Floating to Ausland

Nautical miles of painful memories,

A voyage that tests human endurance.

Lost priorities, ambitions and identities,

Many a thousand waves of inner calamities.

A late night’s urgent call,

To the spot among the lonely Casuarinas

And a sudden sail from the Eastern shores.

Not a memorable goodbye in the painful darkness,

But a muted loud cry!

Compressed in the congested room below,

Where otherwise frozen boxes of fish are stored,

Minds couldn’t settle

Until the floating monster reached the horizon.

Tears rolled down from the fettered eyes

Knowing that the shore’s disappearing.

And the head that leaned on the wall

Kept turning towards the land,

Seen through the glass windows in the bottom.

Only the glimmering Cross

On the roof of the old church

Now a horizon far away,

To bid farewell.

A sinking heart, with lisps of prayers,

Floating to find life.

Unstable was the boat and the heart

Until the sailor’s eyes crossed safe borders.

Rocking and tumbling, turning and twisting

As the arrogant waves punched on the hull,

While flesh and bones met counterparts,

The unfamiliar and unseen voyage mates.

Floating for three weeks,

Hunger and thirst, fear of death,

And the scary wind and waves

Have become familiar and friendlier.

Passports thrown into the Indian Ocean,

A new family in the hidden room of the boat,

Sans race, language and nationality,

But as human bodies struggling for the same.

“Chris Island!” shouted someone.

The ears that waited so long to hear, breathed.

Eyes glistened to see sunshine into the room.

“Navy boats nearby” alarmed the other,

With the boat’s deliberate turn towards them.

Arrested within the destination’s reach,

And questioned weekly in the island,

The heart and body await a decision.

Boats keep arriving here.

Some of them as funeral houses,

And many as floating refugee camps.

But at times, we hear,

Only a piece of wood,

The undrowned piece of a thrashed boat

Reaches the destined sandy shores.

Here in this paradise of lost humanity,

Mother’s lullabies are heard,

And at times the whole family’s mournful wailing.

Waiting for the name to be called,

Waiting to find life.