All day I clean rice, I clean daal, fold up the new and futile mosquito net. If I touch coal dust, my fingers shiver, that hide of mine that’s never learned the warmth of fire. After every night, every morning is the same: each human being eats-drinks-brushes his teeth, just like a human being; I don’t have any illusions. To change the word “illusion” to “attachment” would be a more appropriate way to clarify some of the bold and necessary guilt feelings. Nowadays, therefore, guilt feelings play all through my cold fingers. If you tapped the dead cells of my ten nails, the sound would be “guilt,” “guilt feelings.” Keeping an eye on all this, I sit hunched in a corner all day. All day I clean rice, I clean daal, I fold up the new and futile mosquito net.
*
Delight coated with dust and waterdrops from the market gradually gathers here. Like a kindergarten girl, I squat on my haunches with my chin in my hands, in naive wonder. I watch genuinely new information crawl up the dead spinach. Through the window, the duck pond floods with hidden water; at dawn in the last month of summer, clouds come down on every natural commodity. I touch the round tray full of small compartments; the entire harvest of spices today reveals much about our heritage. There’s no illusion, but I feel an unexpected attachment. I go on sitting in this magnificence; from the green-vegetable basket I can feel the footsteps of people, their soft or loud voices, dust from the market, waterdrops
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