Bhatt's mother remembers being nineteen in 1947, hearing from her garden the cries of people stranded at the railway station and too afraid to go with her aunt to help them; in her seventies she still feels guilty, and asks how a man who knew nothing about geography could divide a country.
How Bhatt's free verse moves from the mother's memory, told in the third person, to the daughter listening at midnight, and how the mother's own words, repetition and dashes show a guilt that has lasted a lifetime.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'nineteen-years-old then', 'the cries of the people', 'it was endless', 'even the birds sounded different', 'tells me this at midnight', 'seventy-years old', 'older than that', 'divide a country'.
Form: free verse that moves from the past, the mother at nineteen told in the third person, to the present, the daughter listening in the kitchen at midnight, with dashes, repetition of each day, and the mother's own words in quotation marks, ending on her question.
Context: Sujata Bhatt (born 1956), born in Ahmedabad, India, who grew up in Pune and the United States and now lives in Germany; the partition of British India in August 1947 into India and Pakistan, along borders drawn by a British official, Cyril Radcliffe, on outdated maps, which brought riots, the migration of 10 million people and around a million deaths; and the poem's two times, 1947 and fifty years after independence.
Links within the cluster: Lament (mourning war's victims), Honour Killing (a new geography against a man who knew nothing about geography), Colonization in Reverse (the legacy of empire) and We Lived Happily during the War (guilt at not doing enough).
An unseen poem paired with it might share a family memory of conflict, guilt at standing by, or borders that divide people.
OCR's mark schemes for 2023 to 2025 pick out its many markers of time, which show the pain of 1947 still unhealed fifty years on.
OCR's question on this cluster has two parts. Part (a), 20 marks, compares a named poem from the cluster, printed on the paper, with an unseen poem on a linked theme, and rewards analysis of language, form and structure (AO2) most, then your response (AO1); an answer on only one of the two poems cannot go above Level 3. Part (b), 20 marks, explores one other poem from the same cluster that you choose, from memory, with AO1 and AO2 equally weighted; a poem from a different cluster means only the higher of your two marks counts. Neither part marks context: use it only where it explains a reading. Each worked paragraph and exam tip is labelled with the part it is for.
