A road…a dust road…long and serpentine.
It wasn't like any other road I had ever seen, I hadn't seen much, come to think of it.
A nomad lost in Hemingway's fishless desert couldn't be half as fascinated about the mirages of shifting shadows of water seen at the horizon, as I was about that God-forsaken place the road led to. It was part of a dream I couldn't contemplate giving up, a dream I had been harbouring secretly ever since my father told me what that road was, where it led to and what it stood for. I closed my eyes, and stretched before me was a road that was not merely filth and dirt. Not merely an ancient connection to a modern world. But the very epitome of independence and liberty.
Liberty from that corner of the world where humans were burnt at stakes along with their rights - and not just metaphorically - in favour of people who possessed the power to be in power.
It's that corner of the world for which rest of the world uses mechanically heavy terms: Genocide, Massacres, Mass-killings -- terms I was quite unfamiliar with, for I didn't have any school lessons I could encounter them in. Although, along with thousands of others, I had been the victim of the persecution perpetrated by the people who believed and used the underlying concept as a weapon.
I have heard the dying screams, the pitiful cries of people who had seen death from an inch away, and succumbed to it hoping in a wry moment of dry humour, that some day their people will start dying of old age rather than getting killed in riots and wars.
Riots and wars though, comprised only one part of the personal tragedy that was generic to all those who had the misfortune of having been born in that country. For women the magnitude of the personal tragedy was magnified a thousand times for, amongst the powers that rock the political map of a war-torn nation, are those men who choose to humiliate the weak and defenceless as a way of enhancing their ill-placed confidence in their masculinity. It's that sub-set of humanity which takes extreme delight in subjecting women to novel and innovative forms of humiliation.
The higher the degree of humiliation, the more successful is the entire exercise, and higher is the level of satisfaction achieved.
It didn't take me long to realize that after the perpetrators were done with their subjects, it was not merely the residual physical strength that kept those, subjected to the physical and moral mutilation, sane. Those who managed to neutralize their minds as well to the atrocities---which would have been otherwise shameful but in the given circumstances, only horrifically inhuman---that were done to their minds and bodies, were the sole survivors.
I had arrived at my own theory of Natural Selection, although I was a century late. But now that I have read Darwin, it seems ironic that to achieve the same end, we had used such diametrically opposite means.
My story, however, is not about the atrocities that came from without, but those which came from within. The atrocities that come from without are the result of the machinations of mechanical minds that belong to those dregs of humanity comprising a class that had shed its human veneer long back and didn't hesitate any more to come out of the façade that hides the most diabolical caricature of humanity ever.
My story is about those people who were my people; whom I trusted and trusted enough to have entrusted them with the task of making me chaste, which at that time I thought, only comprised a series of innocuous events, may be lectures revolving around the birds and the bees. I was proven seriously wrong and my faith broken beyond repair.
