THE BLEEDING FLOWERS

An unusual friendship forms on a riverbank with the understanding that every story has to be heard

- Linthoi Chanu

Before the violence, our village was what you would call sleepy and sequestered. A place beyond the touch of modern growth is now revered as a thing of splendour, but back then, that was our existence. That place is no more. A past. Almost unreachable within our memory, with no hope of seeing it again. Those gleeful winds of our memories exist but only as phantom shadows, flickering behind our immediate disquietude.

All we can see and feel are the fire and smoke from the place we escaped with only our souls packed in our bodies. Some even left their slippers behind. They must have been like our Mam Boinao, never failing to tell us to remove our shoes or slippers while stepping inside his house. He was known to be “the cleanest man in the village”, a badge of ridicule given by the men who said their wives were his only unsuccessful competitors, but he wore it with pride.

For miles we ran; just anywhere away from the debris was our destination. The sound of gunfire mimicked the crackers we burst during festivals, but they were not. Crackers throw up sparks and laughter, but the bullets were meant for our flesh. Some were wounded, they yelled. No one stopped to look anyway. Doing so would only make one dead body two.

I wish I had the privilege to think tranquilly and present all events accurately so that our readers could feel the horrors of that night. But such accuracy needs far more than just the mere privilege of tranquillity, I realise now. Bear with me, all I can remember is that after running the whole night, we were told to form a haphazard line, begging the army trucks to pick us up and drop us anywhere away from the village.