Monoranjan Thakur
Amrita Sher-Gil, ‘Hungarian Village Church’ / Lifestalker
My morning is faster than the seven horses of the chariot Sun,
But only my newspaper hawker brings the day’s excitement and fun!
Waiting for whom eagerly at the front door,
As the country roads bend in the far.
Do you know my fragile looking brother?
You are the reason, my dear happy newspaper hawker!
You bring loads of news on love and hate, war and peace
Sometimes your twelve pages are like the Umkhra River’s morning breeze!
Sometimes Mark Twain peeps through the pages with a smile and tells me
“If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed.
If you read the newspaper, you’re mis-informed.”
Sometimes Gwendolyn Brooks of Mecca peeps and speaks
Through the blurred pages of tears,
“One reason that cats are happier than people is that they have no newspapers.”
“Newspapers are the Bibles of worldlings.
How diligently they read them!
Here they find their law and profits,
their judges and chronicles,
their epistles and revelations.”
says my preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon!
But nobody carried your death’s news My Friend,
my friend of those early twilights!
You were crushed to death with your Raleigh Bicycle
By the madding crowd of the rich!
Your lonely child and wife cry silently in the faroff village
Without a single grain to eat.
The truth is, they will grieve forever.
they will not ‘get over’ the loss of you –
they will learn to live with it,
they will heal and they will rebuild
around the loss they have suffered –
they will be whole again,
but they will never be the same.
Your death is not simply the death of my newspaper hawker
Death leaves heartache difficult to heal,
You have left sweet memories no one can steal!
Nongrim Hills, Shillong
