The Hum of History in Our Blood

On the weight of generational memory, the inheritance of grief, and the sacredness of peace.

Zarina Hashmi, 'Abyss' (2013)

It’s said trauma is passed down through generations; new blood tainted by the same grief-stricken DNA, forging, perhaps, an eternal sorrow.

When 1947 came around and partition ripped his homeland in two, my great-grandfather, a barrister, honored the call of the Creator echoed in the Quran, 4:135. He stood firmly for justice, even when it meant leaving the only home he’d ever known. His Delhi abode, once host to many late-night discussions with the likes of Jinnah, Iqbal, and more, where the subject of a new, egalitarian nation was still only an idea, was replaced with a new heart set in Lahore. After migration, as he transitioned in an instant from one of India’s most privileged men to a widower left with eight children, he spent the remainder of his life anguished and mostly silent. The scar of such a loss, even if for the sake of something so sacred, can never truly leave. Today, 77 years later, the very injustice he escaped has resurrected itself (did it ever really die?) in the manifesting of tiny bodies laid to eternal rest, and the desecration of a land already soaked in loss. It has added more threads to the same fabric of despair that has come to define a ground and a people.

Aside from the inklings sketched into my DNA, I think of the many sweet memories in the archives of my mind and spirit that make this moment all the more tragic. Only two months ago, I landed at London Heathrow after a long flight. As I sat in Caffe Nero and sipped on my coffee, I spotted a woman in salwar kameez slowly making her way around the cafe’s perimeter, searching for a seat. Upon making eye contact, I smiled at her, and without hesitating for a moment, she immediately started speaking to me in Punjabi. As we sat and conversed as if old friends, she told me she had just landed from Delhi. She compliments my broken Punjabi and asks where I hail from. When I tell her, she tells me her family called a village near Lahore home before partition, and I tell her about my grandfather's haveli in the heart of Delhi. There is only warmth in our conversation spoken in a shared tongue, in the understanding only we can have with each other, in the shared glimmer in our eyes. We wish each other well before saying goodbye, and I think of how much simpler and sweeter life could be if we all carried our past this gently, free of the division that only robs us of peace.

Peace, what a sacred thing. God’s proof on Earth. I think too of the other eternal verity, how war turns men into their worst selves, its greatest sin the theft of all sense and humanity. What a simple belief, though, that all could be well if only. Stripping reality of its right to the truth. Now we sit on the eve of war, and the notes of 1947 etched in my genes hum a faint tune, ever so quiet but ever still present. It is easy for men to utter poetry of passivity when they choose to close their ears to the calls of history. This is perhaps the defining phenomenon of our era: hands held so firmly against one’s ears that they start to hear a song that was never there. Song is too gentle a word, I’ll admit, but they treat it with such sanctity you wouldn’t believe it to be anything else.

There is much to say and much to be felt. There are more eulogies to be written, on paper and gene. For now, sorrow envelopes us as we bear witness to the most nefarious tenet of war: that it is the innocent who lose the most. Children stripped of life for the sins of men undeserving of their breaths. To kill what is only pure in the dark of night…and then to celebrate that as a victory is the greatest betrayal of all that is good. People of conscience will never be able to fathom such evil, but it goes on surviving anyway, with a full and beating heart, fueling the lives of tyrants and their terror. When the butcher of Gujarat brings forth a new slew of tiny coffins, one remembers that hum may have slowed, but never stopped. War is our unholiest reality. In how many languages and oceans of tears must we repeat that our children deserve a more beautiful tomorrow? Unknowing of such grief and gore. Let us pray that sense, truth, and the beauty of a greater bond prevail, God willing. So too shall we pray that the melodies of justice echo through the land, from the sunlit valleys of Kashmir to the soil of Punjab.

Perhaps, in my lifetime, my great-grandchildren will be able to live and laugh with no remnants of despair in their DNA. This sorrow need not be eternal.