Peace Has Come by Parismita Singh

Author:Parismita Singh [Singh, Parismita]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789386850508
Publisher: Westland Publications
Published: 2018-02-19T18:30:00+00:00

There was so much happening that year but I remember that uncle.

One day, this fellow showed up at our house. He was my father’s cousin from a village close to the border, and had come to apply for bail for his son who had been picked up by the security forces in a raid. The poor man had sold some land to try and get the boy out in time for the exams. His son and I were of the same age, and I was preparing to take the school-leaving exams that year too. It was 1997 or ’98, the year the peace treaty collapsed and the violence began in earnest. The sound of gunfire was getting so common, the uncle said, that when they heard shooting the night before, they made little of it. It happened every other day. Some of the other families in the neighbourhood sent their boys away, but his son had refused to go, would not even hide in the cowshed when the police arrived with the CRP. The boy was stubborn, and look how they were paying for it. It had been three months already. We stood around while the uncle spoke. My father sat by his side at the dining table while my mother stood by the kitchen door silently wiping her eyes, my sister and I hanging around near her. None of us knew what to do or say, but then father started.

He looked up at me and barked: ‘You! What are you standing around for? Go, go inside and study, anything to keep from his books – out! Let me show you.’

He had stood up and was moving menacingly towards me. I didn’t understand. Maybe he was trying to console the uncle, or stop him from going on with this unbearable story, or he had lost his mind, but my father continued in that vein, berating me: ‘These sons of ours, nothing . . . nothing in their heads . . . no thought for their parents and the future.’ All the while, he was moving towards me, his hand raised, his face mottled red with violence, voice shaking.

He did not frighten me. But I felt such a rage, such acute embarrassment at this spectacle that I could not move. It was my sister who gently prodded me into leaving the room. My anger towards him built up over the next few days with every innocuous remark he made, every time I caught sight of his face. I did not forget that incident for a long time. I still wonder – whatever had gotten into my father that day?

There was chaos all around us, you couldn’t help but feel it in the very air – news of kidnappings and bomb blasts, of villages razed, encounters and killings. The Bodo groups were divided and the two main insurgent wings had started fighting each other. Then there were the Army operations.

It was also about then that we heard of the Bodo–Santhali violence erupting in places, the tension brimming over into skirmishes and fighting.

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