Farmer's Son
FARMER’S SON
There’s the sky, look at it
Giggling with the high-mast light
Twinkling not with the stars, but with rays of illumination
Coming from the back windows of a thirty storey mansion,
There stands in the balcony, like a lonely school boy
The subdued farmer’s son.
Head held high, eyes gazing the sky
Staring intently at its vastness,
Admiring the stretch to the far off remote village
Where dull dusky dark and remorseful it seems
There, with the rest of his family, his father lives.
Skinny face as if a marathon runner
Two packs ab and a pair of distinct ribs
Flaunting like the horns of a merino sheep,
His father could challenge the best of the fatless torsos
Daily diet comprising three hundred gram rice and a black tea sip.
The farmer’s son when in college
After a long long wait
As if in the queues of a government ration shop
Could able to get a pair of new dresses,
Witnessing half-barter
With the brother of a cloth merchant
His father sold paddy two full sacks.
There was more harvest that time
Paddy fetched a good amount though not much more
Four sacks exchanged for a second hand bicycle
Two for buying household needs in the village fair,
Another three for buying good food
Two medicines one for guests
And five sacks kept aside
For the marriage of his grown-up sister.
Now than the previous, the yield is much more
With hybrid seeds and costly fertilizer
Fifty per cent of the harvest just flows down like water
And from the left over,
One third is being engulfed as a lion’s share
By rupees two a kilo rice-empowered
Nearly extinct sophisticated labour.
All the efforts to keep his early esteem
Went in vain as the son of the farmer
Had no money in pocket for labour payment
Migrated to the city as an unskilled worker,
Adding to the construction of a thirty storey apartment
With two hundred and fifty a meagre
He works each day for twelve odd hour.
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