My Hands Can Still Plough The Fields

The non-existent loud voice of Haro Jamunda of Kalinganagar, Odisha.

He was a teacher, my younger boy

He taught me to write my name

Suddenly for days he lay on the bed

Malaria in the brain, they said

We waited for a miracle

To take him to the hospital

No bicycle, no bullock cart

The primary health clinic was 10 kms afar

It was getting eerily dark.

Soups of lentil and basil and yeast

And prayer by our native priest

But you know, he died: my little prince.

Was this a punishment for my sins?

My taller boy missed his little brother

But soon Aati matured into a robust farmer

Soon the rice field was his bed of dreams

Soon he dreamt of a season of rice in heaps

He laboured, we stocked

And thus ticked the sand clock.

Boom! Bam! Boom! The steel factories howled

"Steel factories over our land!" our Ho Munda kin bawled

"What about our crops?" 

"All gone!"

"What about our livelihood?"

"All gone!"

"What about our ancestors' spirits?"

"All gone!"

Boom! We heard it again, but

Aati ran to see, for its sound was different

Gamcha on his shoulder, the gait of a deer

It was the boom of the guns that we could hear

Minutes, hours slipped through the barrel of the gun

Women, children, men wailed for those long gone

"Where is Aati, my young man?"

"They put his body into a van!"

First, there were no hospitals, no development

Then they said steel meant development

But I lost both my sons.

I am old, I am angry.

I cry. No answer to my unending 'why'.

My hands can still plough the fields.

[This poem was first published in Montreal Serai (Vol. 23 Issue 4) and was also recited at the XIII International Conference of the Indian Association for Women's Studies (IAWS) held in Wardha, Maharashtra, from January 21-24, 2011]