First came the scream of the dying in a bad dream, then the radio report, and a newspaper: six shot dead, twenty-five houses razed, sixteen beheaded with hands tied behind their backs inside a church… As the days crumbled, and the victors and their victims grew in number, I hardened inside my thickening hide, until I lost my tenuous humanity.
I ceased thinking of abandoned children inside blazing huts still waiting for their parents. 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 mowed 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.
Robin S Ngangom is a bilingual poet and translator who writes in English and Manipuri. He was invited to the UK Year of Literature and Writing in 1995, has read his poems at literary events in India and abroad, and his poems have appeared in several prestigious anthologies and magazines. He has also co-edited two significant anthologies of poetry from Northeast India. His latest book, My Invented Land (Speaking Tiger, New Delhi), appeared in 2023.