Dr. Srabani Basu’s poignant poem, “Snow Between Footsteps,” offers a haunting glimpse into the mind of a young woman confronting her past in a silent, unforgiving prison cell.

Snow Between Footsteps

The cell smells of iron.
Her wrists remember the bite of the cuffs.
No, not remember—still feel.

Snow fell the night she was taken.
The sound of boots in snow.
Not crunch. Not squish.
Something between.

(newspaper clipping, yellowed)
Headline: Youth Radicalised in Border District; Death Toll Rises
Date: Four winters ago.
Her photograph—
half-shadow, hair wind-tangled.
A scarf covering her mouth.
Eyes like searchlights.

She was nine when they burned the school.
Eleven when the soldiers came for her brother.
Fourteen when her mother stopped speaking.
Nineteen when she planted the bag in the bus.

“Do you regret?” the priest asks.
“Yes,” she says.
“Which part?”
She does not answer.

(memory shard)
Running downhill,
mud sucking at her shoes,
wind hitting her teeth,
gunfire chasing her spine.

The women in the prison kitchen do not speak to her.
They stir lentils.
She peels potatoes.
A fly lands on her wrist.
She does not move.

(interrogation transcript – partial)
Q: Who gave you the order?
A: Nobody.
Q: Nobody?
A: Nobody you can arrest.

The mountains outside her village are shaped like sleeping animals.
She used to name them.
She forgets the names now.

Execution date: announced.
Her cellmate cries more than she does.
The cellmate is not the one dying.

See Also

“A Blur of a Woman” by Basudhara Roy

(imagined future, impossible)
She sees herself at 40,
kneading dough,
scolding a child for spilling milk.
She laughs at the thought.
Or maybe she cries.

They said she was a monster.
She believed them.
Belief is easier than explanation.

(radio static)
A man’s voice says: “The snow is heavy in the hills tonight.”
She thinks—
If snow can bury roads,
maybe it can bury the past.

The rope smells like hemp.
She remembers the smell from her mother’s grain sacks.

In her last dream,
she was running uphill this time,
towards something that shone like water.
And no one was chasing her.