Panguni-chittirai,
the tamarind season.
Appa would buy it cheap
to last a whole year.

At harvest time,
he’d wrangle
a good bargain,
some seven-eight bags—
beans, dal, rice.

He wouldn’t return home
from a Salem passenger journey
without four measures of vegetables
from the vendor-woman.
Would always boast
that what for others fetched a day’s supply
yielded enough for a week.

My father who’d walk a mile
to save a rupee,
my father who was like that,
bought a cent of land
some nine miles away
from town
for a lakh of rupees,
a new township,
much like Gandhipuram,
Annanagar,
or Kamarajapuram colony.

Ambedkar colony,
a stone’s throw from the bus stand,
went for the price of a worthless cow.

Even land
has a caste.