
‘What! Want to be loyal to your girlfriend, who is one thousand kilometers away from here.’
‘Come on, buddy, man or ...’
Fortune’s wheel changed, and he started believing in pluralistic discourse, especially in the matter of girlfriends. He stumbled. However, tried to compensate for his past frivolousness, but the proverb, ‘It’s never too late to mend’, did not seem to be enough to exculpate him from his inevitable fall. He couldn’t cross the barrier of ‘U.P.S.C. Mains’.
‘My brother will perform some feat, which nobody has ever done in my village. He will be a big officer, earn a lot, and will pay off my dowry’, his sister kept on thinking. ‘Oh! This bloody dowry.’ Her entire hope from future perspectives rested on her brother’s success or failure. His father was one step ahead in building castles in the air. He had already dreamt how to invest the money which he was supposed to get in his son’s marriage. Had the things been under his control, he would have become another Mittal, with that money of dowry. A second Mittal, and would have sat on ‘Peacock Throne’. Another Shahjahan, or another peacock.
He loves his sister the most, as she is someone who is miles away from pretence. A thought of her brings two drops of water on his swollen cheek. But, again it’s tears or rain-water, he is unable to differentiate. He had read Keats: ‘My heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains.’
Suddenly, he wants to flinch from his present invention, but what will he reply to his relatives and neighbours. They will certainly sneer at him. ‘Look! S.P. sahib is going’. More than his failure, he is afraid of these backbiters who wield more power in society than the state-owned repressive apparatus. His flow of thoughts is disrupted by the sound of another lightning, as if it were a shot to inaugurate a game, signalling the beginning of a major sport event, his jump into the river. A jump into the future, which is no future; to a new life, which is no life. Certainly, for that acrobatic feat, he needs to muster up more courage, at least more than a Chinese gymnast.
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
beginnings...
To speak is to commit a mistake.
-Samuel Beckett
I would like to begin with a cliche. Its men who commit mistakes, not Gods. To prove that I'm a man I'll have to err, and to err I'll have to speak. I enjoy giving expression to my pent-up feelings either by spilling ink on paper or by disturbing the peace of the classroom and the outside world, among friends. But these days after joining MA Im undergoing a huge change in order to fashion myself perfectly. Call it my vanity or whatever. These days Im learning not how to speak, but how not to; not how to smile, how not to. These are the gifts which this metropolis and this university has given me.
No matter, life is life. I have written in my profile that I want to know more people. But I am really afraid, lest people should take me as an intruding, silly fellow. I have resolved many times to be as reticent as Aruni is (he told me about the Beckett line). But as soon as I see persons are contending with their opinions I jump into the fray. Sorry, cant help, this is what I am. I feel the same as the first person who has written here. We have all confined ourselves to tortoise shells, and its really hard to break it. Or to break the ice, for that matter.
Sorry friends, will talk later. The fleeting time reminds me of the looming danger of the internals.
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