The Walkers of 2020
by Anurag Chauhan
I’m one of them, the mob that lives beneath the gaze.
Suddenly conspicuous, we got on many a nerve this summer.
We the tenacious cockroaches, totally beaten this time,
chose to walk.
Nobody could say we didn’t earn that:
a walk it was, and no walk was too long this time for us.
We walked; we halted; we were driven away; and we walked again.
I saw the able-bodied die; I saw the tenderest suffer.
I saw fear at every step—not in those who walked
but in others: the fear of what they thought we had.
We’d lost our minds; could think of distance alone,
not of what others had given us.
We walked hungry, baton-beaten, tired, or dying.
Cruel contractors, dry-eyed landlords, and the law—
we could take in our stride but suddenly we’d donned death.
The cities were hostile; the villages, unwelcoming.
But they didn’t sting so much as those clicking photos
as we queued for food we hadn’t earned but needed.
I heard some bickered; I heard some planned.
They simply didn’t think we belonged.
Infected words, unkind eyes, faces turned the other way;
a people by people betrayed in every which way.
It was a long walk home, and many found rest;
I was lucky but I don’t know if that was the best.
I’ll go there again next year and see how they face me—
how I’m looked at—and then, bury myself again under debris.
—Edited by Piyush Mathur—
A Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence (2011-2012), Anurag Chauhan is Assistant Professor of English at the Guru Ghasidas Vishwavidyalaya, Bilaspur, Chhattisgarh. You may contact him by clicking on his name and leaving a message for him.