Inroads Inside Outside On One Globe Poem by Erhard Hans Josef Lang

There once was a man from far abroad -
Two and a half days of a crow's flight away -
Who settled in
With gleeful comfort to attune his high-flying currents of life
To a simple sustainable rhythm that would swing forever on with 'soul'
In a haven, insular
With natural born amiable hearts of friends
On lush green fruit-laden shores
Far east of Eden.

And yet there was the tinkling of accursed money, too, heard
In this island paradise of rich soils and heavenly brown beauties
Where he, the stranger and sunny boy, came to be admired soon
As Caucasian from a country of never-dwindling Sabaean riches,
Who had a complexion of spotless Parian marble.

And yes, he did his best to be accommodative to each and
Everyone he came to acquaint there -
A bit too much even so, at times -
Inviting, in the end, also such human characters as
The crabs in the guise of men hanging on
Adhesive to another's poor shoulder, for
Deemed strong enough to carry one's own miserable self through cumbersome life.

But where other foreign settlers in the same predispositioning state -
With their financial securities of livelihood at risk of becoming the spoils of crabs -
Succumbed to attitudes of the more exclusive snotty sentiments,
Living lives behind high inner walls of haughtiness -
Outwardly even also drawn around some of their very houses -
And, thus inaccessible to the natural spirit of love that is there in the air everywhere,
Call only upon such hearts of heads of families
In despair and misery and without means
Who know to make also use of the delinquent's crow-bar
For the love of their own wretched selves,
He only believed in the good of all people, after all, also in those
Who happened to be going a bit out of a good friend's ways -
While driven by utter needs and ignorance of how to make ends meet -

His own simple heart never lost its basic confidence in man and
Still ever stayed on to be true to his own
Unalloyed pure principle of working out a happy human
Co-existence with whoever they might be.

And he learned to understand and speak the language of the natives
In the country where he had settled down.
And he came to know also such words of poor human characters as the
'Greedy or miserly or stingy' - called the
'Kuripot' in the tongue of the island folks,
Civilized to a high level of Asian humane morals.

And once upon a time, years into his happy life in the chosen paradise
On a longer journey once abroad
To the hoary ethereal lands of glittering Worldmother India -
Whose lofty mind is ever akin to all youthful spritely spirits such as his -
On a longer ride inside a fast-moving, fuming train of rattling heavy Indian steel,
Halfway into his 1359-km-trip from southern Tamil Nadu's Chennai
To northeastern West Bengal Kolkata,
There in this voyage compartment of his -
Two rows of benches, six passengers seated on each, facing one another -
Amongst the other decent looking Indians, mostly women,
Happened to be one man that had entered the compartment
With a trail of different padlocked suitcases and plastic bags in his wake
That he stowed away underneath and on top of his seat that
He had taken right opposite of our chap from the story.

Now, that man, as smart-looking as podgy as he was, had
Displayed one unique, outstanding character feature on his part:
Every now and then he used to get up from his seat,
Taking up one of his smaller suitcases, unlocking its padlock,
So as to take out some sniff and other powders and
Spliced spiced nuts and gums and leaves to chew on
To gratify the various vices of his tongue and other senses, then to be
Closing, locking up and placing back the coffer,
Only to repeat the same procedure after just half an hour or so.
Same thing he also was seen doing time and again,
To his plastic bags, each time tying them up with a string in place of the lock.

While on the long journey sitting together with the others,
The others from their viand took out fruits,
layed opened up right next to them,
To be shared with anyone but the one who had the many bags and cases,
Who seemed to be so fully contented with his very own closed device there,
But who, sadly, was as ungiving and
Stingy and miserly and greedy as
Only anyone can ever be,
As a person who in the island paradise of our chap in the story
Were given an appalling name like 'kuripot'.

A but even stranger observation with regards to that man
Was yet soon to be made:
All the shopping bags of that 'kuripot' on the train,
With his sly, impressive moustache there,
Seemed to have stemmed from boutiques for the wealthier classes:
The bags were of various colored plastic with
The addresses of the shops they come from in thick print.
According to the letters
On all of his three or four tightly filled shopping bags,
Our 'kuripot' had originated from
A town in central Eastern India
That goes by the name of nothing else but 'Kuripot'!

Are all people in Kuripot then maybe as kuripot as
That miser from Kuripot on the train?
Since in that pacific paradisical island country of the story,
Which as early as in the 12th century once already had come
Under the cultural sway of India's erstwhile Sri Vijaya period of expansivism,
The name kuripot curiously has been and still is being given exactly to such a person?

Had it already been, during those early days of history,
Commonest saying among the sea-faring Indians,
That someone found utterly stingy reminded one of
Anyone from the town of Kuripot in Orissa, with a
Bad reputation for its townfolks' exceeding miserliness?

As it had been widely known then?

As that trait in people from there,
As seen at least in one of its locals,
Even to this very day seems to exist!

This story is a live history lesson of the hidden inroads
Underneath, above and across the borders of cultures.

The good chap in the story, I think, could well have been you,
As well as I, too.
Isn't that what we more like are?


(Dedicated to 'The Second Coming of a Minnion in April')