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Earlier...going to the vegetable market was unpleasant
Hardy, tiresome, for I had to be a heaving weightlifter!
Now, a welcome change, it’s just a featherweight affair!
Earlier, I used to hold my wallet in one hand
And carry in the other an eighteen-by-fifteen-by-twelve
Plastic lined jute bag with stick handles.
After it was all over, I had to heavily plod back home
Shifting the brimming bag in my right and left hands
Halting every few yards, and in the process
So many calories burnt.
Oh, now it’s like flying in the air, and waltzing on a marble track.
I go to market just with my four-pouched wallet
The cash lying in the smallest one!
I buy fifty grams each
Of ladies fingers, carrots and beans;
And the other vegetables at a hundred grams each;
And greens and chillies, and coriander and curry leaves
Of twenty rupees apiece!
Shoving them all in two pouches of my wallet
I pirouette and prance back home.
I stop by, on the way, at the grocer’s
And buy a hundred grams of red grams
With a red face, and dump it in the fourth.
The wallet is now full,
As the purse is emptied of its two hundred bucks!
Now time to do something, to fill the empty belly for dinner.
Then suddenly I remember ... the virtues of regular fasting...
We had just the previous day scanned the glaring mismatch
Between our lean income and the fatty expenses,
And decided to have only one meal a day,
And begin to grow vegetables
In the few pots of our apartment balcony
Weeding out the flowering ones...
Thanks to the prices that are doing a rumba
In a galaxy somewhere beyond the Milky Way! |
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