Photo: Founding members of the 'Wednesday Group' - a pioneering women's group in 1960s Kobe Indian society (photograph courtesy of Chablani family)

There live these women in a town by the sea –

Kobe; the women of Sindhi ethnicity.

They grew from brides into housewives

of merchants, in diasporic community.

For years these women have hustled and bustled,

bartering their way in broken tongue;

raising each other and their families from young,

dismissing their work as ‘nothing’ they had done.

This is the story of ‘nothing’

the women claim to do;

the ‘nothing’ that for years

has somehow seen them through.

What is this ‘nothing’ and why is it so?

Where does it come from and how does it go?

The worlds of these women long absent from view,

at long last addressed in a thesis debut.