Historical Triangulation as Coping Mechanism

  1630 bullets

In the evening
after her children are tired
of Assonance,
                    Algebra, Pascal’s Law,
                    and Periodic Tables,
their mother tells them
the story of their singularly
mythical great-grandfather
jauntily ambling to Jallianwala Bagh, and then
being sieved by bullets          fired
from .303 Enfield Rifles.
Because the
story is all heart,
fleshed by borrowed memory,
and almost no real detail, she could not
have described the rustle of silence
right before Dyer ordered,          ‘Fire!’
Instead, she tells them
of the shrieks, the panic,
the frenzy after it ended,
the Well whose waters
still ran red, those
Nanakshahi bricks along
the narrow exit corridor,
decorated with bullet wounds
encircled by white chalk. She
cannot possibly know that
like her grandfather,
those Nanakshahi bricks, and the
narrow, deathly corridor
will not exist in future. Feeling
unnecessarily solemn, their
throats sticky with sadness, the children
fall asleep. Next day, they are woken
by their father’s lamentations.
They see him standing
in front of the television,
while an inexplicably
animated reporter conveys, ‘THE TALIBAN
HAVE DESTROYED BAMIYAN BUDDHAS’.
The children do not know
what is the Taliban, where is Bamiyan,
or who is Buddha. Still sobered by
their mother’s story,
they know now is not the time
to make word-strings like,
Taliban-shaliban-kaliban-laliban,
of any new words they learn.