Shankar Painter

To our paragons of virtue

Cross-eyed pigs

Immersed in the service of the poor and the downtrodden!

How meteoric was the rise in your careers!

Bunglows, servants, cars…

And the velvet thrones of power to adorn.

How often have you strangled our rights to death

Helping on ‘loyalty to the party’!

Dozing off nonchalantly in sessions,

You never forgot to raise your hands

When the number game started.

Through your stooges

Bargained over our suffering

And tore us to pieces

Like hungrey wolves.

We never let out as much as a wimper.

Footing around in your cities,

Trying out your antics to dope us,

You got your fame cheap

As the reformers and uplifters of the oppressed.

But remember,

You can fool  some people all the time,

You can fool all the people for some time.

But you can’t fool all the people all the time.

So my paragons of virtue…

From broom to mouth

From dawn to dusk

To earn crumbs and leftovers

The broom they bestowed on us

And the warning cry of our approach

As we carried their shit on our heads.

From broom to mouth we live,

When shall we break our chains?

The full quota of brooms we got,

The whole hundred percent!

There was not much of anything else left

When they cleaned up and split the loot.

From broom to mouth we live

When shall we break our chains?

We are just a bunch of helpless sheep

Waiting for the killer wolves to arrive.

From broom to mouth we live

When shall we break our chains?

Bleeding white to turn the earth red

We became a tribe of living corpses.

From broom to mouth we live

Rising up we shall break our chains!

A journey by bus down the countryside

The villagers struck up a conversation :

 “ sahib, you don’t seem to belong to these parts.”

They seemed to be curious about a thousand things :

My name, my moholla, my village,

My destination, my job in the city.

They had no qualms about invading my privacy.

But there was something lurking in the background

Baring its teeth and fangs to pounce upon me.

They were digging away my at a mountain of questions

To ferret out my caste from its molehill.

They were on to it soon enough –

When I confessed I was visiting a family of ‘shit-shifters’.

The old adage about poking noses.

To make the best of a bad case

They put the lid on all questions.