The Window Washer

The Window Washer

Like a spider crouching
in its life sustaining web,
he hangs there, without a
safety harness, in the lattice
of casurina poles tightly tied
together with flimsy jute strings.

His ebony body
like a fleck of stain, against
the white concrete, is not unlike the raven
perched a rung above him.

He gulps down the acrophobia,
a cruel, contradictory infliction
upon the nature of his work,
by looking up at the sky,
disregarding the inequitable world
that lies twenty stories below him.
He dares not to look too long.
He still flinchingly remembers
the sting of the bird droppings in his eye.

He runs the rubber wiper blade
over the water splashed window,
carefully from top to bottom.
The squeaking sound, the accepted
sign of cleanliness, grates him like
the distant screeching of the
mating cats at night in the slum.

He espies vain women
in the offices, forever painting their nails,
conceited men, forever adjusting their tie knots.
Feeling awkward and insecure at his presence,
they draw the blinds on him when
he appears unexpectedly on the other side
of their perceived, mutually exclusive world.

His ambition is limited to penetrating
that glass French window pane,
where outside the merciless sun
beats down on him, while they adjust
the thermostats inside.

One day, he would become an office-boy,
he muses, achieving his life's goal.
That would suit him just fine,
compared to tending pigs
in his hamlet near Karur.

~ Krishna ~
23 August 2001

More Poems By Krishna

Home