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I would not like to be associated with those who advocate that even census should be on caste line, yet while writing a poem I chose the topic from the caste quagmire. It is common sense that poverty could be anywhere, even in a Brahmin household. Many of our ancient stories used to start something like this: Once there lived a poor brahmin who used to go to village for begging alms...

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A Brahmin Forgets his Hymn

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A Brahmin

forgets his hymn...

When finds his three unemployed sons

plodding along the hungry bylanes

chasing the elusive urban employment,

When finds his daughter pale and pondering

educated, groomed homely, wearied at thirty

miles away from her indispensable wedlock,

When the sharecropper vengefully ruins

his ancestral paddy land of infertile acre

by his wanton step-fatherly neglect,

When his ageing wife sobs in silence

lamenting her birth as a woman

her lost life in drudgery and chores,

When his bed-ridden father

curses his unworthy son

desperate for a few pills of painkiller,

When his ritual fasts

end up in ulcerous hunger

before his stone gods fond of flowers,

When the generous god-fearing devotees

throw a ten paise-coin each

on a sacred brass plate in melting gestures,

When a corn on his naked heel

perpetrates excruciating pain on hot sand

of the lonely sizzling village lane,

When his perforated faded cloth cover

on his quarter century-old umbrella

bequeathed to him by his glorious ancestors

fails to prevent the meddlesome rainwater,

And the Brahmin

forgets his hymn,

salutes an officer in solemn sincerity

unmindful of his unnecessary ancestry

while dragging his feet out of the temple

to ask for a hundred rupees loan

for the day's ration...

And thus the Brahmin

forgets his hymn

of high-sounding Sanskrit

and hollow-sounding rhymes.

PORT BLAIR

21 /03 /97

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By
A. N. Nanda
Coimbatore
05-01-2012
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