Painful Life

I never knew,

Many years after my death

I could still exist,

Captured in a photograph.

Do you know,

I had died in the Bengal Famine,

Of 1943;

The original Black and White photograph

Published in The Statesman

And preserved by the Indian Archives,

Shows me, lean and withered,

As I lay on a Midnapore street, dead.

A fierce cyclone had destroyed,

Its coastal walls;

I knew the dead was me.

I do not remember that life,

The same way I want to forget,

I live.

Life is painful; the immanent death more so.

How can there be peace and ease,

For me,

When I am an embodied soul.