Short Story: Shadows Across the Dnipro (Part 2)

Dr. Nishi Chawla narrates a poignant tale on refugees and shows us life, as they see it.

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This piece is available for free reading this week

Previous Part: Part 1

One day, she told herself, she would find her way back. But for now, she would let the memories carry her forward, like the current of the Dnipro, guiding her through the darkness. Daryna had heard of Warsaw before, only in fragments and whispers. In Ukraine, it was a distant name, a city from another world, a place unreachable by the hands of war, or so it seemed. But now, as her feet crossed the cold earth beneath the weight of all she had lost, Warsaw became not just a name but a destination, a point on the map where she might rest her heavy heart. Poland—just across the border—was now a refuge, a border town her temporary solace before the train carried her deeper into the West.

The journey from her homeland had been long, a crawl through the labyrinth of displaced souls, those fleeing the devastation that shattered Ukraine. With each mile, her memories became more like the shadows cast by the fading light of dusk – dark, insistent, and unshakable. She had crossed the border town of Przemyśl, Poland, a small but significant gateway for countless refugees like her. It was here that the raw reality of her status began to dawn on her—she was no longer just Daryna from Kyiv. She was now a refugee, a woman without a country, without certainty, and without peace.

Przemyśl was a transit town, swollen with the anguish of those fleeing, faces twisted in exhaustion, eyes hollowed by loss. The town, with its history of migration and borders, was a liminal space, where people floated between what had been and what might be, yet it held no permanence. Daryna, like so many others, was soon shuffled along, whisked away on a crowded train toward Warsaw.

Warsaw rose before her like a city of contradictions, a place scarred by its own violent past yet alive with the pulse of rebirth. The streets, lined with post-war architecture, stood defiant. But there were scars hidden beneath the surface-echoes of wars long past that still whispered in the wind. To Daryna, Warsaw was both shelter and prison. She arrived with nothing but her bandura, the traditional Ukrainian instrument that had been her companion since childhood. Her fingers, though roughened by the elements and fatigue, still knew its strings like an old lover’s touch. Yet the notes it produced now were heavy with grief, weighed down by the sorrow that had become her constant companion.

The first few weeks in Warsaw were filled with numbness. The refugee center where she found temporary shelter was a place where stories were shared in hushed tones and eyes spoke of horrors that words could not. There was little privacy, little peace, but there was at least warmth, a bed, and food, albeit sparse. It was in those early days that Daryna realized how quickly one’s identity could be reduced to nothing but survival. The question of who she was or who she might become seemed irrelevant in a world where the only task was to endure.

She wandered the streets of Warsaw with the bandura strapped to her back, unsure of where to go or what to do. The city was strange, the language foreign, and the culture both familiar and distant. Sometimes, she would find herself staring into the Vistula River, searching its waters for something familiar, but they weren’t the Dnipro. The Dnipro River, with its broad, powerful current, had always been a symbol of Ukraine’s strength to her. Now, she felt as if its absence mirrored her own dislocation, as if she were floating downstream, further and further away from the life she had once known.

With no work and no resources, Daryna had to make do with what she had. Warsaw was bustling, with its market squares and parks filled with people who were eager to distract themselves from the chaos raging to the east. It was here, on one such street corner, that Daryna first plucked the strings of her bandura for strangers. The sound was melancholic, a lament woven from the threads of her memories. The haunting notes echoed through the narrow streets, pulling people out of their routine, if only for a moment.

The coins dropped into the case at her feet were few, but they were enough to keep her going. Daryna’s music wasn’t just a plea for survival; it was an elegy for a country, for a life that had slipped through her fingers. As she played, her mind would drift back to the Dnipro’s currents, to the warm glow of sunlight on the riverbanks where she had once walked, carefree. Each song was a piece of that life, each note a fragment of her identity that she feared was dissolving.

Warsaw was kind in some ways, cruel in others. The city, though sheltering her, did not know her, and in that unknowing, she felt the sting of isolation. She lived in a cramped room in a building that housed other refugees—people from Ukraine, Syria, Yemen—all of them displaced, all of them adrift in a sea of uncertainty. They spoke in different languages, but they understood each other in the way only the displaced can: through shared loss, through the silent ache of exile. They were bound together by their shadows – the shadows of war, of broken homes, of lives left behind.

For Daryna, music was her only constant. She played not only for survival but to remember, to keep the parts of herself alive that war had tried to erase. The bandura, with its wooden body and delicate strings, was a lifeline, tethering her to the Ukraine that still existed in her heart, even as the country itself was torn apart. She played for strangers on street corners, in parks, near the old town’s squares, wherever she could. Sometimes people stopped to listen, sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes they left a few coins, sometimes nothing at all.

But the pittance she earned was never enough. Daryna found herself bartering her music for scraps-food, a warm jacket, or a hot meal. She played for the shopkeepers in the market, for the old woman who lived across the hall, for the children who gathered in the refugee center. The music she made wasn’t the grand, sweeping compositions she had once dreamed of playing in concert halls. It was smaller, more intimate, like the whisper of a breeze over the Dnipro’s surface. But it was hers, and it kept her alive.

Warsaw became a place of routine for her. She woke each day to the same cold walls, the same unfamiliar streets, and the same hunger that gnawed at her insides. The memories of her homeland-of Kyiv’s golden domes, of the Dnipro’s wide embrace-faded a little more each day, replaced by the sharp edges of survival. Yet, in the quiet moments, when the sun dipped low over the city and the shadows lengthened across the streets, Daryna would close her eyes and feel the river’s current pulling her home.

