The wife’s red spots have remained red since they were last mentioned but the wife is now swife. Swife is an older version of wife whose red spots have matured to turn senior citizens. The mischievous anti-bodies responsible for their outbreak are now more calculated in their approach.They appear entirely impervious to our assaults by way of immunoglobulin therapy.
A mere congress is grass in the lakeside and harbors enemies. Or a papaya pollen that comes floating on the street air.
Despair is glossed over. A witch doctor might help. A doctor who could shake the ghosts out of women. At the village there is one near the railway line.He would send forth tiny brown pellets down your throat like bullets across the vast expanse of your stomach. He would look down his eyes on your epidermis and determine the bullets . He would speak nothing and could say nothing. When he is not sending down bullets of brown stuff down your throat he is shaking women off their ghosts.
We waited outside iron cages. There were women squatting in the cages waiting for their turn. They had daughters who had carried ghosts in their bodies. A sprig of neem leaves is waved to keep the ghost at bay. Ghosts are scared of the allpowerful words of the witch doctor. The daughters then shook like trees in the windstorm.
Luckily the swife carried no ghosts in her. The red spots are not result of any ghostly actions.
The village doctor
The man with a red dot looks down his eyes
Marginally to below the epidermis of a skin
The subterfuge where stomach humors show.
The Hakim is monkey man of a myth’s fame
Making men swallow brown pellets for quick
Cures for stomach’s skin and mind maladies
That make women shake like full-blown trees
Caught in a windstorm, their hair disheveled.
A middleman helps us wade crowds of men.
Men wait outside to enter unreal iron cages
Anterooms for an entry to the medicine man.
The man would then bend his ears sideways
To muttered tales about stomachs and devils
And scrawl prescriptions in quick round letters
That wriggled like earthworms in a new furrow.
The middleman now takes us to growing rice,
Proud to show his rice dominions till sky-high.
We see more men coming for women’s ghosts .
A poet's diary 