Faultlines

Written By: Joshya Mudaliar

GD By: Sakhi Maheshwari

The river has no memory of treaties.

 When the Brahmaputra swells, 

it does not pause at the fence,

does not consult diplomats or cartographers.

It takes with it homes, cattle, schoolbooks,

and leaves behind the silence of soaked earth.

Cyclones do not ask for passports.

Floods do not stop at customs. 

Drought cracks the land in states and union territories alike 

yet policies march in uniform, 

dividing relief into shares of loyalty, 

while unity is rationed like grain.

Every calamity is a mirror 

reflecting not just the fury of nature, 

but the politics of response, 

the silence of promises, 

and the conflicts seeded in neglect.

In Kashmir 

Glaciers retreat like tired soldiers, 

but the army remains. 

Every landslide is a double siege 

the mountain pressing down from above, 

the checkpoint holding firm below. 

Here, even nature is political, 

its fury weighed against the calculus of control.

And then the drought 

not sudden like flood or storm, 

but slow, deliberate, 

a tightening noose of cracked soil. 

Farmers in Marathwada hang their despair from neem trees, 

their widows queuing for compensation 

that drips slower than monsoon. 

The land burns quietly, 

while speeches thunder on television.

Where villagers speak of rain

as both prayer and punishment, 

where rescue boats come late, 

sometimes never, 

because priorities sit in conference halls 

where the maps glow brighter than faces of the displaced

.

Perhaps, in these unspoken solidarities, 

lies the truest resistance to disaster 

not the maps, not the speeches,

 but the quiet rebellion of compassion 

against the storms of both earth and empire.

Disasters are never natural alone.

They expose the faultlines of governance, 

the cynicism of relief, 

the violence of neglect.

But they also reveal 

the stubborn mercy of people 

who, amid the wreckage, 

choose humanity over geopolitics, 

compassion over conflict.