Written by Ishita Sengupta |New Delhi |Updated: August 15, 2019 5:05:47 pm
Khamosh Pani: The well as a silent symbol of the pain of Partition
Women, hailed as a symbol of chastity and biological reproducers, stood at the heart of the brutality of violence that Partition entailed, with men wrestling their power and domination through and on them.
The generally amicable Ayesha refuses to go to the well to draw water with other women. When asked for the reason of her reluctance, she turns her face away: not just evading the question, but refusing to confront it. Later, Ayesha visits the well twice. She meets her brother there, stating she will not go back to India with him to visit their ailing father. After a few days she goes to drown herself: the act reiterative of a macabre incident from the past, but differing in its conclusion. Caught amidst the atrocities of Partition, Vero (Ayesha’s name before conversion) had refused to accede to her father’s orders (or desperate pleas) to jump. She had stood on the edge of the well and declared she would not do it. In 1979, with a changed name and identity and with no one to force her, Ayesha brings the act to a fatal completion.
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