Forget Me Not: Remembering with a twist

By Srijana Raje

The ground was iced and the soldier pounded frozen mud and shovelled tree roots away. He was completely exhausted and his stomach growled endlessly, but he kept digging as the night sank. The fear of what’s to come grew numb during the next four hours it took to dig his shelter against the enemy fire. As the rising Sun burned away the dense fog, his view of the border was cleared just before the war surrounded him. Once a peaceful morning to erupt ended with the thunderous sounds of bombs smashing into the earth while deafening machine guns shot off in every direction.

There was fire, so much fire. Soon, the fire blurred his vision. First the blurriness, then the pain. Two bullets jutted in his chest and forearm, and the blood flowed from his arms, and got mixed with the ground. He killed three enemies in hand to hand combat that day, their screaming voices just before death echoed in his mind all night. The second enemy bunker was also captured and all were dead by the end of the day.

He escaped death that day, but that night was a different story.

The night was none less than death. It was 20 minutes to sleep, he dreamt about guns and the men whose hands he had to hold to get here. During the day, that land was covered in crimson, but at night, all of the blood was black. All of it. That haunted him. That blood, which was not even his to begin with, squeezed his soul dry.

He survived that day, and the other, and the other. In fact he survived the whole war. But I don’t think he was the same, ever again. He might have walked away from the battlefield that day, but all these aeons, he never left it. He never talked about what happened there, to anybody. Not to his wife, his kids, or his grandkids.

Almost 35 million lives were lost in the struggle for Independence in India.

History is hard to reckon with sometimes. It comes with these huge numbers that no human mind can truly comprehend. We throw around the number thirty five million and we say never forget, but can you comprehend thirty five million individual lives lived and lost?

“We’re at the height of human civilisation and advancement.” That ignorance and the arrogance to forget, to allow ourselves to forget, is really what is a big human flaw. It’s very important to keep telling these stories again and again.

And in the face of all that horror, I always come back to this. Those of us who are still here. Every day we survive as a miracle, one that should be celebrated. Every day of our continued existence is a victory. Survive out of spite, if you can. If that’s what it takes in these troubled times. Remember to just keep going and that no nightmare is forever. But most of all, remember to dance or sing, to celebrate being free and alive.