Mother, Where's My Country? Quotes

“It is said that when people are dead graves aren’t the place to find them. They are in the wind, the trees, in the eyes of people left behind,”
― Anubha Bhonsle, Mother, Where's My Country?: Looking for Light in the Darkness of Manipur

“Time changes its nature in prisons and hospitals. In this cosmogony it both races and drags itself. For anyone who hasn’t been a long-term patient or prisoner—or both, like Sharmila—there is no way to imagine what evenings are like when you are locked in—the indeterminate hour when the sun has gone down but night hasn’t fully set in. It haunts you. In a hospital, especially one where air-conditioning and double-glass windows don’t shield you from the real world, there are mixed sounds that rise up from every floor; murmurs, shallow breaths, the sounds of pain and healing. Once the final inspections are done and the trays and bowls carried away, a shroud of silence falls over everything. It can be strangely tranquil, or eerily desolate.”
― Anubha Bhonsle, Mother, Where's My Country?: Looking for Light in the Darkness of Manipur

“Simply raising a voice would not shatter the inhuman silence at the other end, where brute power lived. And yet, pain, violation, fear had to be articulated coherently.”
― Anubha Bhonsle, Mother, Where's My Country?: Looking for Light in the Darkness of Manipur

“Hallucinations like these haunted some people long after the wounds had healed. Most fact-finding teams or human rights groups that worked in Manipur had enough on their plate managing the basics. Imagine if paperwork had to include pain and dreams.”
― Anubha Bhonsle, Mother, Where's My Country?: Looking for Light in the Darkness of Manipur