A Tree That Fell - by Atul Singh

The history of the world is littered with tragedies big and small. Some have affected a few, perhaps like a lightening strike and some many, like an earthquake. Some were man made like the American Civil War and China’s Famine of 50s, while others were natural disasters. But none has surpassed this singular event that transpired a few decades ago in scale and depth of tragedy. It was metaphorically a giant, beautiful Tree that fell. 

So how do you rate a tragedy? Let’s take the passing away of a person. It hurts in two ways. One clearly is the emotional trauma inflicted by the loss on those who knew the departed one. The other is the lost opportunity of life yet unlived, both in terms of experience the person would have lived through as well as what could have been. Hence a younger person passing is so much more tragic than a 90 year old, having lived and experienced their full life. 

The other sad score to rate a tragedy is in terms of how many people it affected. A car accident with a few people hurt versus 9/11, with several thousand perishing have different import, even though on a individual basis a loss is a loss, and there are no two ways about it. 

So coming back to the Tree that Fell, the poignancy of that singular event is unsurpassed in human history on accounts of sheer pain, scale as well as lost opportunity. I talk about the Partition of Bharat into two countries, India and Pakistan. 

There was the immediate consequence of the largest migration of people in the shortest time and direct deaths associated with the event. Take a pause and reflect a moment on the below numbers. Remember also that these numbers are from 1947, when world population was a tad over 2 Billion. So as a percentage of people affected from those that were living at that time, the affect was 4x. 

“The partition, as it came to be known, forced more than 15 million people to move to the other side in what was the world's largest forced migration. Nearly two million people were killed in the riots during the exodus and the bloody history of partition continues to affect relations between the two nations.”

There are no words, no feelings that the human brain can conjure up to deal with the scale and pain of that tragedy. But these numbers only tell a part of the story. The other part has happened over the ensuing now three generations in terms of what so many of those forced migrants have gone through.

15 million stories disrupted, 15 million people with multiple generations affected, millions and millions of homes, farms, contexts, history, playgrounds, schools, temples, memories, relationships, connections, roots annihilated, murdered, butchered aside from the sheer scale of murders and rapes and torture and disease and displacement inflicted on human beings. 

The world is floating on a sea of stories they say. There are Sun, Moon and Star stories. There are love stories, animal stories, neighbor stories, spiritual stories that are told and retold. Those are the real lasting colors and sounds of human civilization. Human beings are born, play through their life’s roles and die in time. But each one leaves their own fingerprint on these story threads that weave the fabric of our society and indeed life as we know it. 

But then the dagger came, nay a million daggers that ripped through the ancient fabric, that tore open the breasts and limbs of whoever fell in their evil path. They stabbed and stabbed at the last vestiges of humanity, puncturing nature’s very soul. The land that was all these beautiful stories convulsed and heaved in giant cries of immeasurable pain. It’s tears were not enough, it’s cries were not enough, it sobbing not enough, it could never be enough. To this day it lies mutilated in a puddle of it’s own blood, unrecognizable from it’s eons old past, an intricately woven fabric of human lives, culture and stories intertwined.

And then the what ifs. What if all those 15 million displaced, 2 million murdered, millions of rapes and ensuing lifelong traumas… what if they did not happen. What if the power hungry evil men had better sense. Would this new nation have had a few billion-trillion happier stories added to its experience. Would there been more doctors, engineers, farmers, business people, seers, people falling in love, having children… their squeals, laughter, their stories … would that have not enriched the soul of a nation, of indeed the Universe. A nation that was trying to get it’s first few nascent breaths after hundreds and hundreds of years of slavery, deprivation and invasions that pillaged and stole it’s treasure and dignity.

Why did it all happen? It happened because a people, who came from the bosom of this same land, were trained, cajoled, coerced to worship differently and then wanted to wield power over their own erstwhile brethren. 

In time, new stories got written and will get written, new farms, homes and schools built. But they can never get un-soaked from the blood of those that fell. From the civilization that got brutalized. 

The land will never stop trembling from the tremors of the Tree That Fell, from Bharat getting partitioned.