The Living Owe It To Those Who No Longer Can Speak To Tell Their Story For Them

From the great ghats of India to Port Natal
Patched together crossing the Kala Pani
The children of rain and storm
Finding no anchors in the wind
Fated to be vagabonds of identity
Their histories sinewed to their bones
Start to till coolie canefields
Learning the language and lore
Of foreigners in foreign shores
Producing sugar for an empire
Their ladoos and rasgoolas
A remembrance of things past
Lighting the family God-lamp
With suppliant hands
Watched only by the stars
Working with new kith and kin
They slowly forge a new people
A new heaven and a new earth
A new spirit
And a new freedom
A new home in a new land – Poem in
celebration of the 150th Anniversary of
the Arrival of Indian Indenture
Labourers in South Africa by Betty
Govinden

Home is where one starts from. As we grow
older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern
more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be
deciphered. T.S. Eliot ‘East Coker’