Distant memories approach me – I am looking in a water well, an elephant is plucking peepul leaves in the dense forest, and her mahout is laughing. I am sprinting along narrow past-roads, fields of corns and pulses covered in evening smoke, the villages of many doors and windows. It was my fifth grade when [...]
i. Almost always, I think of you fondly. Like: clouds think of rain; Like: words think of sentences; Like: women think of orgasms. ii. But sometimes, dead from the shoulders down when we aggressively silently—Chomskily— protest to one another: You’re wrong. You lie. We wonder if others notice. They must. Our animosity obvious as the [...]
Recently, a combined bundle of chapbooks by Mihir Vatsa, Nandini Dhar, Usha Akella, Manjiri Indurkar and Arjun Rajendran were released through Vayavya and Aainanagar at an event ‘Reading Five: An Evening of Poetry’ at Moti Lal Nehru college. It was a refreshing visit, that took me back to my college days when we, as English [...]
The houses protrude from the hills like buck teeth. But this is no mouth. It’s like Siliguri’s rolled-up sleeve. Pink, yellow, anaemic blue – the houses, the molars. They’re like leaves, competing for light. I notice their stillness, how they never shiver from the cold. The windows rattle, I know, though I can’t hear them [...]
(To listen to the poet read the poem, click here.) * We ken we’ve said aw this afore But, please, lend us yer ear fur a minute. Aye, we’re jist a wee country, But we’re a wee country wi a big hert, An when Thomas Hamilton Stormed intae a schuil gym An shot dead 16 [...]
(1) our first phone was born with me, my mother always said; my first memory of distance also comes from the phone. my father, on a Friday, calls home and tells me, “I cannot come this Saturday.” I am two. He is thirty nine. What about Sunday? “Not Sunday either, darling. I will come next [...]