SUKAMAA

She passed away. Suka-maa

Suka’s mother. Suka’s, Sakunta’s,

Shakuntala’s mother.

She was the mother earth,

the virtual mother of us six sisters.

In our love, perhaps she couldn’t love enough her

Suka, Shaila and Koili, her own daughters.

One day, we flew the nest

making her flounder

 and forever brood.

Today, Sukamaa

(had she any other name? ) died.

When a poor taps my car window

at the  red lights of Connaught Place

I have a shudder of relief that

I am not on the opposite side.

The leitmotif of time -- has it

made me such esoteric?

Then who reminds me time and again

of Sukamaa, our childhood

domestic-help, our foster-mother,

the rural poor tribal

the Kondh woman

unschooled, deprived, subjugated

subaltern

one among the crores

that constitute real India?

Sukamaa, the  real homemaker

in our suburban household,

she would fight with our

school-teacher-disciplinarian-mother

for being strict with us, would

not mind if my younger sisters

relieved themselves on her lap.

Shy about the criss-cross tattoos

on her rather pretty face (which,

her husband had etched to

make her  less-beautiful, thus, less-desirable!)

she would swear about tales from

her youth, when many a men

were engrossed to have

just a glance of her!

We were the foil set against her

to depict her ugliness

her tattooed face.

We felt so purified after

we had disbursed our dirt on her.

We felt so pretty when

 we hoisted straight  across her ugliness.

Her ease adorned her.

Her culpability consecrated us.

Her feebleness made us glimmer with health

her inelegance made us

reason, we had wisdom.

Her inarticulateness made us trust

we were persuasive.

Her poverty kept us lavish.

We sharpened our personality on her,

propelled our charms

with her fragility.

And nodded in the imaginary world

of our power.

Today

we are sophisticated, articulate.

We confront life with ease

like we did for years

without knowing that it was she

in her ugly, sordid, squalid

haunt, who prayed for us

day and night.

Today we pretend

with decent planning for intelligence.

Reschedule deceptions

and call them a point.

We are coping with the tough

business called life, facing the

predicament of survival

tearing apart the tie

between her and us.

Villages have given way to cities

we have moved

from innocence to experience.

Her story is an  incredible mosaic

about a generation, our generation

of the metropolis, the NRIs--

embarrassed of  Sukamaa’s poverty amid

our chaotic urbanization.

Forgetting,

Sukamaa had created that symphony

of  time and place us.

Eating a proper meal was an indulgence

not meant for her, she sensed.

Interposed

between two worlds – her poor

thatched house and our luxurious

apartment – contradicting,

empathizing, appalling, opposing each other.

Her dedication had no master plan

her dream was only to watch

us rising stars in

a galaxy where the privileged

disdain the sprawling slum.

Sukamaa’s  silent death inquests. 

Would human goodness

silently triumph someday?

Would we ever get over the fascination

to our  feigning melancholy and

be like her?

Isn’t it the conscientiousness of

an unwitting bystander like me

to tell her untold tale amid

all these sagas of quick-fix

T.V channels on yoga, beauty care,

weight loss and wealth-gain?

Isn’t it my moral obligation

to  an unmindful posterity

to tell Sukamaa’s  slum-dog tale?

---

Prof. Nandini Sahu, Vice Chancellor, Hindi University, West Bengal,India, Amazon’s Best-selling Author, Professor of English and Former Director, School of Foreign Languages, IGNOU, New Delhi, is an established Indian English poet, creative writer and folklorist. She is the author/editor of twenty-three books. Apart from being a double Gold-Medalist during her Graduation and Post-Graduation, Sahu is the recipient of Gold Medal from the Hon’ble Vice President of India for her contribution to English Studies, the Michael Madhusudan Academy Award-2024, Lifetime Achievement Award-2024, Tagore Samman-2025 and Honorary-Fellowship-2025 by International Academy of Ethics, India. Her research interests cover New Literatures, Critical Theory, Folklore and Culture Studies, Distance Education Theory, Hindu Studies, Indian Knowledge Systems, Comparative World Literatures, Children’s Literature and  American Literature.