MAYA CHI DUNIYA

Maya is a 26 year old with intellectual disability in the NGO I work for.

She sits at the door as I draw her. Attempting to capture her wildness.

People say those people who don’t want anything big in life are losers

They assume everyone begins the same starting point.

You began without crying unlike everyone when you were born

You changed colors like a chameleon, trying each one on

Before giving yourself up

To be human.

You doze off because of your heavy medication

People try to contain your wild energies simply because they cannot

Stand seeing you free. They try to manage you

You laugh at their madness and bang upon the surfaces around them

To make them hear their delusions clang like chains around their minds

You don’t speak much, it is enough to wave from across time and space to similar souls who share your madness.

And it is enough they see. Sometimes reciprocate.

You sit at the porch of your one room house

Preferring not to participate in the Cage called family

Your brother steals money, your sister - love From a different boy each day

Counselling? Your family is much too torn apart for it

And love too distorted to put things right

All day you sit and smile

You make friends with the silence clouding around home

You don’t mind dancing but there again people insist on meaning!

Rhythm, rules, context, purpose, propriety

Again you bare your mouth in that insane smile of rotten teeth

Reminding them – all will wither away

What is left of dance will be, just as in life – motion

Just let go. Let me be. Smile. Sleep.

Sreepriya Menon

Sreepriya is student of Mental Health from School of Social Work, TISS Mumbai