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)