Jadugora

By Prerna Munshi

Do not mistake me 

for these emaciated limbs

or for my sisters and brothers

with scoliosis. 

or for my fathers and mothers

with radioactive lungs.

I am not the one-eyed child of Jadugora

I am here to tell you a story of a brittle courage.

Stories of elephants that treaded this earth once

 and of their pensive ears that darted 

like turgid sails

at the bellowing mills.

The land bears their ghosts.

This living is all a result of the brittle courage

 and the fortified silence,

Me 

My sisters and brothers

My fathers and mothers 

Collectively incubated.

My paddy fields

grow isotopes of

 devastating hopes. 

My fathers wear artilleries

of obliteration

which my mothers iron crisp.

The school playgrounds play with a cryptic element. 

My genes have been experimenting for generations

Each decade a tad more intense, 

these in-house war laboratories.

Go write in your records

In blighted ink

About the number of days you heard me cry.

About the miles my fathers dug into the earth 

to only come out as abandoned cemeteries

Record the number of years I have lived on my own land

In exile.

As I fight between facts and fabric,

scraping the Palaeolithic walls of my memory, 

to discover the murals of my Santhal antiquity, 

I hope you're still recording

that I do not need morsels of your sympathy. 

Or your microphones of distended apathy.

I am not angry. 

Not anymore.

This is the umpteenth time

my beautiful gullible land 

eviscerates me in a memorandum of ignorance.

My land, their ordnance factory

promising calendula fields.

While all the hyacinths on my water buffaloes shrivel to fatal atoms.

My land, checkmated for the thousandth time.

My land, my mine laden land 

Amidst these tranquil ranges of Dalma

where children are fed with shrapnel.

Shrapnel with half-lives of your entire race.

By Prerna Munshi