[Displaced tribes in the valley of Narmada due to the construction ff the Hirakud dam.]
A moment that wrinkled history,
A moment that unwound time,
And made it stop.
The moment that caught us too happy…
Centuries of existence made us love,
The land, the plants, the animals,
The river which had recorded our silted history,
The tongue which we spoke in nature’s voice,
The culture that defined us and made us whole,
The moment that was to fossilize our lives
And bury them under the currents of development.
The moment stretched to new places,
To an unfriendly world,
To a relearning of life,
To tin huts and floods,
To poverty and destitution,
While the wooden memories, the remains of our homes
Grew sodden in the floods like ghosts.
The moment shall pass, they assured us.
We will learn, they told us.
The warped moment would plummet our country
Into a new era of modernity.
We afterall, are the other people
Meant to be lost in the tectonic wrinkle
Before the shift to greater things.
Akshaya Kamalnath.
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