“Old Children”

Creators of Justice Award 2020 | Third Prize: Poetry

Anju Kanwar is the author of The Sound of Silence (nominated for the Independent Scholar’s Award of the Modern Language Association) and the Introduction to D.H. Lawrence’s novel, The Lost Girl. She received the Arnold B. Fox writing award (special reference) and the 2018 Loquat Literary Prize (third place) in poetry. Website: https://riseglobalinitiative.org/anju-kanwar.

This is cactus land.

─ T. S. Eliot, “Hollow Men”

“I would love to talk to you about this beautiful world of ours …”

─ Jawaharlal Nehru, “Letter to Children”

I

We are the old children

We are the forgotten children

Leaning each on each

Underneath the blazing sky

In the blistering summer heat, or

At the foot of the jamun tree

In the busy city street.

Our desperate eyes, when

We look at you

To look at us,

Are like the green-black film 

Upon stagnant pools, or

The tadpoles that swim just beneath,

Before they withdraw their tails and sprout feet.

Our rasping whispers, when

We scream together to be heard,

Are like the crunch of dry leaves

Under feet

In high summer, or

The crawling of cockroaches 

Across mud floors

In shanty colonies.

Eyes without vision

Voices without sound

Walk by,

Bodies without soul

Souls in commotion

Wearing masks that break in deadly grin; 

Hard to see

New moon blossoming.

II

I am a little house boy

Eleven years old

My mother, father sold me

Into slavery

To feed the rest of the family

To the brown sahib

Whose cars I clean and shoes I polish

And his modern mrs.

Who works me in the kitchen, from 

Break of day to long after her children have been put to sweet sleep.

I am a novice prostitute

Ten years old

My mother made me  

In her image

Then put me to work

With a stranger, night after night.

Noisily chewing betel-nut leaf, she says hardily, 

“It’s just a job,

And has fed generations

Of our family.”

I am a little beggar boy

Seven years old

My parents lost me at the railway station

Baba found me

He takes care of us children all

And we take care of him; we are family.

“No sacrifice is too great to make for family,” he said 

The day he cut my right leg just below the knee.

But the little six-year old girl with no arms, who sleeps on the barren earth behind my back,

Cried that night for me.

I am a little factory girl

Nine years old

My father lost his job, so my mother brought me to her

Work. Out of kindness,

The Head took me into a dim back room and 

Gave me my first sewing machine. 

For 13 hours a day, 

Chained lightly to the floor, I

Now make clothes for happy ladies and gents

In foreign countries. 

We are the old children

We are the young children

Forgotten

Like dead dreams.

III

This is a land of many gods

Idols for each day of the week

This is the land of milk and honey

Where the gods have walked the streets.

Here we greet strangers and guests with

Welcome, as gods come home to meet.

They have not so greeted me.

One wall

After another,

I feel my heart beat

Upon the soles of my feet,

I weary of deceit and 

Broken prayers, and

Look to get past the present.

But will it still be so:

The vacant eyes

The voices like winter ice 

For evermore,

On the other side? 

I 

Do not know.

Let me then 

Return to womb, or be 

A tadpole, that frog

Who dreams the dream of kissed

And Princess Charming

Waiting for me.

IV

One day, as the crows

Caw from wire lines and sparrows quiet into

Cosy nooks in walls, sunligh

Will crack and splinter like shell firing, or

Some newborn

Slicing meaning with its tongue.

One day, 

God shall surely look

Upon our clipped hearts,

Scored by wounds picked 

By teeth, and leaking

Like a sieve.

One day, you shall surely

See me lining Nigambodh ghat, late at

Noon, drinking fumes and eating hot air. My

Whole life would fit nicely atop that lazy cloud

Slow moving over the hungry Yamuna night. Dammed, unseen

Old children wait here to unbloom.