Stench on our Skin

Image source: http://www.hindustantimes.com/photos/india/the-stinking-heaps-of-ghazipur-landfill-site/photo-EPOZjmghYwaqgrbKznFmSI.html

Men, often a few young boys,

Women, rare yet likely,

Huddled for a conversation

Like we do on a mound

Green grass covered

In the park.

But these men, boys, women

Are on a huge heap

Of stench emanating garbage.

Each morning, on trucks, lorries

Door to door

Apartment to apartment

Restaurant to restaurant

Picking up filth

Vomit-inducing rubbish

With bare hands

Without masks or gumboots

Displaying a normalcy

That isn’t.

Those big blue bins

With leftover food

Or used sanitary pads

With soiled diapers, or wet hair

Or when color codes we brazenly disregard

And throw that syringe, a razor

They touch these, it pierces them

But we play the ignoring game well

Pretending well

The non-existence of these humans.

Questions of caste

Of their subsistence

Unanswered yet known

Are relegated to the hind

Where cemented by conditioning

They pass along generations

And breed kids oblivious to

The strife of these men, boys and women.

The forms that resemble us

In cloak of flesh and bones

But on their skin is smeared

That invisible stench

Which no soap can wipe

And a part of the soul

Amidst it all is lost

And part of the mind

Numbed by cheap alcohol

Or that thinner

Caring no more to think

Rag-pickers, garbage collectors, koodawala

And all the hues in between

Part-dead, part-living

Cleaning our filth

Thought of, treated & thrashed as filth

These men, boys, women

Are on a huge heap

Of stench emanating garbage

Huddled for a conversation

Like we do on a mound

Green grass covered

In the park.