In Celebration of Childhood

 In Chennai, January is like the white foam on the Pongal pot, February, the vividness of azure. March comes stained with pink watermelon flesh followed by blazing yellow months of Gulmohar blossoms, mangoes and many sunshine and Dog Star days. Then, there are the obscure medley months of heat and shower before November arrives clothed in grey.

November Diwalis are rarely dry in Chennai. Yet it takes more than a couple of dank evenings to douse the sparkler of a festive spirit out of the Chennaiite, I realise, driving through the restless T.Nagar roads. Oh the annual struggle and wriggle in and out of the several ‘storied’ Saravana’s and Pothy’s fulfilled with the joy of possessing a wallet’s worth of vanity...life is good, crazily though!

A little beyond the cloying glitter of firework shops and sweet stalls, I halt at the red lights, when he appears from nowhere, hastily knocking at my car window, with a flute on his lips, playing a rustically corrupted version of a Bollywood number. I will call him Krishna, my urban Indian street child, thin, hungry and dishevelled, bearing resemblance to the beloved Child God only in the darkness of his little form and the flute he plays. He moves on...

Somewhere in the narrow streets of Sivakasi, it is Krishna again slogging in a cramped room reeking of phosphorous and glue. His deft little fingers magically rolling out crackers and fireworks that warns in mocking irony, against the dangers of unassisted use by children. The child worker whose denied childhood seems too trivial a reason to affect the grandeur of celebration of good over evil, year after year.

Krishna, the child labourer who launches firework rockets that will deceptively surge heavenward only to plunge, Krishna, the impoverished Indian child at the signal selling happy books he can never read and heart shaped balloons to a loveless world.

His face smeared with the grime of the city, he prophetically reveals the truths of his world as he toils through the festival of lights that falls on the 13^th of November and a day dedicated to the child that falls on the 14^th. Strangely reminiscent of when his cherubic namesake the little Lord Krishna revealed the mystique of the cosmos the day he playfully consumed the soil of Gokul.

This poem is for you, child that knocked at my car window and my conscience. We owe you an answer.

Twilight

When dusk begins its drowsy descent

Clothed in surreal hues

A million lamps startle awake

This city, so worn, sleep shorn

There clad in incongruous rags,

A tattered school uniform

He wanders in that joyless twilight

Irony in the eye of that traffic storm

Strings of jasmine around his tiny wrist

And eager balloons, a hearty bunch,

He leaps ahead as the signal glows red

Beckoning blind car windows for rare mercy-little wretch

Now destiny blinks green in life’s random game.

He recedes to the wings in brief submission

To watch a while the world dazzle past

Light streaked mazes –night’s frenzied vision

Bound by the eccentric whims of a pole,

He flits in and out of a ceaseless chase

Measuring his worth in a fistful of coins

Ignorant of childhood lost to toil ridden haze

Soon weary darkness drags through its last lap

And life lulls a languorous while

Asleep between the shadows of fatigue and fate

His dreams surface in a half smile

Fragmented flashes of reclaimed innocence?

Or a strange slide show of denied deliverance?

Of gingerbread houses or an enchanted castle

Or just the elusive warmth of a hearth to nestle.

                                                                Asha Mathew