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.
Copyright © Manya Saxena | Year Posted 2020
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