Reflection

Reflection

In the past few months, Punjab — and South Asia as a whole — has experienced one of the greatest heat waves that has been seen in living memory. Thus, of course my concern for India’s climate comes from a sense of heart-tendering concern; each greater burden set atop its climates’ already shaky shoulders spelling out an echo of worse to come. But during this heat wave, I began to see the greater implications of the impacts of climate change — ones far more striking and personal. I am from Punjab, the state the British had the great honor of carving into two nations with the blood-soaked scythe of a colonist’s hand. Today, a majority of its land is in Pakistan, with the other portion making up a sizable portion of India (from which I am). My family has lived with the aftereffects of this cleaving for generations. My grandmother has spent an entire lifetime apart from her sisters, caught in the cross-tie of a border between two fundamentally similar peoples with nation’s a soul’s width apart. And the heat wave has made the effects of this relationship on India’s treatment of Punjab, especially during climate emergencies, quite clear. In the past few years, the increasing temperatures globally have rendered Indians and Pakistanis particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change, with dozens upon dozens of deaths during the summer season being attributed to heat stroke. But this latest wave seems to be worse than them all, with more than 60 deaths being recorded in the north of India. Where Punjab is. I knew one of the men that passed, passed him by on the street, and walked by him while he played cards with my grandfather. The few years I spent living in India with my grandparents and cousins, he had always been beside me, a few doors down and not a lifetime away. Now, I write of him an ocean and soul’s distance apart. It terrifies. It terrifies me even more considering the strict gaze currently affixed upon Punjab from both the Indian and Pakistani governments. As both nations rise in power and desperately try to prepare for the upcoming climate crisis, their disputes center on a state they both have potential claim to: Punjab. Thus, there is a concerted effort to deprive citizens of their connections on other sides of the border, rendering the very land into a sign of fundamental conflict. In a time where Punjab’s location could make it so very vulnerable to the effects of the climate crisis — I’m terrified. And when treaties such as the Indus Waters Treaty are signed, seemingly with the intent of preserving the possible water sources for both countries in this crisis, the effect is felt most heavily by those who live in Punjab. Punjabis who live on the other side of the border and stray into Indian waters are kept prisoner for many years, and the same goes for Punjabis straying over from the Indian side to the Pakistani. As the fears and tensions of both nationalism and impending crises grow on both sides of the border, it us Punjabis who will inevitably be the most affected. From being cut off from relatives both on this border or the other, to the continuous impact of climate change on our crumbling infrastructure; we are vulnerable. When I crafted this poem, with its trembling, twisting structure and continuous references to the divides that occupy my life — all of which begin with the division of my homeland — I thought back to my family’s tale of the partition. Of the rivers in which women chose to be drowned rather than risk assault and the way they fought over drinking water was fought over to a breath’s cusp. As I see climate change accelerate and tensions rise between Pakistan and India, I cannot help but fear a similar fate. And that is the fate whose downfalls I have tried so desperately to illustrate in this poem: how a border wields its very violence against those it is supposed to protect. As we hurtle towards a future, shapeless and undefined in everything but the sheer possibility of disaster, sometimes what is required is reaching out the ocean’s distance away — and holding on.