UNWANTED CHARACHTERS

An attempt to portray the war victims who never make it to the headlines,but live silently punishing themselves!

Streets spilled war .
Fear lurked everywhere.
Unfamiliar eyes prayed for help,
Unknown hearts pleaded for mercy.
This is the land of unrest where,
each corner,screamed a story.
Story untold by the newspapers
Stories that never quite made it to the headlines
Some stories that were forgotten,
some others deliberately abandoned!

Story of a boy who is limbless now
His leg was blown by a bomb
Of course ,it was only an accident !
The army had made a ‘Silly’ mistake
He does not go to school today.
He does not chase a kite or play in the field.
He works in the matchstick factory,
His dreams crushed under his own weight
As he drags around his torso,
remains that was spared in the ‘mistake’!

Story of that girl who doesn’t smile anymore
She was only seven when she found her parents lying dead in her house
Red coagulated in her eyes, the coldness spread into her mind
She heard that last dreaded cry of her sister from the courtyard
As she leapt out her last breath struggling in the arms of the stranger.
She doesnt speak, she doesnt smile,she doesnt even complain
Her smiles have faded into unknown, her tears frozen
She doesn’t live, she only breathes,
Breathes as a mistake of Fate!

There is also the story of a man whose family was killed
Before his own eyes-his wife shot in the head
And two children strangled
Have those images faded from his mind?
He still works in the army
He still works there everyday
Never questions why,
He too is living by, living a life to wake up to work in the day
And Sleep to wake up to work again and never question anything ever!

The woman who is mindless,
Who lives alone in the eerie ruins of a mosque
Staring at blank skies in the morning, eyes still, mouth open,
her countenance expressionless.
She screams the whole night in fear ,frantically
perhaps fear of memories…fear of darkness or of life itself
Her son killed his own sisters a year ago
For no apparent reasons .
She too lives, an existence, as one of the numbers in the demography department!


What do these people see?
What do they hear?
Dark corners whispering to the fading shadows?
Mysterious aloofness lurking beneath the soil ?
Deserts flashing before eyes, sandless duneless deserts…
and then vanishing under the starless moonless sky?
Mirages drowning into the silence,making way for more stillness?
What goes on in their minds?
What makes them one among us,The living?
I wonder!

No one speaks but the stillness
No one complains but the shadows
This is the Land of colourless vision,soundless speeches
Where Life ebbs into the hollow of fear
People are born in silence and die therein
This is the land of umpteen stories
Land where the world choses the story they want
There are people living here too...but...
their stories are never written nor told
They are the unwanted characters of an unborn story!