The old rickshaw uncle, whose life was bound to three wheels, who used to buy a plate of rice with his sweat— he has been doubled over with hunger for days now, and I have kept no count.
The uncle who mended shoes each day, enduring hunger's whip-lashes—his stove no longer holds a pot, and for how many days has he been swallowing hunger mixed with his tears, I never cared to know that number.
At that three-way crossing, sitting in a corner, face veiled in her sari, the old aunt who used to beg—into her outstretched hands not two coins have fallen for how many days now, I haven't had the time to ask.
Tearing himself against life's barbed wire of want, that ragpicker boy trapped at hunger's border— how many inches has his belly skin sunk inward, I felt no need to inquire.
With meager earnings from selling betel and cigarettes, the old uncle who used to return home after dusk with two handfuls of rice— for how long has his family gone without even dry rice with salt and chili, I could never learn that span.
Kicked around by want, that blue fairy drifting on the streets who sold her body for two or three hundred rupees to feed her family— how many of that fairy's bones have wasted away in this lockdown, I never wanted to find out.
Shouldering life's burden, walking mile after mile, the peddler who used to hawk his way through living— through his broken cheek, how many more teeth have emerged, I never went to witness that sight.
Along the parallel railway tracks, on life's unparallel path, the homeless porter who has lost his way—in his body's thin skin folds how much more hunger, thirst, pain accumulated during this stay-at-home time, I felt no need to sense it.
The ten-year-old child who killed himself, tormented by hunger's fire— by the measure of hunger in his skeletal, lifeless body, exactly how many earth-weights of suffering can be measured, I never tried to bear that burden.
Those big babus who, having looted the rice from all these hungry faces, covering their faces with courtesy's handkerchief, yawning, turn on the room's AC and stretch their full bellies onto soft beds— how many thousands of deaths' guilt lies pressed upon their sinful shoulders, none of us have kept that account.
Our wall-hung clocks have only hands, time itself is gone. Our planet has demographics' mouth-filling statistics, only humans are missing.
We have no time to inquire after people. None of us has the courage to touch the sorrow of the sorrowful. Those being crushed under our busyness— our clocks cannot hold the time it takes to apply a morsel of dry bread as salve to their festering wounds.
Alas, life! Alas, hunger! Alas, time!