by Sophia Terazawa
One.
The neighborhood called Jubilee Park in Kolkata is exceptionally quiet at dawn. For the time being, the street dogs have ceased their nightly howling melodrama. There are three patrolling the block below my window—all muscle and limp—that growl and bark and bite at each other for their rightful place as alpha male. The fights erupt from the tiniest infractions. A bump on the shoulder. A look.
The regular brawls are quite exhausting to hear at midnight, as everyone bleeds and nobody sleeps. But like I said, the theatrics inevitably end at dawn, and it is in this moment that one can feel the silence of this city.
I am sometimes awake at this time to write, as I write now, when a dream pries open my eyes and chokes out the sound of what needs to be said. And I think what needs to be said is the smell of holy places―mosques and black churches―burning in America.
Two.
My flat in Jubilee Park is a dusty ten minute walk from the Tollygunge tram depot, and somewhere between the two, the dogs are finally napping. They are a pile of legs and heavy, fresh torn bodies. I imagine each morning that they are finally friends. I also imagine my mother working. She is a refugee in a new country that once bombed her previous country, and I imagine her paycheck in U.S. dollars. I imagine her laugh lines, the ones that deepen around her eyes with every passing year, the ones that fold and break easily into hysterics. She laughs, even when she is hurting, and I think about this before writing, but I cannot write, not yet. I cannot write until the first call to prayer.
Three.
The mosque is so close that I can hear the man clearing his throat before the microphone. It is a soft cough, a gentle cough, and he could shatter the spirit in two if he could—however mournful the previous day, however high the body count rises, however brown and black the faces of his murdered children around the world—yet he does not halve anything but the silence. In this place and in this time, he is the song and glory that pierces the distance between Kolkata and South Carolina. And it is precisely here that I write about devotion in flames.
Four.
Homes of worship are combustible places. The sight is more immediate from a television screen in West Bengal—a grainy video from a cell phone of the fire, the yelling, the grief. A mosque burns, and a young man howls into the shirt of another. One elderly nun is raped in a church. A temple falls. Bangladesh is there. Nepal is there. Pakistan is not too far away either. There are conversations all the time with the people of Kolkata—some hushed at the vegetable stalls of Lake Market and some roaring at the universities, in Esplanade, a blocked intersection of Ballygunge. It is an insistent demand for justice, and though my language fails me in some instances, I am witness to the calls for accountability, peace, and equality for all by any means necessary.
“What in the hell is going on over there?” A Bengali professor had demanded to know, as we sat over tea and politics. I replied that yes, Niladri, it is hell over there. America is hell. In the name of progress and freedom, the country is a falsehood for the hungry, the tired, the poor, and worst of all for the policed. There are images of hate, and then there is the reality of hate. I did not have to leave that place to see the difference.
Five.
There is something peculiar that happens to rage, as the morning light becomes brighter, and the street vendors begin shouting. There will not be another call to prayer until midday. It is more difficult to write poetry at a time like this, but the words come fluidly. It reeks of kerosene and old teakwood, the history still fresh, and there—buried inside the muscle and flesh of such history burning mosques, temples, and churches—is the responsibility to write about the ashes. I do not believe that the dead ask for immortality, as I believe the dead bury no names. And I believe in chaos as much as I believe in grace.
Sophia Terazawa
THE DECOLONIZER
December 2015
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