The Blank Sheet In Between

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 she was really young. 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, blank. 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. 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 heart numb. My hands rushed and turned the page and in that moment everything made sense. 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.