By: Kousik Adhikari

With that knitted scarf
In your hand, you seemed a pakka sahari babu,
You sometime call,
‘Dukhia, bring me a cup of tea’,
I know, you like the raw with bits of ginger,
Churned those delicate taste out,
Like the fights of cocks
And oozing out of blood, swift and sudden and terrible.

I can bring you a cup of tea,
I can make you ornaments of flowers
If you need, and when the charcoal night
Climbs the hill, distant forests,
Hazy lantern light shafts my hut,
Smoky smell of mahua, rippling fantasies,
Reeling, rippling,
I sometime call myself,
‘Dukhia, bring me a cup of tea’.

Note: Mahua is a kind of country liquor especially used by the tribes like Santhals, Mundas etc.