The Convicts

Dear Pakistan, I have had this nauseous feeling inside of me for some time now. I had consciously stirred away from all the books that described the partition in great detail. And if I did read about it, it was objective and from a third party perspective. I refrained myself from having any feelings about it. And why should I have them? I was born in 1988 in a small town of Maharashtra- an Indian state far away from the India-Pakistan border. Yes, my best friend had her ancestral roots in Sindh but we seldom spoke about it in detail. I grew up hearing about ISI intermittently. From what we kids heard about it, for us, ISI was equivalent to a terrorist organization. You were always the enemy. How I hated you during the Kargil war. And yes, almost everything that went wrong in India was attributed to you and your ISI. And then this happened: It was 2003. I was 14. I was in Thailand as a part of the Indian contingent for the 20 th world scout Jamboree. I met people from ar...

I go to my office, I sit at my desk. I type mails on my laptop. Tip tap tip tap, such sounds the keys make! Analysis and meetings and arguments and reports; Inside I am draining, I feel so low. I feel dizzy, I want to lie down. I cannot explain to the world, It is my krypton- This vitamin D deficiency makes me all woozy. But I fight it every day, I am a supergirl, you see! My best friend is a batwoman. How is that, you ask. Oh that’s simple- she wears a mask. She lost her parents-no, not physically. But in spirit, they weren’t available emotionally! They told her she couldn’t do it, she was not smart. The world said the same, she had a broken heart. She fought depression for a very long time. And yet she is now a business woman, totally worth every dime! There was a little boy I knew, A boy who lived! His name wasn’t Harry Potter but he shared the same story He survived a brutal attack, it was very gory. The world sneered at hi...