I Named Myself Nobody

By Subhangi Maity

The night they shelled the hills; I was ten and lying flat in a bunker covered by earth. The walls felt cold and damp stone hung in my throat. Though no one spoke the word out loud, I understood enough to stay still when the ground trembled. I could measure silence by its sharpness. I knew that staying quiet was sometimes the only power a child had.

The whispers were not meant for me, but they slipped through doorways and walls. Half-sentences floated behind the whispers and nervous breaths, talking about rivers running red, about blood tracing the banks of the Jhelum like veins.

I didn’t ask questions. I memorized the way their voices dipped and left the meanings hanging.

This wasn’t war, not exactly. This was a fight with no clear name. Everyone bled poems and called them flags. The soil never agreed to be divided. The sky never signed a side.

And Kashmir didn’t belong to soldiers with their boots pressing down on her or politicians drawing borders with broken compass needles. It belonged to the girl who felt the coldness of the ground under her feet and the burn of sunlight woven into her scalp like fire. She wore both as her inheritance, as if she were crowned by contradiction itself, the king of the mountains, the gift of the Himalayas, of wind whispers that told her everything without words, of willow trees that bowed to touch her feet and hold her hand so she could sway in the wind like the flowers that bloomed in the valley.

When the snow came, it felt like relief, like a language that didn’t care what name I answered to. No sirens. Just a kind of hush that made me believe maybe the earth finally closed its eyes.

I watched from beneath the sky, each star sharpening its edge. I felt my name pull away from my tongue as if it were trying to leave my body entirely. And I let it.

I told myself,

 I am real.

 I am real.

 I am real.

 But the stars only blinked, indifferent and eternal, as if existence needed more proof than breath.

By Subhangi Maity