A dried well sits along a sugarcane mill, on a stretch of land encompassing three dialects. You see kids rolling tires and tubes, medieval games in a modern silt. Their fathers are in the mills, twelve hours, fourteen, and more maybe. You muster the scarce hold left on your native language with weak eyelashes seeing red all 360. Determined, you ask: Why are they struck with kwashiorkor when the men are working the factories, when the mothers are tending the fields? But they run from your bright, almost foreign skin. You are sticky with sugar all over, but nothing has entered your gut. You may fall on the taxed roads for big trucks—no grass, no mud. As the evening commences, you are put to your feet by the entourage of the man in the white kurta and Nehru jacket, seizing the forest for a new data center for a five-trillion economy. Intoxicating fuel in the air burns your nostrils incessant hum of servers cooling has left your brain burning. you wanna ask him: Can they ride the streams when no rain finds them home? But you can only ask AI for the nearest pool a thousand miles away. Now their fathers will be sent home, and their mothers will have no land to toil. Now we all can be starving artists.
