From Bihar to Bengal

There is a Great Barrier Reef

From Bengal to Bihar there is none

Perchance you traveled East

You’d feel it

Bengalis traveling West deny it.

There is no doubt that it is not about poverty –

The misery on both sides hangs over towns

Like lung-constricting smog.

The difference is about the moon:

In Kolkata, the poor have an insatiable desire to eat it.

There are most definitely pieces missing.

There is no doubt that it is not about sound –

The music and the ragas waft freely through the air

The difference is in Bengal –

There is no combination of notes

That Tagore had not already composed into a song

In Kolkata everyone feels they own all words,

And for all songs all sounds somehow India owes them.

It is not about rectitude

Or the Grand Restraint

The rectitude of the class struggle

And the Marxism of governance

are serious but humour bursts the membrane

And no congestion, hardship and even

An extra 1 000 cars a day confound it

The other day a bio scientist

Claimed that he had found it

The genetic coding, the real formula of –

The untouchable gene

And it is shared by all the sample of harijans

Whose blood was taken and then thrown

What is the fuss?

It was all known before in the Vedas

Like relativity and the splitting of the atom