Weaving law, literature and contemporary reality together in a prose.
P r e s e n c e turned into m e m o r y
M e m o r y L o s t
I N
T I M E
Taken-for-granted are
museums of unnecessary, unjust,
undeserved pain and death.
Unnecessary deaths call
the audience of the present,
To speak to the audience of future.
Unjust pain calls for
opportunity to be heard
opportunity to speak.
To preserve the moment
To insist on memory
in the face of
denial
The collective memory calls on
Due process Justice in-process Justice due in process
Documents, transcripts, written opinions remain
Memory of individuals lost erased
One can only hope
Individuals living through pandemic,
be preserved in and through law.
May “Law materializes memory”
May “Law re-enacts the past”
May “ Law becomes archives”
May “Law allows present to speak to the future"
May “Law writes history”
May “Law calls on audience across time”
May “Law does justice in time”
Note on Stylistic Choice
This poem has been drafted using words from page-58 of the pandemic judgment of Supreme Court, dated 30th April 2021. The core idea behind the poem and the choice of particular part of the text is to situate the pandemic’s life in it’s temporal vastness. When the pandemic ebbs the flow of life, arrests the world in a petrified state, the memory becomes the refuge and preserver of what’s lost. It’s particularly hard to conceive of any justice in the middle of such mayhem. Yet, memory will perhaps provide an opportunity to preserve the forever imprints of the fallen, the suffered, and the lost times. Hence, this poem is an effort to remember the vastitude of time, which enables a possibility of locating hope and justice in the course of time, even though it seems impossible in the moment.
First stanza - The scattered nature of this text, sentences scattering into words, words breaking down into fragments of alphabets, indicates the very disintegrating essence of the reality of pandemic. Just like dust suspended in mid-air, the words of this text are similarly suspended where it becomes particularly hard to hold them together into coherence.
Second stanza - The orientation of this text is such that every following sentence starts after a longer blank space. It highlights the incremental difficulty of articulating, when one tries to account for unjust, cruel pain. Even though this stanza insists on right to be heard, to speak, to not be forgotten, but with all this surmounting numbness and blankness it becomes increasingly hard to insist. To lay your rightful claim becomes a tiring effort, just like a dead hope trudging to sustain itself.
Third stanza - Here the text starts coming together, as the invocation is made to legal memory as an instrument of preserving the memory of pandemic in collective conscience. It also highlights the relief and justice muddled and caught up in time lags in operations of governance and judicial system. “ Due process” becomes “Justice in-process”, which ends up becoming “Justice due in process”.
The last stanza- has been written like a prayer. Just like all impossible and dying hopes are clinged to “ May Almighty '', similarly, legal institutions are looked upon as an omnipotent house of Justice. Against all evidences of hopelessness, the bare figment of hope is clinged to the expectation that Law will preserve the memory and do justice to the unjust, indiscriminate onslaught of pandemic. The carrying forward of memory to the future becomes the necessary condition of hoping for any justice in time.
The above attempt, at reproducing this poem from pandemic judgement, enables us to see the role of legal judgments in a new light, not just as a dictate in a moment, but also as a binding knot, to keep the memory alive into the collective conscience of the present and future. If history is the claim that the dead have on the present, then today’s action/inaction are the responsibility and accountability endowed on the present by the future.
If law is the house of legal justice, then literature is the abode of poetic justice. The edifice of poetic justice can be constructed only on the reminiscences of the memory. And that’s where law emerges as an unfolding field of narratives, a directory, an archive, and above all a keeper of the memory. Only together, can law and literature aspire to promising justice in time.
