Red Henna Blues

Red Henna Blues is a assemblage of hybrid writing, a memoir, told through essays, flash fiction, qisse, kahanis, oral narratives, and creative non-fiction pieces. The writings are reimagined dialogues, fables and tales as told by generations of the extended Singh family, predominantly women, who travelled from Punjab, India to Taunggyi, Burma during the British colonial era, formed families and legends, fell in love and eloped or had arranged marriages, faced joy, estrangement and violence, and after almost half a century later due to the 1962 military coup, were dislocated and fragmented and scattered to many parts of the globe: the stories are of the Japanese occupation of Burma between 1942-45 and of the Allied Bombing on their homes; the "return" home to Punjab in 1946 and the Partition of India in 1947; the journey back to Burma in 1947 as refugees, and then, the Burmese military coup of 1962 when they, once again, became refugees after living for many years under the brutal military regime. While many family members became refugees and exiled, some were either unwilling or unable to migrate and were forced to integrate and follow along on the Burmese Road to Socialism by the Burma Socialist Programme Party. The writing is not about a single person but is a collection of memories and re-memories of selected members of various branches of the close-knit family within the small Sikh community in Taunggyi, Burma. The pieces are written from the perspective of one member, the middle child of a family of six siblings and five cousins in a joint family of eighteen who, by default, became the repository of stories of gendered violence and resistance within the Sikh, and the larger Indian, community in the diaspora. These are home truths about her/story told through a unique blending of the craft of storytelling, allegories and creative non-fiction hybrid narratives.