Every time 13-year-old Selina Mairembam tries to write or eat with her right hand, the pain and the scars remind her of the day she was nearly killed by a bomb.
She was knocked out instantly. When she woke up, there was blood everywhere. For a moment, she thought she was dead.
Talkative once, Selina now barely speaks. Holding out the jagged pieces of bomb shrapnel that tore through her arm, she whispers to me, “I’m always scared. I don’t want to be scared.”
Selina is the great-granddaughter of Mairembam Koireng Singh, the first chief minister of the northeastern Indian state of Manipur. On September 7, 2024, while she was helping a priest arrange a ritual for her grand-aunt’s death ceremony, a “big rocket” came out of nowhere. She remembers no flash, only the deafening sound – so loud she thought her ears had been blown off.
The improvised bomb struck the house of the former chief minister in the heart of Moirang town, near Loktak Lake, the largest freshwater lake in northeast India.