Admittedly, I have very little understanding of European and Indian history. I presume that the (fictional?) events of the story and poem are based on the Partition of India and Pakistan. From the short excerpt from “The Return”, we can gather that there is significant civil unrest in Pakistan. Our narrator, Sirajuddin mentions boarding a train at 2:00 PM in Amritsar, a city in India, which arrives eight hours later (10:00 PM) in the Pakistan city of Mughalpura. Given that our narrator refers to the attackers as “rioters”, it is unlikely that an actual war has broken out yet (especially since trains are carrying civilians between the two regions).
What interests me is that the events of the poem and story are only possible because our narrator arrives late at night, when darkness covers the train. The narrator’s wife is disemboweled in front of him (the graphic details and process are most likely further described in the accompanying poem, “Sorry”). After rereading both the poem and story, I realized the entire situation was pretty funny. In the poem, the attacker slashes out the intestines of a “man” and feels regret after realizing he killed not a man, but a woman (“the man with the knife looked down and said, ‘oh no! That was a mishtake!). This illuminates two important points:
(1) Women have very few, if any rights in this region. The attacker clearly believes that this conflict is the responsibility of men, which excludes women and children, as though they don’t have any say in the regional conflict. This is important to understanding the second point:
(2) It takes a woman to make the man realize he is killing people. It doesn’t matter that the attackers are killing civilians (instead of, say, soldiers). Had the attacker struck down a man, he would’ve continued without any regrets. I found this point particularly humorous because war necessitates the dehumanization of your enemy. Once you see your enemy as something less than human, it makes it easier to massacre them. This brings out a glaring contradiction in which women and children can be deprived of rights since they exist in a group that isn’t necessarily “human”. After all, if men saw women as equal human beings, they would have second thoughts about depriving them of rights. Simultaneously, however, women and children embody the aspect of “humanity”. It takes someone not seen as a human (a woman) to remind the attacker he is killing actual humans.
These are just some things I found interesting about the two passages. As I mentioned above, my understanding of the historical context is very limited. Please let me know if my interpretation is historically incorrect or flawed.
-Chris
That is interesting. I always thought that the poem symbolized the British in the Partition of India killing Indian unity and the resulting bloodshed from the crises resulting from said partition. However, what you said was also true. The brutality resulting from the war resulted in the dehumanization to such an extent that Muslim men, who may have lived with their Hindu neighbors, are killed arbitrarily due to the dehumanization in the India-Pakistan conflict.
-Zachary Rosman
I also noticed a lot of emphasis on gender. It could be because of the traditional nature of religious groups, or it could be that the countries themselves place a lot of emphasis on gender. It’s interesting how this passage talks about women, daughters, and sons in that specific order. Especially when directly contrasted with the story of “Sorry”. Lastly, thank you for providing more historical context. It’s definitely helpful when understanding the story.