What is it in mapping, re-mapping if it leads to animosity, hatred, malice, envy, revenge-killing, death, murder, genocide and bloodletting? What it in partition if it could be so gruesome, bloody and bestial?

What to say? What is it called the Partition? How were the lands partitioned? What was the basis of it? What has the Partition taught us? What lesson did it to the rogues? You would never be at peace, was the lesson given too. But instead of it we demarcated them mindlessly ignoring service to man is service to God.

She was only thirteen when she was butchered, the lamp was snuffed out. So, what could she see it? What independence did she enjoy it? What freedom meant to her personally? So, as she could not see it taking place bodily, she seemed to be viewing from there, blessing us from above. She was put beneath earth, moving earth on her, we buried her and did with behind our courtyard and forgot her to move ahead, leave behind what it happened, the blood-smeared gory incident. The world remembered her not, came to feel it not after. We too could not locate and trace her grave when we crossed over the border to see and feel it. Time wrapped it over with its sheet of forgetfulness, the shroud of mystery.

Is this called the Partition? Can the Partition be as such? Who is to answer it? Who will say? Who will give the answer? Yes, we gained freedom at the common man’s sacrifice. Foreigners and invaders always looted and plundered India. A few took to it as their own, taking to be its pain as their own. None tried to understand it, the lore of India, the myths of it. None strove for the development and eradication of its poverty.

People escaped, but she could not. A victim of the sub-continental tragedy, she lost her life and lay in the embrace of Good Earth. But when we visited, the poet says, we could not trace her, locate her, the house lying on that side of the border which was but our own then. Just the maize plants, green plants seemed to be greeting from the fields seemed to be welcoming and greeting with hands. Whatever brutal, bestial and bloody it had happened, that gruesome night, we forgot it in course of time and the things turned into history and its blurred pages to rewrite in a prejudiced and biased way our forgotten tale hearing in a folktale version intermixed with pseudo-truths, the bloody chapters of the Partition which read we not, just read them now as a discourse for our seminars and talks. Was the Partition so? Bloodletting, inhuman bloodletting, we could not forget it.

Had she been alive, she too would have joined us at the celebration of the event, she would have seen her family. But her life was cut short. She lost her precious life at the hands of the narrow-minded, small and bloody bastard cut-throat fanatics, zealots and conservatives.

Now it is up to the readers to say, what Parting was it? What birth of a nation was in essence? Did we approach such freedom? Did we ever want such independence? It shook us emotionally and we do not have words to say; we do not have the requisite speech to condemn it the mass killing and genocide.

It was not in reality a partition, but a mindless killing, some sort of blood-letting that did we in the name of independence, attaining of freedom. Had we felt free, we would not have such a thing. Had we enjoyed freedom, we would not have at least in an inhuman way. To be independent is to not inflict injuries upon each other. To be free is not to impose one’s own faith and liking. Lands can never be divided on the basis of narrow thinking. History is not history if it is smeared with blood. Try to think about humanity, this mankind at least rather than you about yourselves.

The words ‘thirteen’, ‘butchered’, the birth oof a nation, she could bless it, ass to the pity and pathos. Put beneath, the house, a barren field make the poem what we could not have felt.

It is really a great poem that we are reading. Really, a few can attempt in such a way as has tried to get at the things. We admire the approach so missing in literature, the talent he has got in penetrating the scene.

She was only thirteen
When she was butchered
On the birth of a nation
So that she could bless it
From above
She was put beneath.
The earth
In a barren field
Behind my house
In a hurried burial of escape
So much in the embrace of earth
I failed to trace her grave
On my visit across the border—
She must be married
Rearing children of grace.
A rich crop of maize swirled
As if waving at me with hands
That had long been folded stiff
In peaceful sorrow rest.

Let us see what he narrates in the poem named Birth of a Nation wherein he deals with the tragedy of the Partition, what the others have left, he says that in just a few lines of poetry.