Hunger -- Jayanth Mahapatra

 Hunger – Jayanth Mahapatra

 

It was hard to believe the flesh was heavy on my back.

The fisherman said: will you have her, carelessly,

trailing his nets and nerves, as though his words

sanctified the purpose with which he faced himself.

I saw his white bone thrash his eyes.

 

I followed him across the sprawling sands,

my mind thumping in the flesh’s sling.

Hope lay perhaps in burning the house I lived in.

Silence gripped my sleeves; his body clawed 

at the froth his old nets had dragged up from the seas.

 

In the flickering dark his lean-to opened like a wound.

The wind was I, and the days and nights before.

Palm fronds scratched my skin. Inside the shack

an oil lamp splayed the hours bunched to those walls.

Over and over the sticky soot crossed the space of my mind.

 

I heard him say: my daughter, she’s just turned fifteen…..

Feel her. I’ll be back soon, your bus leaves at nine.

The sky fell on me, and a father’s exhausted wile.

Long and lean, her years were cold as rubber.

She opened her wormy legs wide. I felt the hunger there,

The other one, the fish slithering, turning inside.

 

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 Comments.

Jayanth Mahapatra’s poem “Hunger” is one of the best poems which depicts the true picture of poverty that prevails evidently everywhere in India even after seventy years of Independence. At the surface level ‘hunger’ is utter shortage of food in poor communities that leads to gross violation of values and morals that have been set by privileged people.  Jayanth Mahapatra’s poem ‘Hunger’ deals with two kinds of hunger, one is ‘hunger for food’ and another is ‘hunger for sexual gratification’.  

 

The quest for fulfilment of fisherman’s hunger for food leads to pimp his own daughter with gross violation of morals and traditional values to a person who is hunger for sexual desire. The values have no place in such an utterly degraded human plight. The father’s pimping of his own daughter is a condemnation not of the father but of the society where such tragedy takes place. The title of the poem “Hunger” has relevance to the existing predicament of the poverty in the society. When the agony and the suffering become intolerable to a weak spirited person such person tends to surrender to inhumanity. It could have happened on the poverty-ridden sands of any beach in India.

 

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