The Secular Patriotic Hindu After 26/11

The newspapers would have us believe that if you were a Hindu you should be wanting a war, and if you were a Muslim you should be condemning the incident to prove your patriotism. I wanted to show the confused middle ground!

"THE SECULAR PATRITOTIC HINDU AFTER 26/11

In this the festival of crimes,
Where darkness feasts on
Grey areas of the mind,
We turned up uninvited,
Like pictures without a past,
Like clones, donors lost,
The bunting hung down dripping blood,
Of nights in Mumbai, Malegaon, Godhra
And the long forgotten ghosts of Noakhali
And Chauri Chaura.
Our hostess, gracious lady, pushing sixty
Looking younger than an evening with a rock star
Made us at home right away,
Amidst the larger than life posters of atrocities
Apparitions, finger food and burnt out cities
And horrifying portraits of the ubiquitous “Other”,
While her roving eyes tried to fix our pedigree,
Lineage, and exact place in the scheme of things,
Formulating us like phrases in a pretty speech.
We discussed poignant nothings
Pregnant with our own importance
And with relief at not having been found out.
And there, between the watered whisky
And slowly warming white wine
(Of some forgettable Indian vintage
Made up to look “foreign” and vaguely French)
The musk of promises made and unmade
Or barely kept,
Shoulders flashing white and talcum
The right and the wrong fusing into an amalgam
(The rot gut whisky helped)
I promised that never again,
Never again would we be taken unawares.
The morning came, red eyed, head vised
And creaking with accustomed pain,
And we woke up side by side,
In a bed that had seen better times,
And the headlines screamed that
A Ghost that had burnt 30 years back at the hustings
Was back again, this time as a savior,
Not risen after three days,
Not at one with God,
Not flesh of my flesh,
Not blood of my blood,
Just a casual, sly insertion, a commando action,
Infiltration, exfiltration, like a virgin conned
By the fall of gold dust or a white goose,
Just the All father in His All Fathering mood.
In the name of the father,
In the name of the nation,
In the name of the people
In the name of alienation
We have the dracula back again
We have the teeth of dragon
Democracy, soiled grimy golden fleece,
We need dragon’s teeth to guard
You
Again.
The war to end all wars,
The peace that passeth
Understanding.
We thought of going back to sleep
And found out, to our great surprise,
That we had never woken up.
We had never dreamt.
“And in the room, the women come and go
Talking of Michaelangelo”.

Composed by: Protik Prokash Banerji