Poem: They Help Themselves to Many Things
K. Srilata
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One of the houses the Pune police raided as part of their nationwide swoop on August 28 was of 51-year-old professor K. Satyanarayana at the English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU) campus in Hyderabad. Satyanarayana and his wife have alleged that their house was raided under false pretences, with the police claiming in their search documents that the professor's father-in-law, Varavara Rao, also lived with the couple.
Satyanarayana told The Wire that their personal properties were ransacked, computers were seized and even their seven-year-old daughter’s toys were allegedly damaged in the drama that went on for nearly nine hours. During the raid, Satyanarayana has said, police asked him questions about the books and photos they found in his house. “They asked me why I had books of Mao and Marx. Why I had songs of Gaddar,” he said. Asking him why he had photos of Jyotirao Phule and B.R. Ambedkar, the police told him, “Why do you want to be an intellectual? Why can’t you be happy with money you are getting?”
Poet and author K. Srilata has written a poem about the raid on Satyanarayana's house.
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For eight hours, they search his house,
help themselves to the bread
that sits crumbling on the table.
They help themselves to the love letters
he had written his wife at age twenty two,
run their fingers on their yellow age.
They help themselves to a book by Marx
he had bought on the footpath of Abids for ten rupees,
the dust on its spine thick as the country’s decline.
They help themselves to a photograph of Ambedkar,
and then laugh at the spider that scurries from behind it.
One of them mock-aims a gun at it.
They help themselves to his worries about his wife
and what they are doing to her in the next room.
They help themselves to the father-fear in the pit of his stomach.
What will become of my daughter if…?
They help themselves to the revolutionary songs in his head.
They even sing them out loud,
their voices hard and mocking.
The words dart like arrows into the dark night
that crouches by the window,
silent and afraid.
K. Srilata is a poet, fiction writer and professor of English at IIT Madras.
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