By Anonymous,
I am a Jew in Nazi Germany waiting for Hitler to be elected as the supreme leader. I listen to Nishrin Jafri as she speaks about her father who was murdered along with several others. Bodies floating in the drain….I remember 1992, the fear. Mom drawing up the curtains. All of us ‘hiding’ in one room. As if the ‘empty’ look of the house will fool the rioters…
Nishrin talks about the 1969 riots. Her parents moving back to the same area. Then 2002…Waking up to find out about the news of the killing of your father, friends, cousins and neighbours from Times of India. I shudder, I cry. I can’t listen to her anymore. I hear the sound of my train to Auschwitz in her words.
Nishrin Jafri [Courtesy: IAMC]
A young Indian journalist from London updates his Facebook status about the need to elect Hitler as our next Prime Minister. I feel sick in my stomach. I press a button and unfriend him. I remember my Latin American friend talking about what happened to his uncle and many others under Pinochet. People who disappear into thin air.
I wonder about the people who will be ‘safe’ under the supreme commandership of Hitler. What are the Poles thinking? The Dalits? The ‘loose’ women? The homosexuals? The Spaniards? The communists? The poor? Do they think that only Jews will end up as corpses?
I plot an escape. May be I need to get my family to another country while I still can. Then I remember walking around with my brown skin, ‘polluting’ sacred white continents. I remember 2002 Gujarat and the realisation that I will never belong anywhere. I can see my grandnieces fleeing the snow white lands amidst a grand cleansing drive.
I remember 1992. Till then, I used to be confused about the difference between ‘Muslim’ and ‘Hindu’. My headscarf wearing mom used to tell me and my brother that Krishna was a prophet. Then, at the grand age of 10, amidst rioting mobs in a small south Indian town, my doubts disappeared. After that, I knew why my friend Mini was Hindu and I, a non-Hindu.
Then, in a long journey of many years, I remember meeting other ‘outsiders’. ‘Anti national’ fisher folk who oppose nuclear plants using dangerous weapons called slogans. I remember the man in a torn T-shirt who was arrested for staging a play. He was apparently a Maoist who was capable of committing thought crimes. My women friends who should be wiped out of the ‘decent family residential colony’ because they have male visitors. Gay people who get routinely raped by very moral men. I remember the homeless man who told me that it is the duty of the police to ensure that he does not have even a blanket in Delhi winter.
All of them, my cell mates in Auschwitz. We will fight for a bowl of thin soup. We will plot escapes which will never materialise. We will die of dysentery. We will scratch the concrete roofs of gas chambers with our nails. Our body fat will turn into soap in glitzy malls.
May be some of us will survive and go to a new land. There we will repeat a different kind of Auschwitz. This time on the locals who dare to pick up stones to do an Intifada.
(Anonymous very often gets identified as a woman, Muslim, brown, South Indian etc.)