Purasawalkam

Somewhere in Purasawalkam,

Dwells a dizzying slum,

To the north of Chennapatnam.

Living there won't differ

From Sisyphus’s fate to suffer

Within inescapable life,

Within that eternal strife,

The gods brought to bear.

No space to walk

Through cloistered walkways stretched

Between squatter settlements sheltering

A thousand households,

A thousand families,

A thousand dreams

Blessed with but two toilets to share.

Beings decomposed to numbers:

Each set bundled in a room

With walls not wider than the widest

Ultra HD televisions that adorn

The wide walls of the widely wealthy.

A vibrant Deepavali hubbub,

Of cats, flies and humans

Vying for a piece of social meat

Being slashed on a cleaver

By a woman or a mother

Beside whom a neighbour’s

Infant son crawled.

And as that child cried,

Another lady

From another room

Brought forth a steel plate on which,

Seeing its own reflection,

The child became mum,

It’s attention distracted:

Into it’s own freckled face.

Drying clothes across crumbling walls;

Garbage clustered at select corners;

A smiling, intoxicated man approaching me

To ask in a language indecipherable,

Only to be reproached by

His apologetic wife.

And then a diffident girl

Calling out “anna!”,

Signalling me to make way for her

As I inadvertently obstruct her path.

These images stay embossed

In my fading memory.

No newfound compunction

Drives this reflection.

These images, often have I seen

Wherever I have been;

Through a door left ajar,

Through the window of my car,

Noonday or night,

By the red traffic light.

Man, woman, child often has held

Sometimes a car seat-cover,

Sometimes a flowery sticker,

And sometimes, nothingness

On palms widespread in hope

Of a minted blessing

From me, a monk of modernity.

So, that day in Purasawalkam

Was not unheard of.

Not images alone;

I had also been exposed earlier

To theories on paper

That deal with what we,

From a positivistic distance,

Call “the problems of the poor”.

But one thing did separate

This visit from all else:

I was diluted to a streak of blue ink

On the paper of time

As I found myself in the timespace

Of that concentrated "other",

Not mine as in earlier times.

A timespace wherein the "other"

Seems queerly settled

In the theoretically uninhabitable!

Oblivious to alien lifeworlds

Of more mobile shadows that find

Touristic delight in shuttling between

Medieval museums and sandstone castles:

The glory of other times.

This mobile modern mind

Is itself unaware of the possibility

Of a reflexive history

Of the present, penned through

Everyday, evanescent struggles of

The unknown inhabitant

Of temporary quarters, surviving on

The margins of urban life.

An urban life where temporariness itself,

As with a woman I met,

Assumes a different norm:

Three decades or even more.

To me, almost a lore.

Hers is a subaltern history,

In writing which

She ceases to be one,

For the subaltern

Could never speak.

She then metamorphoses into

A new historian of praxis

Who resembles that child in the slum

Silenced into reflection by

The curious sight of its own image.