If they remembered their grandmother’s tales of many winter
hearths
at the hour of sleeping death,
I didn’t want to know, if they ever learnt the magic of letters.
And the women heavy with seed,
their soft bodies mown down like grain stalk during their lyric
harvests;
if they wore wildflowers in their hair while they waited for
their men,
I didn’t care anymore.
I burnt my truth with them, and buried uneasy manhood with
them.
I did mutter, on some far-off day:
‘There are limits,’ but when the days absolved the butchers,
I continue to live as if nothing happened.
I underlined ‘when the days absolved the butchers’ and ‘live as if
nothing happened’.
I drew a large breath and started rewriting my notes.
N
6
NELLIE
STUCK BETWEEN REMEMBERING AND
FORGETTING
Massacre is a dead metaphor that is eating my friends, eating
them without salt.
Massacre opened the door to them when other doors were
closed, and called them by their names when news reports
were looking for numbers.
Massacre is a dead metaphor that comes out of the television
and eats my friends without a single pinch of salt.
– Ghayath Almadhoun, ‘Massacre’,
translated from the Arabic
by Catherine Cobham
ellie is one of the small villages in the northeastern state of
Assam’s Nagaon district. It carries the heavy history of having
been ground zero of one of the bloodiest massacres in India. More
than 3,000 Muslims—mostly women and children—were massacred
there and in the surrounding villages on a single day in February 1983.
Local eyewitness accounts of the massacre report a much higher number
of fatalities.
Newspaper reports appear sporadically on the anniversary of the
massacre, repeating the same information and always referring to Nellie
as the ‘forgotten massacre’ in which ‘illegal Muslim immigrants’ were
killed. But those who buried their dead and returned to live next to these
graveyards have a different memory of these events. And after three
decades of silence, they now bear the burden of explaining, repeating
and narrating what happened in Nellie over and over.
With Guwahati, the capital city, as my base, I travelled throughout
Assam. Each day, I would travel out to the villages where the
communities I wanted to speak with lived, and return to the guesthouse.
In my earlier journeys along the borderlands, I would travel along the
border for months at a stretch and return home when I ran out of money.
I lived in cheap hotels and government guesthouses, and sometimes even
slept in the car when I couldn’t find a place for the night. When I
returned in 2018—thirty-five years after the historic massacre—much
had changed for me and this book. I had given birth and left my
eighteen-month-old daughter behind. As the rhythm of my life and my
body had changed, the way I travelled and moved in the world also
changed. I felt sure that this trip was my last chance to finish the journey
that I had started almost five years earlier.
The last five years had also affected the politics, moods, rhythms,
joys and sorrows of the people of Assam. Two realities dominated daily
life: the ebb and flow of the mighty Brahmaputra and Barak rivers, and
the battle to establish who was ‘Assamese’. Almost all the people I
encountered there were either
made or broken by the rivers, as well as by
the battle to establish who they were.
A third of Assam’s border with Bangladesh is porous—about 162
miles of the border are fenced, and about fifty-nine miles are along the
river Brahmaputra. The river is dotted with ‘char chapori’ or ‘chars’,
shifting sand islands that are created and remade each time the river
Brahmaputra ebbs and flows. These shifting chars are also homes that
people leave every time the land erodes. Every three or four years, when
the chars become unliveable, its inhabitants move in search of the next
liveable char.
Independent India inherited the former British protectorate of
Assam, a region that today shares borders with Bangladesh, Bhutan,
Burma, China, Sikkim and Tibet. If history had taken a different turn,
Assam might have been given to Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) in the
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
