Tears and black flowers

 

They emerge from the prodigality of entanglements, like mushroom sprouts from the savage and fertile humus in the human soul. Destiny chuckles with perfidious pleasure as it pushes them onto the stage—faceless, no defined character role, just fuddle-muddle-headed lousy slow-creepers among the smart stampede of noticeable boots. Most of them are pushed by abhorrent native circumstances. And they somehow float into relatively better parts, their existence as trivial as slut, scum and scamp. They move tactlessly, all of them bearing the marks of ravaging thunderbolts back home—civil wars, genocide, hunger, poverty, natural calamity, systematic targeting and the likes. All of them sharing the same pool of ineffaceable memories of pain and suffering. Destiny holds them tight. They are mere harnessed horses pulling at the traces and pathetically biting at the bits as if to douse their hunger with it only.

They come from different regions and religions but look the same—poor scum of the society. Snatchily squelching in the survival sludge, they chatter in various unknown dialects. But it’s the same language, the same script of poverty. It’s the same sobbing choir. They might be Rohingyas, Bangladeshis, Nepalese or anyone from the poorest parts of India. They share their very own unique nationality of disadvantages, oppression and exploitation. They simply barge in to survive, to stay alive. They aren’t welcome but they smartly swim in the stench of sewage drains, rapaciously picking up the discards like these are tasty, pickled raw vegetable slices. They pick up and eat and accept anything at which even the poorest local won’t even look. They do this so that they are seen to survive without giving competition to anyone. They pick up what even the native rag pickers won’t touch.

They know that capacious ears get pricked up to catch their presence. They stoop so low that no one feels slighted by their presence. Their glum disposition would enable you to see through them like you would through a pig. Thoroughly gnawed and devoured, they scamper stealthily like big rats in the sewage lines. Then sometimes malice and temptation catches a few of them, inflicting a cold-blooded derangement to the logical part—a small section where some sense still exists despite such horrible emotional trauma—in their poverty-knotted brain. In chocking resentment, depressed and downcast, the horribly miserable being slays someone’s good fate. Some crime is committed.