There Are No Heroes Here

July 1947

A Muslim, a Hindu, a Sikh are having tea together. It sounds like the start of a bad joke. But it’s much more tragic.

The Muslim holds in his heart rage against decades of injustice. The Hindu holds a dagger in his hand, bloodied and notched where it got stuck on a bone. The Sikh knows he will not survive the night.

The characters are revealed.

Our villains find themselves sitting at a table in the corner of a tea house, caged in by carnage. The tea in front of them, three glasses – miraculously untouched by violence, is cold and stale. One of the glasses is half full with a bloody fingerprint near the rim. A single biscuit remains on the chipped quarter-plate – neglected. Somewhere across the room, an almost-corpse is gurgling blood.

The stage is set.

And now our tragedy begins.

The conversation is stilted. They know what they are – sorry excuses for representatives of three great races. The remains of a generation that slit each other’s throats and ran, wagging its tail, to their White Masters, looking for appreciation. The generation whose great contribution to history will be rivers of blood that will continue to flow for a century, maybe more. The generation that split a continent in half, stretched barbed wire across mountains & deserts, through front lawns and family lounges. The generation that fed on political propaganda and shit hatred.

A Muslim, a Hindu, and a Sikh are having tea together. They know what comes after. This is their last cup of tea – stale, pathetic, but it’s tea nonetheless. As the last drops of this parley vanish, the carnage that was on pause now climaxes and ends abruptly.

The Sikh knew he would not survive the night. The other two only suspected it.

And now the curtain drops. There is no applause.