Stateless in the City

Stateless in the City

They ask him his name,

Where he comes from,

Why he ambles around

In the city, without purpose?

He asks the puissant river,

Why did she wash his home away,

His land, his identity,

The very sign of his roots?

He fears not the river anymore,

He bewails not his loss of land,

He hopes to redeem his fields;

But when he wriggles into the city,

He cringes to face the vigilantes’ grill.

Loss of lands has made him homeless,

He grapples with fate to find his papers,

Loss of land swipes his face,

Loss of language doesn’t manumit,

Because his tongue still quivers

To answer probing eyes,

On the streets of the big city.

The river pillaged his land,

Lands lost made him rummage

Through big cities for food,

But civilities in the city,

Made him an alien,

A stateless in his own realm.

………..................

Baharul Islam

Guwahati

12 July 2011

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Note: The poem is about an internally displaced person from the riverbank areas of Assam state in India. He comes to a big city in search of work/food after he lost his land in erosion of Brahmaputra river. But, in the city he is suspected to a "Bangladeshi" - a migrant or worse an illegal intruder into India. An official report of the State Water Resource Department states 3,88,476 hectares of land was lost to river erosion between 1954 and 2002 in Assam, at an annual rate of 8,000 hectares.This has meant the displacement of 90,700 families living in 2,534 villages.