Some of you may remember I went to India earlier this summer … as promised, here are more reflections on the trip.
This week, India and Pakistan celebrate their 76th anniversary of independence from Britain, and I wanted to share thoughts on a bizarre nationalistic display I observed in late June.
On a 110-degree day, my teen and I navigated the most organized line in India at the Wagah border near Amritsar. Crowds gathered over two hours and crammed into bleachers in a large, newly built stadium. Indian military guards literally hyped up the audience with Bollywood-like music, inviting women and children onto the stadium floor to wave the Indian tricolor, and to dance in a mosh pit of patriotic frenzy. At one point, the hype leader stomped on the ground and pointed to the Pakistani side, while signaling to us to cheer more loudly. Most people participated enthusiastically and apparently unthinkingly in the jeering, as if our voices could end the decades-old tensions between two border nations. Eventually, the main ceremony began, the Pakistani and Indian flags were lowered, but not before soldiers on both sides (the Pakistani crowd was much smaller) performed orchestrated movements in uniform.
So many of us have a border story, ours or an ancestor’s. For years, I didn’t understand how much my parents’ border story was also my story. How their trauma (mostly suppressed and rarely discussed) was also my trauma. And how the trauma of Partition remains a collective memory among so many.
Last year, I read Tomb of Sand, the International Booker Prize Winner by Geetanjali Shree, and was struck by the line:
“Once you’ve got women and a border, a story can write itself.”
I think about this line a lot, as I continue to explore my own creative writing.
Colonialism is shit. And baked into my very existence. Had there not been a border drawn through a land in 1947, my parents wouldn’t have become child refugees and may never have met and married. I am here because they were there.
For years, because of systems of oppression, I have had a broken relationship with my ancestral stories. And now my writing is part of the healing journey. So many of you have talked to me about writing, and I believe it’s because we’re in a collective moment of reclamation.
Claiming and documenting our narratives is very much part of our liberation. If you haven’t already, pick up a journal this summer. Write. Your memories, your thoughts, your feelings. For yourself first.