Rice-Pot Riots

They tend to tear their stomachs out at night without a sense of place or time. Cursing the empty wallet when seeing white smiling sweets in glass cages on roadsides with sticky bellies.

On one of the dark nights of drizzling rain, there was a small gloom just before the suicide of a kerosene lamp flame. Four stomachs are waiting for a long hour to cook a little rice in the fireplace. It is only the mother of the house who sees through the veil of tears that the green wood that is reluctant to burn is being lit as a cure for hunger. The poor waited for the rice to turn into cooked rice. When the storm of hunger blew, the poor three little bellies fell from the edge of sleep to slumber. 

It was when the night broke at the edge of darkness that the man who was the father of those three baby bellies arrived on all fours. As soon as he arrived, he took the pot of three-quarter-cooked rice from the stove and threw it out in a drunken stupor. 

Only that mother, after looking at the three stomachs that were crying and tired, bit the rye with saliva and thought that death would not be so painful.

…. By Sindhu Gatha