Divide and Conquer

You can’t imagine a civil rights movement if you haven’t lived through it. Indian history teachers flip through textbook pages brimmed with institutionalized glorification and patriotism and celebration of ancestral figures that overthrew British colonizers in the 1900s. Yet, no textbook talks about how the British created incessant Hindu-Muslim tensions that still exist in a seemingly independent and secular India.

Viewers across the world sat on their comfortable couches, watching in awe and horror social media hashtags of protests that unfolded in response to the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in 2019. The Act discriminates against Muslims and snatches citizenship from Muslim immigrants and refugees.

Zoya did not see these protests through a screen, she lived them.

What Zoya really saw while walking home was a sea of white-capped and scarf-wrapped heads peacefully chanting and singing protests, raising their flags and signs. She pulled her hijab tighter over her head and kept walking.

Then she heard three deafening booms. Determined mobs of Muslim rioters now became terrified strangers clinging onto each other for dear life, they tumbled about like bowling pins, while bone-chilling shrieks pierced the air, and barrages of uniformed police officers rained sharp wallops on them with lathis.

She saw the police hurl some more tear gas grenades before they blasted off right in front of her and she could no longer open her eyes without excruciatingly searing stings. Perhaps she was so close to the commotion now that she heard a raging bonfire’s flames sizzle the flesh of someone that blindly walked into it.

Zoya might have seen a spray of blood from a gunshot to the head. She probably saw police protecting confused mooing cows on the street before flogging the crowds of blood-sodden faces and dusty breaths and raw, blackened flesh. People are beaten so hard their bones snap and their lacerations ooze fetid fluids and they lurch about helplessly, falling on their knees for mercy.

Sirens wail and ambulances pull up. Then corpses are hauled and wheeled out in stretcher beds and fruit vendor carts, and damaged scooters sputter weakly to life as frightened passers-by flee the scene. There are houses and streets crumbling under raging fires, and dead bodies lying among heaps of shards and splinters and remains.

Zoya tries to run from the mobs, unsure where she is going. She will suddenly hear “Bloody terrorist!” and feel a stinging, scorching lash on her back. She will let out an agonizing howl, but perhaps it will be drowned out amidst the cacophony. She will feel her heart pulsate and pump and reverberate in her chest, until it will become all that she hears. She will collapse to the ground. The acrid smell of rotten plants on the ground will overwhelm her senses. She will smell her own blood dripping from her nose, and a strange metallic scent of the bloodshed of a fellow countryman being beaten up nearby, perhaps a Muslim.

These are the things she will experience while she lies limply on the ground, policemen and protestors trampling her in a merciless cat-and-mouse chase. She will turn over to reach for her backpack, but someone will keep kicking her hand away as they run over her. She will find that it is empty and torn and sooty and wet. Her finger will stick to a mud-soaked pack of gum, and she will dig around some more and find that it is all she has. She will have lost her university books and her wallet and her keys and her hard-earned money. She will feel tears trickle down her cheeks.

That is what she will get for being a Muslim in India.

Inspired by the writing style of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men