Prisoner

They say it travels like a prisoner
and they say it must travel like a prisoner.
On new years eve, that incessant knocking on the door, that we were told to ignore.
On 15 August, those insolent cries that
we were taught to overpower with the sound of the fireworks,
saffron, green and white.
Voices that a radio silences once every month, an hour or so.

Last night musing on the dinner table,
scanning grains of rice on my glass plate,
I found them.

I found a story etched into that one tiny grain of rice, and another story in the next and another .
In sewage holes on broken roads
On trees which had knotted ropes hanging on them,
In the shutters of the dams we visited,
On the bars of the prison where my uncle worked,
On the flowers that the nameless boy sold on the road, when signals shined red,
On the barbed wires at the border, telecasted on the TV,
On the giant walls of our gated community,
shut for a class,
On the wells that they covered,
for fear of touch,
On the bangles of prostitutes, I have never seen,
On streets that I was asked not to go unaccompanied when darkness falls,
I found them.

Freedom. That one word that our memory is tired of being fed and recollected
The paradoxical prisoner they allow the privilege of movement,
yet keep caged,
so that knowledge and rage
never comes as a combination
and revolution
features last in our lexicons.