The shadows that clung to Daryna weren’t just those of war. They were the lingering echoes of who she had been, of the dreams she had once held. They were the shadows of her family, now scattered, some lost to the violence, others simply unreachable. They were the shadows of her identity, a mosaic of memories and hopes that had been shattered like glass.

In Warsaw, she was no longer the woman she had been in Ukraine. She had become something else-something forged in the fires of displacement and survival. But even as she adjusted to this new existence, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was only a ghost, moving through a life that didn’t quite belong to her. She watched the people of Warsaw go about their lives, and she envied them their certainty, their rootedness. For her, every step felt like it was taken on foreign soil, every breath was borrowed.

As the year wore on, Daryna became a bit known to the local community. The bandura player from Ukraine, the refugee with sad eyes who could make the strings sing. She didn’t speak much, but she didn’t need to. Her music spoke for her, carrying the weight of her sorrow, her loss, her longing. And though she lived in the shadows-of war, of displacement, of the life she could never return to-there was a part of her that found solace in the quiet moments, in the music she made, in the resilience she hadn’t known she possessed.

Warsaw, for all its strangeness, had become her refuge. It wasn’t home, but it was a place where she could rebuild, piece by piece, the fragments of herself that remained. The bandura was her anchor, and as long as she had it, she would keep playing, keep surviving, even as the shadows lingered, even as the memories of Ukraine grew ever more distant. And the river before her was not the Dnipro, but the Vistula – its waters colder, darker, and somehow less forgiving. She watched its steady flow with quiet resignation, her breath slipping out in fragile clouds that disappeared into the winter air. There was a finality in the way the light fell across the water, a pale glow of dusk that softened the world in a way that made it feel distant, almost unreal. The Vistula and the Dnipro, two rivers separated by borders, war, and history, flowed through Daryna’s heart as one. As she stood on the banks of the Vistula in Warsaw, the sight of the river’s dark, churning waters brought a sudden, sharp ache of memory. The Vistula stretched before her, vast and quiet beneath the weight of winter skies, its current slow but powerful, like a pulse carrying the city’s lifeblood. And yet, in her mind, it was not just the Vistula she saw, but the Dnipro—the great river of Kyiv that had once shaped the contours of her childhood.

In a way that only memory can allow, the two rivers merged. The cold winds blowing off the Vistula carried the scent of the earth from both banks, as if the rivers themselves whispered to each other in a secret, fluid language, undisturbed by the violence of nations. Daryna could almost hear the echo of the Dnipro’s voice beneath the steady hum of the Vistula, as if the two rivers sang the same song in different tongues. She had once stood by the Dnipro, its wide expanse gleaming gold in the evening light, reflecting the domes of Kyiv’s churches. Now, the reflection of the Warsaw skyline rippled faintly across the Vistula’s surface, and Daryna closed her eyes, merging the images in her mind.

She remembered the Dnipro as it had been in the spring, swollen and wild, its waters rushing like a torrent of memories too powerful to contain. In Kyiv, the river had been a boundary, dividing the city into halves yet drawing it together with the promise of continuity and history. Here, on the Vistula, she felt that same pull-the water calling her back to something she had lost, but not forgotten. The rivers seemed to hold the weight of centuries within their depths, as if every drop carried the story of a land, a people, and the tragedies that marked their paths.

As she stared into the Vistula, Daryna felt the rivers converge in her soul. The Vistula, cold and foreign, had taken on the sadness of exile, but within its currents, she sensed the warmth of the Dnipro, the river of her home. Both rivers had seen their share of war, of borders drawn and redrawn, of lives torn apart by forces greater than themselves. And yet both rivers, in their endless flow, seemed indifferent to these human struggles, their waters moving onward, always onward, to the distant sea.

The two rivers, each a part of a different landscape, flowed toward a common destiny, just as Daryna felt her past and her present, her homeland and her exile, flowing together within her. In her heart, the rivers became one, a single, eternal stream that would carry her memories of Kyiv into the future, even as her life moved forward along the banks of the Vistula. They seemed to be united in a way-two rivers, two cities, two lives-flowing endlessly through her, inseparable and eternal.

The End

(To be published in USA in a collection of short stories on refugees by Dr Nishi Chawla.)

Author’s Bio

Dr Nishi Chawla is an academic and a writer. Nishi Chawla has published ten plays, three novels, and seven collections of poetry. She has also written and directed four award winning art house feature films. She has also co-edited two global anthologies of poetry published by Penguin Random House: ‘Greening the Earth’ and ‘Singing in the Dark.’

Dr Nishi Chawla holds a doctorate in English from the George Washington University, Washington D.C., and her post-doctorate from the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland. After teaching for nearly twenty years as a tenured Professor of English at Delhi University, India, Nishi Chawla had migrated with her family to a suburb of Washington D.C. She has taught English Literature for forty years at the University level. Nishi Chawla has recently completed her fourth feature film, “The Peace Activists” on Gandhi, MLK, and Thoreau. Three of her art house feature films are on Amazon Prime: ‘TechNous,’ ‘The Strange Case of Normalcy,’ and ‘Mixed Up.’ are streaming on Amazon Prime, and ‘The Peace Activists’ should also be on Prime by the end of 2024.

Dr Nishi Chawla’s play, ‘Kasturba versus Gandhi’ was staged in New York in an off Broadway production in June 2024. Her tenth play, ‘The Mahatma versus Gurudev’ was accepted to be staged in June 2025 again off Broadway, New York, making her one of the few Indian playwrights to ever have a play staged off Broadway.

She is the third Indian poet ever to be invited for a reading and a discussion of the US Library of Congress organized, ‘The Poet and the Poem’ program.