Sana AllySeema… Sarhad… Border.
I was three when I first understood what ‘border’ literally meant. Thanks to my father, an officer of the Border Security Force of India. Protector of the country’s borders.
Us siblings and many other (para)military brats would gleefully swing our hands, left-right-left, jumping up and down in uncontainable excitement from our seats in the audience, keeping time with the marching brigade as it passed us at the parade grounds every 1st of December, the BSF raising day. We would squeal in delirious joy on spotting the sniffer dog platoon, wagging their bums to a metronomic precision, cutely saluting us as they passed us.
Every 26th January we would sing loudly, the BSF anthem, at the top of our lungs, as if our voices would carry beyond the television screens and reach the ‘jaanbaaz prehari’ precariously keeping balance on motorcycles, the proud BSF tableaus.
“Hum seema ke prahari hain..
Hum seena taan khade..
Hum bharat ke gaurav ki …
Ban ke pehchaan khade..
Bharat ke har prant se aaye bahaduron ka dal..
huma hain seema suraksha bal .. hum hain seema suraksha bal.”
We, the sentinels of the border,
We, with our swollen chest,
We, the emblems of pride,
For our motherland, our beloved India,
From the corners of the nation,
The platoons of bravehearts,
We are Border Security Force.
As a consequence of my father’s sworn allegiance to his beloved employer, the nation, from age 6 till age 20, I remained forcefully separated from him. In about a year and half since, I would leave my nest for good.
My middle class parents’ took the executive decision of keeping their children in the big city with the stable, big factories schools instead of lugging them around like my father’s faithful ‘holdall’ from one remote posting to another, on the very tense borders of the north east and Kashmir.
6-year-Sana couldn’t understand or process the primal fear she felt on being uprooted from her safe space, her beloved, indulgent father. Nor could she articulate the debilitating, paralysing fear which became her constant, that of possibly losing him, what with him promising “duty unto death” to the BSF. With a thick layer of sarcasm, a dash of self-deprecating humour, spoonsful of chronic anxiety and other related ways of dealing with the fears she did not have a vocabulary yet for, she drank the ‘rooh-afza’ of patriotism rather easily.
The ‘harmless’ jibes/remarks from fellow students at the aforementioned factories schools, thanks to my religiously unidentifiable, confusing surname but dead giveaway Arabic name – ‘Are you <scrunched nose, crinkled, curious eyes> Muslim?’, ”Greetings from India” “Hey Pikey” could not touch my military brat armour. My standard retort to such sundries: “When your dad takes bullets for the country, we’ll then qualify that cheeky remark with a response <drop mic>
I crossed the border, somewhere in my thirties, in the midst of CAA protests, after yet another report of beef lynching and witnessing the recognisable anxieties of my own nephews with a fighter pilot father. I began the deeply uncomfortable work of revisiting my Enid Blyton childhood and painfully realising much like the problematic author, I too had many unanswerable questions about borders and our politics. The cost that the families of armed forces pay on repeat in blood, sweat, tears and collective trauma. Of young, impressionable recruits who make a lopsided trade-off – that of signing every last bit of their life and love (and that of their families) to the country.
Namak, Naam, Nishan.
Salt. Honor. Loyalty. To their ‘land’ they did not draw lines upon. Men, women and children, who become anonymous statistics in the line of fire they did not start.
Pride, courage, resilience, service for the nation unconditionally.
Subsidised ration and cheap housing thrown in for good measure as compensation. Systemically since time immemorial, honourable men, good men. Handpicked and moulded. So they rise to become extraordinary men who don’t blink twice for taking a bullet for their brothers. Every decision on the frontline gravid, heavy with the weight of life and death. Sniper focus. At the cost of their very being.
No one can fathom or decipher the grit and otherworldly power that helps these ordinary minds transgress human limitations, again and again and again, throughout their careers. No one can also ever understand the unimaginable trauma, that those in the military have to numb. Often, simply with a catchall solution of subsidized canteen alcohol that civilians get envious about!
This cost that military families, including mine, pay for pride and glory by wrapping themselves in an oath of “Duty unto death”. The cost that has not been enough to camouflage & blend the colour of my minority faith in a supposed secular nation. The cost that feels heavier than it needs to on reading about the grotesque accounts across a cracked beyond repair world, of families displaced, voices silenced, treaties dishonoured and only politics honoured.
So here I am, conflicted, filled with immense pride for all the named and unnamed heroes while questioning my 6-year-old self’s simplistic definition of man-made lines upon the lands and minds they continue to divide in a world that continues to burn. For the futility of it all, standing on no man’s land, a point of no return.
