Scribbles by Sudhansh

Grabbing the hook on a gloomy morning…
Moved she with short strides,
A foodless frame with bones bulging out from a brown skin…
Picking garbage to feed her solitary kin,
What she carried is what she became…
Chocolate wrappers, coke cans, silver foils…
Shit stained diapers, contraceptives and what not.
A reflection of her exterior with an interior yet unexplored,
Untouched, uncared and to some extent, unbothered…

Living with a fatherless child under a flyover,
She couldn’t remember what the hollow man looked like…
Was it the syringe? Or a memory she no longer cared to look back to?
She knew not the rusty past…
Only cared about the stainless future in her arms.
The little lips too tasted not his mother’s colostrum,
For she feared where her venomous milk could lead…
A milk shaped by her kalank, disgrace as they called it.

What more could one pen down having satiated eyes?
From the eyes of a human who hasn’t tasted hunger,
Or desperation
Or shame
Or a chaotic roofless winter with smog assimilating,
Polluting,
Staining the corners of one’s soul.

She has always been here…
sorting the city’s waste so the rest of us stay clean.
She will remain here,
visible only when the cameras come,
or when the next headline needs a face for “urban blight”
Otherwise, she folds back into the background,
another shadow under concrete,
carrying tomorrow in small arms
while the rest of us look away.