The Other Corpses

The Other Corpses

A mastectomy is considered a traumatic experience for a woman.

A cut finger, many say, is felt long after it is lost: twitching, moving; its absence becomes a recurrent reminder of its existence.

Nations are cleaved apart and habitually given new names.

Land is understood as ‘territory’.

It ‘must’ belong to someone: a government, a tribe, an army, a clan, a group of revolutionaries, a people, one man. It has never been allowed to exist in itself, as of itself.

We are taught repeatedly to absorb and digest the fact that wars are only incidental occurrences.

Like fingers cut off in a machine accident.

Or like the necessity of a mastectomy; unexplainable, mysterious, impersonal in the arbitrariness of its occurrence.

1947 was not the only year in which it happened.

It has happened before and since countless times.

One wonders about how much is lost. The numerous casualties. The numbers of rapes and kidnappings and slaughters and yes, of course the murders involving special attention to breasts, executed of course in an accidental, incidental way, because incidentally, breasts happen to be located on a woman’s body.

We have all seen pictures of wars. Such as of the war that caused a part of India to metamorphosize into a new beautiful name: Pakistan. So neat and new and shiny.

I wonder why when we look at pictures and read accounts, we are shown only the material corpses; the corpses of human bodies. Why are we not shown the other corpses? The invisible corpses straying like spirits in the air. The eternal, the unshakable, the persistent corpses of all those Tomorrows that were also slaughtered during the shift of people and animals and furniture and stacks of wheat. The corpses of all the Tomorrows that were never lived, the unlived tomorrows which were never fulfilled in that land, which some people

called ‘mother earth’

Or ‘heartbeat’

Or ‘life

Or ‘home’

or 'soul'

And which historians

incidentally,

call India.