Sab Yaad Rakha Jayega

I am concerned with the landscape of memory.

- Amitava Kumar

Do you remember how the night-sky glowed with funeral fires? I read reports that the metal in the crematoriums was melting. You were walking among the dead. A thuggish chief minister warned that anyone who said there were no oxygen tanks available would be arrested. There were so many bodies floating in the Ganga and dogs were sticking their snouts into corpses buried in shallow graves on the river's banks.

But you know how it is. In one season, you have seen the branches of the trees heavy with fruit, and you cannot recall that distant season when the branches were bare. When the next elections came around, how many remembered what it had been like during those times? The same man who had lied about oxygen tanks went around proclaiming the victory of his party. Why do we let this happen? It is perhaps because we surrender to spectacle. And we are seduced by sentiment. We choose to uphold the constitutionality of the irrational.

The guy on the throne, the toastmaster of all tamashas, decided to shower rose petals from helicopters to honour the medical staff. All that while, there were millions on the highways trying to get home, to Ballia and Bettiah, and Sitamarhi and Siwan. This is the landscape of the nation-state: hills and valleys. One group, blissful in its comfortable ignorance, sits on the mountaintop while the masses trudge along the snaking paths in the valley below.