When someone says village I gulp a mirage as saliva the inner eye projects a cinema of memory. Towns as anacondas, swallow the villages A door of a farmer’s thatched house closing on my anxious face, A dead ground-nut crop undulating with wind, A banyan tree longing for new gossips in its shadow, and the scarecrow,protecting the desert. The national highway cutting the village where thousands of vehicles flow and some dried winds carrying bougainvilla leaves never waited a moment to see this mirage, the village. A temple on a rock hill a factory choking the village a hospital without doctor, a school without teacher and such piteous images screen, as I think of a village. Villages are fading away the way the effect of night’s rain slowly evaporates as the day walks into the streets and wakes everyone into everyday…