To Market... In The Times Of Recession Poem by AtreyaSarma Uppaluri

[Viewpoint of an Indian homemaker reeling under the price-spiral]

Earlier going to the vegetable market was unpleasant
Hardy, tiresome, for I had to be a heaving weightlifter.
Now, a welcome change, it’s now a featherweight affair.
Earlier I used to hold my wallet in one hand
And carry in the other an eighteen by fifteen by twelve
Plastic lined jute bag with stick handles.

After it was all over
I had to heavily plod back home
Shifting the brimming bag
In my right and left hands
Halting every few yards
And in the process
So many calories burnt.

Oh, now it’s as if flying in the air
Just like waltzing on a marble track.
I go to market just with my wallet
With its four pouches.
The cash lies in the smallest one.

I buy fifty grams each
Of ladies fingers
Carrots
And beans;
And the other vegetables
At a hundred grams each;
And greens and chillies
Coriander and curry leaves
For twenty rupees apiece.

Shoving them all
In two pouches of my wallet
I pirouette and prance back home.
I stop by at the grocer’s
And buy a hundred grams
Of red grams with a red face
And dump it in the fourth.

The wallet is now full
As the purse is emptied
Of its two hundred bucks.
Now time to do something
To fill the empty belly for dinner.

Then suddenly I remember
The virtues of regular fasting
That my hubby and I
Resolved to be religiously on.

We had just the previous day
Scanned our lean income
And the fatty expenses
And decided to have
Only one meal a day
And begin to grow
Vegetables in the few
Pots of our apartment sit-out
Weeding out the flowering ones
Thanks to the prices
That are doing a rumba
In a galaxy somewhere
Beyond the Milky Way.

[Jul 19,2009: : Hyderabad - 500 056]