Last week marked the seventieth anniversary of the Partition of India, with its tragic aftermath of sectarian violence and loss of life.

This poem by Chrys Salt comes from her forthcoming pamphlet The Punkawallah’s Rope, a response to a trip to India last year where she read at the Kolkata Book Fair. Her poem below is rooted in a conversation she had with Professor Bimalendu Bhattacharya, who fled East Bengal with his family when hostilities broke out. “You can see the pain on his face when he speaks of it,” the poet says.

 
PARTITION 1947 (An old man remembers) 

‘Where are we going?’
‘I don’t know,’ papa said,
‘but this is not my country now.
I want to die in India.’ 

Old eyes cloud 
with seventy years of history
and loss.

‘I still have dreams
of growing up with friends,
Hindu and Muslim,
Remember their addresses, 
every one,
our village fish tank 
with three kinds of carp,
of playing Daria Bandha in the sun,
a football we begged money for
from door to door,
the house dad built 
for his retirement, back then.

The day they said 
my friends were enemies,
spoke of marauding mobs,
in nearby villages. 

The day
we packed up all that we could carry,
took a train.’