Mr. Mishra cannot shit

without his morning newspaper

& until all the articles are read 

& rated, a good big shit remains 

awaited, and today's a particular 

problem - Mr. Mishra's travelling 

on a train and is constipated. He 

is cursing spicy food and all the 

headlines, as a small, stony pellet

drops slowly - the pain is unholy! -

first at the New Delhi railway station, 

& despite his cursing & frustration 

the next one takes all the way till 

Tilak Bridge (the news gets no better,

just columnists' idle chatter) till one 

last long, painful pebble comes out 

of him at Anand Vihar and drops 

down on the train tracks, and Mr. 

Mishra almost shouts, as the pain 

wracks him, he promises his cook, 

his work, his world some serious 

avenging, reading the last headline: 

"In reply to the petitioner's PIL, the 

Indian railways ministry denies the 

presence of manual scavenging."

Devdungri, Rajasthan

Even the night refuses to completely darken
here, as the moon keeps turning each stone

silver beneath our feet; you can play foot-
-ball at night and know exactly where the

goal is. She wrote in that email that Mohan ji
was somehow always hopeful, despite the odds,

"something will turn up," and even as I read it
typed, I knew her emphasis was on 'will;' that

night the moon was our bonfire and memories of
all their years, of making flowers grow out of stone,

were now stories, silvered by age, of those who were
gone, but, they said, those who have come back to us

like colour in flowers, they still see us through these
years, they come to us in songs, like ants, they are in

the small, like elephants, they are big, Kabir sang "Tu
hathi mein hathi ban baitho, cheeti mein hai chhoto tu,"

an' each year as they hold up the silver mirror to those
who're sun-burnt with power, keeping account for a

world that is both concrete and air - here, possible,
and yet, always beyond, "there" - the goal, silver-lit,

remains, despite the night, with us, and the moon still
burns white, and there are always in Devdungri, Gods

lying visible-invisible in the darkest hills of the night.

Maruti Swift

It takes a 1248cc diesel engine,
4 cylinders,
16 valves,
a max. torque of 190 newton meters 
@ 2000 revolutions every fuckin' minute,

it takes rack & pinion steering
& drum brakes & disc brakes
& steel tyres,

it takes one thousand five hundred kilos of metal
moving, always moving 
in 48 second loops on the assembly-line,

painted & cut & bolted & fed
by workers.

It
takes
workers

on 9 hour shifts,
one 30min lunch break,
and two 7 minute tea-cum-toilet breaks
(those two-seconds-late-&-pay-cut-breaks)

it takes "if my leg itched, I do not even
have time to scratch it,"

it takes waiting
for one's own fingers
 
it takes white-hot "discipline" cut by teeth,
welded by metal to townships
with smoke-grey evenings

it takes 13 days of occupation,
months of sit-ins, lock-outs, it takes 147 workers
arrested on manufactured evidence,

to make one of these.



(thanks to Anumeha Yadav, Satish Dalal and Imaan Khan)

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tr. from James Oppenheim's "Bread and Roses" (1911), inspired by Rose Schneiderman's slogan "The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too"

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