Taxi Trip...Down The Memory Lane Poem by REETESSH SABRR

It was my fault that I asked,
to a turbaned cabbie who was masked
in the skins of a human & habits of a wolf.
Searches for its prey with silent brute,
and sometimes in temptations it groans & hoot.
He believed that he was not bluffing me,
so ignorant was he about his pretension,
no learning, no religiousness yet he do,
the Waahe Guru an apprehension.

Did asked for my identity, for who I am
a Hindu or a Muslim? ?
Had I not been a Hindu, which I told him,
he would have beaten me.
I reminisced, it was the gruesome Godhra
in the backdropp of which
there was lying this air of hatred
and a deadly threat on the innocent people.

By God's mercy, he left me unhurt, by the
side of the Matunga Road station(East)
didn't charge money, I was in utter shock!
But the painstaking agony of the suffering,
standing helpless in the late hour of that
awful night on the first day of my Mumbai arrival,
I kept brooding while walking past with my
handle-less suitcase across the Z bridge...

8th April 2002