There she blabbers beside the road to everywhere.
A thin shawl once garbed around her shoulder
Now trails behind, bedaubed with soil.
Continuously she gazes with disbelief at her swaying hands,
As if destiny has betrayed her palm reading,
As if it was not her fate to sit on the road
And be pelted by stones, or survive on loaves thrown
Or to be called a poor ‘madwoman’.
A fortune teller once told her of a handsome man,
A large joint family and half a dozen children pride.
The contours of her palm must have changed
For her fortune was bright (I swear he said it was very bright).
Then one day they dragged her to a healer and said
‘She speaks in double voices,
tears apart her clothes; hurts herself with pointed edges.
She is a witch.’
He ravished her mind deep where dreams throbbed,
to conjure the black energy out of her evil body.
Further dreams were of the leeches feeding upon a withering soul.
One last day, in an everlasting night, they put her in a distant dark world
where the screams were muffled by the hard stones.
“This is your home.
Madness is contagious, you know. How would you know?
For the good of all, it is better to kill a rabid dog or let it
Kill itself.”
And this world made of rock piles, they knew, would kill her
like death’s natural/arbitrary prey.
She survived.
And since thence, she studies the mystics of the streets.
Incessantly she mutters and rereads
the mysteries of her lines.
A cheerful obedient girl lurks therein,
Her nectar sucked and her carcass declined.
The fragile skeleton appears over her blotted dead skin.
She feels no pain, no sun, no cold, and no
Hunger or knows not to express them.
Millions walk past overlooking her,
Some swarming living garbage on the roadside.
Her shabby potali kept close to her heart and
a mad dog stoned dead beside.
Only the dog knew what she treasures
in the filthy sack that she often checks.
“What she keeps talking to her treasured sack?”
“Mad is mad for every isolated reason,
for every inexplicable reason.”
She could not trust her hands, her own hands,
For these were the hands that rocked the cradle, tied
the sacred thread and watered the family garden.
She could not believe that these are the abandoned hands
of a ‘madwoman’.