What took place

C C Likith Bopanna

20SJCCC316

What took place

(Innumerable timelines consolidated into one)

The night of freedom

Multiple fused into one

Rain brings pain and grief

I have decided to take Toba Tek Singh as not one person or entity but as a collective memory of all the emotions, hardships, distress and much more faced by all the people present at the time of the partition. Everyone alive during the partition faced different hardships and experienced the partition in different ways compared to one another. Most people were traumatised by the conditions they had to face which many of them did not expect which changed their mentality and lifestyle especially in the case of Toba Tek Singh. This was a result of the confusion and commotion caused because very few people at the time understood what the partition would imply.

I have chosen to express the story in the form of a haiku as I think it leaves room for speculation and thinking when it comes to the subject matter as none but the people who have gone through the situation can explain the feelings and emotions rushing through their minds as everything happened in the moment and without warning. This also leaves room for people to come up with their own ideas as to how the partition went and does not restrict them to one specific way of looking at everything that took place as everyone who had live in the time of the partition had different experiences which may have been similar but none of them were the exact same.

The title “What took place,” is what I chose as it brings about intrigue and desire to know what took place in the story. It also promotes the reader to do more research into the topic as before reading more into the topic I knew about when and how the partition took place but didn’t know about all the other things that happened and about all the experiences the people had gone through during the partition. I also think that most people, just like me don’t know most of what happened during the partition as we are so disconnected from the problems faced at the time of partition as it was completely overshadowed by India’s acquisition of independence. The title also acts as a form of continuity which is both a personal preference and also partly due to the limitation of syllables in a haiku. The subtitle “Innumerable timelines consolidated into one,” is to add to the collective grief, pain and trauma faced by all the people living at the place where the partition took place.

The first line “The night of freedom,” refers to the day when India became independent or the time during which the partition took place. This line has both literal and satirical meaning to it as people call around India rejoiced over the attainment of freedom but it wasn’t the same for the people living in the borders as the action ended up uprooting all their lives and all of them had to face difficult and troublesome situations that made freedom the least of their concerns. Most people there lost their families and had to resort to labour and homelessness as they were separated from their families and had no source of income which made independence not seem like true freedom.

The second line “Multiple fused into one,” is about how when we think of the partition, we tend to think of the entire ordeal being completed over the period of one or two days when it was actually more than that as everyone was struck with complete confusion and disbelief which went on for several days leading to the people losing their families, their sources of income and also in the death of a lot of people and complete anarchy around the area. It is also about how we fuse the multiple memories that people have about the process into one and forget about the misery caused as it was all for the greater goal of independence.

The last line “Rain brings pain and grief,” is about how even though the people had different experiences, they all collectively faced the same emotions of grief and pain as a result of the partition which caused them to lose everything they had and the trauma they had to endure with everything going on. Rain is a part of the line as I think this went down during the season of monsoon as it was in August and also the fact that rain normally correlates to the feeling of melancholy. Haikus also tend to constitute seasons and this was a way I could make it a part of the poem. Rain can also be considered to trigger the PTSD of people who had first hand experience to the partition.