Soul Underfoot
Posted by Sruthi Sadhujan (Alumnus) | Filed under '09 Spring: Dream of a Ridiculous Man, Poetry, Print, Show Poems
Some days… I smell of loneliness and escape,
of the uncomfortable intimacy of economy-class seats.
On these days, I scrub to take off that layer of dead skin,
hoping that if I rub hard enough, I can find traces of that person
that I once discarded from 30,000 feet high into the gulf of good intentions.
But sitting in an ocean of brown faces, all keen-eyed yet timid,
I felt the familiar restlessness of a 15-hour trans-everything flight,
the first voyage over, where every miles feels heavy under your eyelids,
as you try to put it all behind you.
They spoke of kathakali and crowded bus stands,
with passengers stacked like matchboxes,
sparking with urgency and escape.
One man told a story of a village of untouchables,
of a dog that wandered off
and impregnated another from an upper-caste family.
They torched that village,
raped and killed the first woman they could get their righteous hands on.
An eye for an eye, a dog for a rotten bitch,
these are the stories that move them,
these are the stories that appear in international newspapers,
but for all their notoriety and fame,
they’re standing neck-deep in stagnating water,
where the smallest ripple would drown them.
Because backward castes are equivalent to the very shit they scavenge through.
I looked over at the man, speaking with earnest and a quite rage.
Your eyes are hungering for moonlight,
and my heart cracked through the spaces of my split lips like parched earth,
ashamed to say that sometimes I dream of this place with pride.
I come from that far off land where mixed caste fetuses
are crushed one by one under the four legs of a bed frame.
Women are told to hold back their smiles,
because no one wants a rabid bitch to bear her teeth.
I know that you’re struggling, unable to reconcile the curious yearning in your chest
for the land that spat on your face because of the sound of your last name.
I belong to you,
I belong to a first son and his first child
with a mouth too big for much too small wallet.
to rice paddies floating with drowned lungs,
plastic bottles, and water-stained pleas,
I belong to a billion explosions of color between brown and ivory
I belong to the monsoons, to the color of my skin,
to women strung with jasmine garlands,
I belong to jai hind.
To communist graffiti on the walls of train stations
And groping blind beggars scraping like scalpels against the asphalt,
as if his knees were more courageous than he was.
I belong to him
To Kerala, Tamil Nadu…
And yet it seems that I will never belong but still…
I dream of you like the space between the fish and moon,
I belong to the place where they breathed, dreams expanding like balloons,
to the sun dying in the east.
I belong to a few, to a billion, I belong to you.
