In times my cell is darker than a womb but lack the warmth of it.
It’s cold – soul-clenching cold.
I look at the vertical scratches on the blood-splattered walls,
Reminder of the desperate attempts of my predecessors,
To keep the track of days and nights,
To confine their confinement within the limits of time,
To escape eternal nothingness,
To avoid insanity.
One must have an idea of time to remain sane,
A sense of day and night,
A sense of light and darkness.
I am not sure those scratches were any use to them.
I don’t know if they could stop their existence from plunging into nothingness.
Or did they lost their sanity to the faceless flogging hand?
My cell which hardly comprises a few hundred bricks,
A few hundred bricks that’s all it takes to keep a man from being a man,
A few hundred invisible bricks and a flogging hand,
An inhuman hand slowly stripping me off from my human senses,
My existence.
But one day I will leave this cell with blood-stained walls and vertical scratches.
I will end up as an unnamed grave, or if lucky,
I’ll be found as a decomposed body in a desolate place.
Or I might be hanging on a poster on another wall,
A wall with more bricks,
A brighter wall with no blood stains.
The only prisoners who remain in the cell are the ones who lose the track of time,
And the faceless man with the inhuman flogging hand.
Sameer Mehrab is a writer and co-founder of Balochistan Times. He often depicts Balochistan's socio-political dilemmas in his fiction and poetry. He is based in Canada.
