The Tryst of a Woman of Nandigram

I am a woman of Nandigram
– My name is Radharani Ari
– Born in the twelfth year of the Republic
– That makes me forty-six.

Fourteen March 2007
– I am part of the struggle to save our Bhoomi
– The peaceful blockade on Bhangaberia Bridge
– Turns into a bloodbath
– Police shoot fourteen dead
– I hide in a ditch
– Only to be pulled out by your masked harmad
– Beaten unconscious and raped with a tree branch
– Till the tearing pain chokes my shrieks
– And my ears can hear my voice no more

I limp back in naked terror
– After all, what else can a poor woman of Nandigram do?

And then thirteen months on
– One month before the Panchayat election
– Three days before Nabo Barsho
– Eleventh April 2008
– In the night your rabid marauders come again for me
– Wearing red wristbands they drag me to the killing fields
– To gang rape me.

But this time from my mutilated vagina
– Sprouts forth a one man army
– Moulded on the one you so despise And call Gendoburro
– And like his agonising Kolkata tryst
– Away from the power transfer scripted in Delhi
– Mine is not to rest.

Till the cries of Freedom, Justice, Democracy
– Etched with the smouldering embers of my bones
– On the one hundred and fortyfour columns of the Temple
– Echo: I have come! I have come!

Till the ploughshares in my country’s parched farmlands
– Ignite and cut furrows into barricades of resistance
– My ashes rekindled into crimson blades swaying in the wind
– Echo: I have come! I have come!

June 8, 2008, New Delhi

[Suhas Borker is an independent documentary filmmaker and convener of the Working Group on Alternative Strategies based in New Delhi. He can be contacted at suhasborker@gmail.com]

(Courtesy : The Statesman)