by Afzal Moolla
Someone always told me this with tears in her eyes
A wife left South Africa in the 1960’s to join her husband
who was in exile at the time.
In 1970 the husband was sent by the African National Congress to India to be its representative there.
The husband and wife spent two years in Bombay.
One afternoon the husband fell and broke his leg.
The wife knocked on their neighbour’s door, in an apartment complex in Bombay.
The neighbour was an old Punjabi lady.
The wife asked the neighbour for a doctor to see to the injured husband.
A Zoroastrian ‘Bone-Setter’ was promptly summoned.
The husband still recalls his anxiety of seeing ‘Bone-Setter’ written on the Parsi gentleman’s bag.
By the way, the ‘Bone-Setter’ worked his ancient craft and surprisingly for the husband, his broken leg healed quite soon.
But still on that day, while the ‘Bone-Setter’ was seeing to the husband,
the wife and the old Punjabi lady from next door got to talking about this and that and where these new Indian-looking wife and husband were from as their accents were clearly not local,
the wife told the elderly Punjabi lady that the husband worked for the African National Congress of South Africa and had left to serve the ANC from exile,
and that they had left their two children behind in South Africa and that they were now essentially political refugees.
The Punjabi lady broke down and wept uncontrollably.
She told the foreign woman that she too had had to leave her home in Lahore in 1947 and flee to India with only the clothes on her back when the partition of the subcontinent took place and Pakistan was formed and at a time when Hindus from Pakistan fled to India and vice versa.
The Punjabi lady then asked the foreign woman her name.
‘Zubeida’, but you can call me ‘Zubie’.
The Punjabi woman hugged Zubie some more, and the two women, seperated by age and geography, wept, sharing a shared pain.
The Punjabi woman told Zubie that she was her ‘sister’ from that day on, and that she felt that pain of exile and forced migration and what being a refugee felt like.
Zubie and her husband Mosie became the closest of friends with the Hindu Punjabi neighbours who were kicked out of Pakistan by Muslims.
Then came the time for Mosie and Zubie to leave for Delhi where the African National Congress office was based.
The elderly Punjabi lady and Mosie and Zubie said their goodbyes.
A year or two later, the elderly Punjabi lady’s daughter Lata married Ravi Sethi and the couple moved to Delhi.
The elderly Punjabi lady called Zubie and told her that her daughter was coming to Delhi to live and that she had told Lata, her daughter that she had a ‘sister’ in Delhi.
Lata and Ravi Sethi then moved to Delhi.
This was in the mid-1970’s.
Lata and Zubie became the closest of friends and that bond stayed true, and stays true till today, though Zubie is no more, and the elderly Punjabi lady is no more.
The son and the husband still have a bond with Lata and Ravi Sethi.
A bond that was forged between Hindu and Muslim and between two continents across the barriers of creed and time.
A bond strong and resilient, forged by the pain and trauma of a shared experience.
And that is why, and I shall never stop believing this, that hope shines still, for with all the talk of this and of that, and of that and of this, there will always be a simple woman, somewhere, anywhere, who would take the ‘other’ in as a sister, a fellow human.
And that is why there will always be hope.
Hope in the midst of this and of that and of that and of this.
Hope.
(for Lata-aunty’s late-mother, who was my mother’s ‘sister’ and who took us all into her heart, and for Lata and Ravi Sethi of Defence Colony, New Delhi)
A few random poems:
- Moonrise by Sylvia Plath
- Battle-Scene From the Comic Operatic Fantasy The Seafarer by Sylvia Plath
- You must once
- Владимир Маяковский – Били раз… (РОСТА №631)
- Hound Voice by William Butler Yeats
- Владимир Бенедиктов – Люцерн
- On Hermocratia (From The Greek) by William Cowper
- Sonnet 112: Your love and pity doth th’ impression fill by William Shakespeare
- Владимир Маяковский – Третий вывоз
- To Natasha poem – Alexander Pushkin
- Вера Звягинцева – Качаешься в гробу стеклянном
- Ольга Берггольц – Знаю, чем меня пленила
- The Complaint Of Prometheus
- The Human Tragedy ACT III poem – Alfred Austin
- Ольга Седакова – Когда говорю я: помилуй
External links
Bat’s Poetry Page – more poetry by Fledermaus
Talking Writing Monster’s Page –
Batty Writing – the bat’s idle chatter, thoughts, ideas and observations, all original, all fresh
Poems in English
- Spenserian Stanzas On Charles Armitage Brown poem – John Keats poems
- Spenserian Stanza. Written At The Close Of Canto II, Book V, Of “The Faerie Queene” poem – John Keats poems
- Specimen Of An Induction To A Poem poem – John Keats poems
- Sonnet XVII. Happy Is England poem – John Keats poems
- Sonnet XVI. To Kosciusko poem – John Keats poems
- Sonnet XV. On The Grasshopper And Cricket poem – John Keats poems
- Sonnet XIV. Addressed To The Same (Haydon) poem – John Keats poems
- Sonnet X. To One Who Has Been Long In City Pent poem – John Keats poems
- Sonnet XIII. Addressed To Haydon poem – John Keats poems
- Sonnet XII. On Leaving Some Friends At An Early Hour poem – John Keats poems
- Sonnet XI. On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer poem – John Keats poems
- Sonnet. Written Upon The Top Of Ben Nevis poem – John Keats poems
- Sonnet. Written On A Blank Space At The End Of Chaucer’s Tale Of ‘The Floure And The Lefe’ poem – John Keats poems
- Sonnet. Written On A Blank Page In Shakespeare’s Poems, Facing ‘A Lover’s Complaint’ poem – John Keats poems
- Sonnet. Written In Disgust Of Vulgar Superstition poem – John Keats poems
- Sonnet. Written In Answer To A Sonnet By J. H. Reynolds poem – John Keats poems
- Sonnet. Written Before Re-Read King Lear poem – John Keats poems
- Sonnet. Why Did I Laugh Tonight? poem – John Keats poems
- Sonnet: When I Have Fears That I May Cease To Be poem – John Keats poems
- Sonnet VIII. To My Brothers poem – John Keats poems
More external links (open in a new tab):
Doska or the Board – write anything
Search engines:
Yandex – the best search engine for searches in Russian (and the best overall image search engine, in any language, anywhere)
Qwant – the best search engine for searches in French, German as well as Romance and Germanic languages.
Ecosia – a search engine that supposedly… plants trees
Duckduckgo – the real alternative and a search engine that actually works. Without much censorship or partisan politics.
Yahoo– yes, it’s still around, amazingly, miraculously, incredibly, but now it seems to be powered by Bing.
Parallel Translations of Poetry
The Poetry Repository – an online library of poems, poetry, verse and poetic works