In 1947, my grandparents brought three children and the remains of an uprooted life from Pakistan to India in a train. One of those children was my mother.
I grew up hearing a lot of stories about the horror of those times.
The trains full of bodies.
Hungry migrants forced to cook on the flames of funeral pyres.
I heard these stories from many survivors of Partition, internalised them and purged them when I wrote my first novel Perfect Eight.
Safe in the knowledge that we would never again see the level of desperation and inhumanity we had seen then.
And yet nearly 73 years later, there is a mass exodus again. Of Indians who are treated as migrants in their own country. Their bodies travel in black polythene bags alongside the living in trucks.
Trains have once again become deathtraps. They lose their way routinely and when they arrive, they sometimes unload bodies of those who starved to death on the way.
A dead mother lies unattended on a railway platform. Her baby tries to wake her while routine announcements go on around them.
CBS sums up the scene thus, “Her young son can be seen repeatedly tugging at a piece of cloth placed on her body. She died of “extreme heat, hunger and dehydration” on Monday as the train reached Muzaffarpur station, about 200 miles short of her hometown.”‬
There was also a hungry man who we saw recently picking at a dog’s carcass.
And a huddle of shivering men being sprayed with a chemical disinfectant.
A mango stall being looted.
This is happening In a self-governed country that was supposedly no longer a prisoner of its past and is on its way towards “global supremacy.”
A country where remapping the central vista in Delhi is more important than building infrastructure for citizens.
This too is a kind of a Partition.
Between the balcony class and those who do not belong even to the cities they helped build.
Between advocates of “positivity” living in a bubble and those who fall asleep on railway tracks out of sheer exhaustion and then are run over before they can reach home.
Between social media influencers posting pictures of their whipped coffee, banana breads and those who scramble to collect a pack of biscuits, a banana.
Between us and them.
Between those who cannot acknowledge reality and those who have to live it.
Between the India that wants to monetise space tourism, and circulates fake NASA images to show how it shimmered through a pandemic, and the India where a man walks on a highway with his old mother in his arms, a young girl cycles for hundreds of miles to take her father home, a mother drags a suitcase with her baby asleep on it.
We are now officially a nation of lotus eaters, drunk on imaginary glory.
Unaware that a swarm of locusts is on its way to consume what is left of our idea of a Republic that was supposed to be by, of, for not just some of us but all of us.