A Leaf in the Storm 🍃🌪 || Short Story ||Lalithambika Antharjanam

The independence of India and the history of the partition of 1947 has been recorded as the most gruesome division on the basis of religion. The demarcation of the arbitrary borders was accompanied with horrifying violence that included mass rape and murder, displacement and trauma that proceeded. The communal violence was at a rise, people committed crimes to protect the honour of their own, violating humanity and legitimising revenge on the grounds of religion and ethnicity. Though there are recorded histories of the partition, the trauma, and the sense of loss, yet there are rarely any narrative from the women’s perspective. The atrocities committed against women and their bodies have not been unknown but excluded. Their bodies became sites of violence, they were not only the witnesses but also treated as objects of exchange.  The urge to document these narratives was brought forwards by writers like Kamla Bhasin, Ritu Menon, Urvashi Butalia and a few more. Ritu Menon in Borders and Boundaries says “… the anticipation of just such a rejection by the very family and community that were to provide them support was one reason why many women resisted being recovered. Pregnant women were obviously more vulnerable than others and the decision whether to abort or carry their pregnancies to full term was an agonising one for all women, especially young ones who were going to be first time mothers. Those who were in an advanced state did not even have this choice; for them the question of whether or not to abandon their babies must have been even more painful.”