a boy in a delhi refugee camp
Photo: Margaret Bourke-White
‘you survived: / a stranger among ancestors, / born on the wrong side of a new / imaginary line’
you have my eyes, large and oval.
you strain away from the camera,
charred by the ashes of the past,
staring rapturously at nothing.
you have my nose, wide and crooked,
you are suffocating on the
young country’s old air. you survived:
a stranger among ancestors,
born on the wrong side of a new
imaginary line, riding
trains with fifteen million strangers—
ancestors. you sit with bare feet
under your folded legs, hands pressed
against your head, you search for home.
and if you could look back through that
lens to the other side across
time, would you still stare
at nothing?
that camp is now a capital
of my independent nation
with highways and underpasses
and bullet trains.
***
Karan Madhok is a writer, journalist, and editor of The Chakkar, whose fiction, translation, and poetry have appeared in The Literary Review, The Lantern Review, F(r)iction, and more. He is the founder of the Indian basketball blog Hoopistani and His sports journalism has been published for NBA India, SLAM Magazine, Firstpost, Scroll, and more. A graduate of the American University’s MFA programme, Karan is currently working on his first novel. Twitter: @karanmadhok1
