We came for the cows-
sleek shiny skins to sew into seams and cents
but were caught in a contradistinctive cacophony-
silk sarees, careering through merging traffic
in colours more complex than considerations of the constellation,
on the backs of mopeds, motorbikes, motorcars, broken cars,
cars piled on top of cars, twisting and turning like my thoughts,
like shiny spun threads speeding through calescent carriageways
sweltering under the hustle of the crowd’s bustle,
horns and humans honking along the raw edges of overrun roadsides.
Curious eyes casting assumptions on the stiches I’d unpicked-
trying to see how they held it all together. Eyes smiling, seeing,
wondering on why I’d come and what I’d take away.

We’d come for the cows-
but slipped like silk over skin into the smooth symphony
of those streets where wild cows were prized idols
wandering freely through the masses, noting nothing
of our search for their hides that had slipped from being seductive
into being sacred, again. In the height of this mercurial madness,
a man, blind to all light, weaved his way through the carnival
like the weft goes through the warp, three sheep by his side
as if they’d always been with him- the silken worms to his weave
and I wondered, then, who was leading who;
the man, the sheep, this car or me.

Into every baste stitch, hand-made,
in Meluhha’s lining, was hidden a fine canvas
where letters spelling out the concept of freedom had been placed,
sealed beneath from the politics and the poverty, they’d sewn smiles
into each seam and it was I, in branded costume, who looked the fool-
traveling through, taking it in, thinking I was better off amid my laws
and rules and beds and baths and running water and walled in farms
that kept cows in containers too condensed to come close
to any considering of the constellation.

We came for the cows-
but discovered that this was no place
to search for that something sleekly-
for this was a city too silky for the stains of my synthetic skins.

 Words and photographs by Damien B. Donnelly