Three Poems by Tushar Sen
The Last Tree Standing
A lone banyan waits
to be cut down,
until the block officer signs
the contract
to his brother-in-law
in the timber business.
Samples have been collected.
A local student earned his thesis
studying the therapeutic effects
of any/every banyan tree.
His brothers were uprooted
for godowns assembling ORGANIC vegetables
and factories mass-producing HERBAL remedies.
“Too much land locked by trees
that produce nothing except oxygen,”
the fat tycoon said.
So many red-crossed vehicles
passed by the tree,
with bodies feeding on stored oxygen,
waiting to die.
Soil erosion, they claimed,
had been defeated by concrete.
Shade became personal now,
sold as umbrellas.
And the dam they built,
the great hymn to progress—
holds barely enough water
to cool the data center,
built by a foreign company
serving another foreign company.
The Business of Drought
We have never seen the ocean,
but we carry it every day—
on our heads,
in dented metal moons,
in the ache that bends our spines into question marks.
The sky has lost its cotton fields.
The westerlies have blown them away.
It asks the sun to fetch them now.
The sun is working overtime.
The earth is bearing the overheating.
We walk before the sun decides to burn,
feet mapping distances no one will measure,
past a tree that died waiting,
past a well that whispers dust.
Even the fish have learnt of our thirst;
the fish fear we would siphon all the lake—
they refuse to multiply.
Water tankers pass by, teasing the village—
pockets too shallow.
Soda water sells at a discount at the shop,
Morra has no water to freeze for the ice box.
False rain alerts embarrassed
the weather section out of newspapers.
The village priest advises a ritual—
a quintal of rice, a barrel of cooking oil,
a bushel of corn, and a sack of sugar—
to the deity.
Birds have all flown away disloyally,
the lizards that tried to flee
died in empty earthen pots—
decaying outside the village.
The village shylock now lends
not for seeds,
but for water
from the ecoreserve company.
Trees that were uprooted gave way to barren lands,
silenced factories,
cold chimneys,
paper appointments,
future salaries,
future development.
Leaders have decided to plant cactus saplings—
they need no watering.
The wells in the village tremble with fear.
The minister protested
the dam proposal last year:
if electricity is drawn out of the river,
how will the crops survive on hollowed water.
A reporter came last week.
He inquired.
He took notes.
He never returned.
Some say he went missing.
Parched
A bomb fell—
like a rogue kite,
stringless, nameless,
aiming nothing, claiming everything.
Blisters on that body—
like boils on bubble wrap,
waiting, bursting, multiplying.
The place hissed,
like a silenced furnace
breathing through broken walls.
In the market square,
a skull lay atop a fountain,
choked with blood—
to ward off the spirits
of those who died a “natural death.”
Fresh rubble,
still warm,
drew hands the way gold does.
Not mourners, collectors.
They came softly,
like it was a harvest.
Shoes were eased
from the feet of the buried
without asking for permission.
Gemstones pinched
from fingers gone cold.
Piggy banks split open—
their small treasures
up for grabs.
Business as usual—
no one took notice,
no one complained.
Barrows carried bodies—
unclaimed,
hurried to a deep patch of earth
dug out to accommodate them all.
Ambulances stood in the heat,
with hospitals gone,
medical aid
traded by the roadside.
The city now heard
only sirens,
craving baby cries.
A stray rocket stuck on a rooftop—
ashamed of its own sterility,
hiding its nose from passersby
who pelted rage-filled stones.
Nadine, seen every noon,
bowl in small hands,
waiting for rice
in a line longer
than her eyes could hold.
Tushar Sen is a finance professional from Bhoiwada village in Maharashtra, India. He also engages in sustained creative and scholarly writing. He is the author of Pandora’s Box, a collection of short stories available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Audible. In 2020, he wrote and produced the short film Zulfi, which screened internationally and received 22 laurels across film festivals. He was recently selected for LADAKH—Closer to the moon Residency Program for writers.
His poetry has appeared in Sortes, Lekh, Indian Review, Writers Resist, SpecPo Verse, Flora Fiction, Ecological Citizen, Military Review, The Orchards Poetry Journal and Afrocritik.
Photo credit: Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash.
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