on the bus a woman gets on with three daughters,
three bags, and a son, and because the ride is free
for women, asks the conductor for one ticket, while
talking on the phone in a tamil touched by many
unknown languages. just before camp road the conductor
alerts the two north indian laborers in broken english
and i realize, no matter what linguistic textbooks claim,
that english is a bird perched between the branches
of the indo-aryan and the dravidian language trees.
i get off at the railways station and book my tickets
by the qr code. everyone asks the same guy whether
this train goes to the beach and he says yes. i asked him too.
i ask myself: why did we all only ask him? because of our bias
of who's the authority of knowledge: a middle aged, native male.
a woman sells pomegranate, eight for a hundred. nothing sells.
i get off at st thomas mount, the legendary place where
doubting thomas, disciple of jesus, was buried.
when the colonists first came they thought the christianity here
wasn't real, not knowing that people here knew christ
a millennium before they did. i get into the metro, get a seat.
a gang of guys with a haryanvi accent chatter between the bogeys,
one of them says his friend only eats the food cooked by their bihari buddy.
a man walks in with a walking stick and before i give up
my seat a couple give up theirs. i'm too indecisive
to be good and too impatient to be bad.
the metro goes underground and the lambent metal seed
plows through the wombdark guts of the city.
i get off at anna nagar tower, which attracts tourists
and suicides alike (this isn't a juxtaposition but a synonym).
at zam zam chai i have tea and biscuit, buy one for a woman
who begs, and as she walks away, i feel the repulsive guilt
of a complicit kindness, all the way to the documentary screening,
at the end of which gyarsi bai says: they're killing the poor, not poverty.
~ajay
22/7/2024
