A DRY HOSTILE ANTAGONISTIC PLACE...

Just finished reading Salman Rushdie's "The Enchantress of Florence" and towards the end this is this passage which I find very relevant to India today.

Emperor Akbar is evacuating Fatehpur Sikhri as the lake has dried up and these words are his musings:

The future would not be what he (Akbar) hoped for, but a dry hostile antagonistic place where people would survive as best as they could and hate their neighbours and smash their places of worship and kill one another once again in the renewed heat of the great quarrel he had sought to end for ever, the quarrel over God. In the future it was harshness, not civilization, that would rule.

NOT SAYING ANYTHING

Why didn't I realize that your silence
was not an accident but a result of my failure?
Words have been the cause -
'Cannot stay', 'no future', these once spoken
You took without protest. The unspoken, you used with deliberation;
They dripped bleeding questions
On gaping scars.

It is no big deal to live without
warmth and hugs, even Wills and Reserva
Thingschangefiredieswaterfreezes
andspacesindistanceandwordsbecomeknives
That tear apart memories and make one wonder
if they were imagined.

Strange to think that once addictive substances
are so easy to wean from, including your words
Once offered as promises. Easier still to think
All was a deception from the beginning.

Frightening to know this pattern for what it is,
in others silence and my own

Answer being a departure.