exercises in minimalism

last week –
furloughed by the crisis, this immigrant learnt austerity:
took aim at adverbs, took them out
along with unnecessary pronouns;
sauntered rather than walked slowly,

then deeming most words disposable,
declared there would be neither
wandering aimlessly nor sauntering. only
having arrived.

wrote on a Moleskine in the study:
words are black against white, definite as
the balance sheet of an assembly line,
each part as useful as a rupee earned or
a rupee lost.

took pen to printed manuscript and slashed away,
placing marginal words where they belonged, in the margins,
restoring only that which was essential,
discarding the rest.
all that’s superfluous can be forgotten,
expression is economy.

last week –

a twelve-year-old girl died an hour away from her tribal home in Chhattisgarh, after she'd had to walk over a hundred kilometers to get back from the chili farm on which she’d worked before the coronavirus crisis had rendered her – a child – unemployed, homeless, and without viable transportation.

Madkam died of exhaustion after having completed ninety percent of a journey she should have never had to make.