My Generation

I sat there, in a pool of blood and human guts, bawling at the scene I was being presented with. In front of me, my mother’s mutilated corpse — raped and beaten till it was no longer physically possible for her to live. When she had stopped breathing, they had still seen potential in her. Plunging a hunter’s knife into her gut, they had ripped her stomach open in a neat vertical line and let her entrails splay out. She lay there, her delicate frame unrecognisable; every orifice covered in blood; her teeth lying in different corners of the small hut we had called our home, not more than an hour before.

By my side, thrashed a man I had once called my father; my hero, my saviour, my guardian. I could not, however, call him my father any more. For the man I saw was a weeping, bloody mess; he did not look anything like my strong, bold father. On his knees, drenched in blood and piss, he let out guttural screams for the life of a loved one he could not save. I could see his face turning white as salt, as the man behind him slammed the butt of his rifle into my erstwhile father’s skull. As he keeled over and his head hit the ground beneath him, I noticed that the lump of flesh, where his arm had been, had stopped bleeding as profusely as it had been. It was now just a bloody mass of pink, with a thin white suggestion of a bone sticking out of it. He lay on the ground, next to my mother’s feet, unconscious — as humiliated and powerless as a new born suckling. It would be better, if his life faded away before consciousness slipped in.

Knocking him out cold was probably the kindest act committed by the group of men who, now, surrounded me. There were seven of them in all; in their white Banians and khaki shorts, they looked like the splitting image of the Rakshasas, which had featured in mother’s bedtime stories. Each one of them carried a rifle in their hands. The four Rakshasas, who had laid their rifles against the mud wall of our hut, so as to brutally violate and mutilate my beautiful mother, moved towards the source of their illegitimate power, the greatest equaliser of individuals. They were using the only three saris my mother had owned to wipe the blood, mucus and semen off their deflating penis’. They tucked their veinous protrusions into their pants and proceeded to take swigs from a glass bottle filled with transparent country liquor. It was time for them to rest, after a hard day’s work. They were neither the establishment nor the revolutionary; they simply had power from the former to behave like the latter. The other three men were searching for specific items in the hut, flinging aside any innocent object, which came in the way of their quest.

I was left sitting in the centre of the room, with limbs bound by jute rope, covered in my parents’ blood and the men’s urine. The only sounds I could hear, ringing in my ears and mind, were that of my father’s hoarse wailing and primal thrashing, as he was made to helplessly observe his wife’s defilation; my mother’s gut wrenching screams, as she was repeatedly raped, filled with blood curdling pain and fear. I did not feel sorrow or despair, at the moment; not an ounce. All I felt was rage — a blinding white, hot rage, which threatened to consume the entire world, if it were not unleashed on the demons, which littered my parents’ hut. I was crying, but no sound escaped me. My incessant screaming, an hour ago, had left my voice torn and empty. All that escaped my bloody lips were gusts of fiery air.

Soon, they were done. Drunk on the bottle of liquor and the power they had pried from my mother’s tormented screams and my father’s helpless flailing, they staggered to the entrance of the hut carrying the few valuable items the hut contained — my mother’s sparse array of jewellery and the money my father had made working for our malik. They sauntered away burping, laughing raucously, screaming into the decimation. Clearly, I was too negligible to be bothered with; I had nothing to give them, but the guilt of having killed a child. My inability to resist assault proved to be my greatest strength.

The last image I have of these lawless crusaders, enabled by the long arm of the law, was of them exiting my parents’ mausoleum to be — shoulder to shoulder, guns slung back, heads tilted up with a pride, undeserved, as a single entity emerging from the ashes of one victorious disaster to rush head long into the waiting arms of yet another. As they stepped out, one man turned back to take one last look at the sordid masterpiece he had created with the aid of his compatriots. In that moment, his eye caught mine; I held it with a calmness I thought it had become impossible to feel. In that instant, in that calm before the storm, I saw in his eyes all I could find, the demise of my kind, the birth of my mind, the traumatic departure on a path to bless the whole world blind.

It has been many a year, now, since that fateful night. I have grown; I am ready now. With me, within me, has grown a vicious plant born of the seed sown by the murderous fiends, who relieved my parents of the pain they would have been faced with if they saw the person their precious son was today. It is time for the branches, which have grown stronger by the day, to lash out; to grasp in it’s clutches the wrongs of the past and make right the future with a dice which it will cast; to wring from their beings the essence of life, not with a knife but by eternal strife.

It is time to set the world aright. It is time to end it all, to start again.