The town is a nasty wind,
the suburbs, nauseating warmth waves,
and the streets, breath wheezed out of fevered lungs.

Individuals swarm like microbes.

Their quantity
calculated
by the variety of lifeless 
in riots, earthquakes, bomb blasts.

Garments hanging within the yard—
are they garments?
They’re flapping people left to dry.

The lone sandal severed from its pair, 
damaged bicycles, fallen disfigured tiffin bins, 
newspapers quivering on the footpath:
they’re all people.

Additionally,
sobs slipping round within the wind for phrases, 
phrases lower all the way down to silence, 
silent stars deferring their fall
hanging stubbornly within the darkened sky—

If we have been to rely them in a census,
there could be too many
of those abstractions
but to be thought-about people.

If 1000’s perish, 1000’s extra might be born.
In on a regular basis language,
we learn this as a beacon of hope.

However, like I mentioned,
the town is a nasty wind that blows no person good.
And I haven’t even talked about water,
turbid and scarce

and the way heads are crushed 
on the municipal faucet for a bucketful,

how this water vaporises into the sky 
to turn into wind, good or dangerous,

how this wind nonetheless, 
stubbornly, after centuries,
blows day after day.

Translation from the Hindi