Today is August 6, the 76th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing in 1945. At a time when the second World War was nearing its end, the United States dropped a nuclear bomb on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on August 6 and 9. According to a rough estimate put together by historians, around 70% of Hiroshima was wiped out by the effect of the bomb, decimating the lives of thousands of innocent civilians. Even today, the devastating effects of the toxic nuclear radiation from the bombs can be felt in the two cities, causing many infants to be born with physical disabilities.
On this day, let us hear of an account from a 35-year-old man whose grandmother was unfortunate enough to have lived through the nuclear carnage.
This man, whose name has not been revealed by the author of this two-year-old story, said that his grandmother used to live in a small town which was adjacent to Hiroshima, only a half hour’s distance by bus. On that fateful night, when the Little Boy exploded after landing in Hiroshima, his granny was already pregnant with his mother.
Recalling the sequence of events narrated to him by his grandmother, he said that in those days, the war was at the center of everyone’s mind. Whether it was a discussion at a dinner table or a school project, all people did was talk about the war. The sound of bombs was also fairly frequent in that part of the country where his grandmother lived. But on that day, when the shrill, unnatural sound came forth exactly at 8 pm, everyone instinctively knew that this was something different.
Out of sheer curiosity, his granny travelled some distance and got caught up in the black toxic smoke that was guzzling from the newly exploded bomb. A while after she returned, the radioactive smoke that she inhaled caused her eyesight to become bleary, and blisters sprung up on her skin.
But what was the most horrifying after-effect of the explosion was that the foetus in her womb stopped kicking and lay still, as if dead. The baby, who miraculously survived and was born two and a half months later, was a daughter who was deaf and mute. That woman was the narrator’s mother.
He says that his grandmother never grew out of the trauma that engulfed her that night along with the smoke. She kept on muttering the events of that night even in her sleep, long after the war was over and the US had provided reparations to Japan, along with entering into a defence deal with the country which ensured that the US military would defend Japan in case of any military threat in the future.
Listening to the man’s story, the author was reminded of the old woman from “Innocent Erendira and her Grandmother: by Garcia Marquez, where Erendira’s grandmother used to blabber about her past days of glory in her sleep.
This young man still lives with his mother in Hiroshima and works at a software company. He has not married, neither does he have a girlfriend. He denies having any love for traveling. He narrated his story in ‘less than ten sentences’ according to the author, but the pathos that was communicated by his expressions was overwhelming.
Truly, pain and enduring trauma transfer themselves from generation to generation, leaving around traces in some way or the other. In some, that trace is physical, in others, it’s psychological.
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