Uncut Poetry

Agency! Agency! That’s what people would say - women lack agency, that self-respect, which would allow them to accept no nonsense from their partners. Violence? Infidelity? These were lines which once crossed were unretractable, unforgivable.   But women do the unthinkable - they scream and shout, but they also forgive, they also stay on. And in that one decision seems to lie embodied their helple...

It’s so easy to say that trust is absolute. That what is trustworthy has to be fully so, or not at all. In the grey complexities of life, it’s both the toughest give and often an unreasonable ask.   Humans are fragile, they are also duplicitous. They lie, betray a trust of years, but are ironically ready to lay their lives on line when it comes to things they care for - and for those whose very tr...

If I commit suicide, it will be on a happy day. I would wrap the day as efficiently as I would wrap my life. Instructions clear, bank accounts safe, investments earmarked. I would make your favourite dish (stuffed aubergine with sun dried tomatoes), serve it with garlic bread, call in your favourite ice cream (Jamoca Almond Fudge) and have a glass of chianti on the side, as you look on in wonder....

It’s one of the ironies of life that we spend more time searching for what’s wrong and flawed in those we love than on the pleasure their presence provides us. We are crotchety with praise. We could be pillows or doors for them, we could be their skies or their earth, their truth when they require it, their boost, their grace, their heft.  We forget they are breathing masses of soul, liable to be...

This is a repeat of one of my more popular poems, replayed here with a hope of getting a new audience, who might have missed it!   "Come. Come softly. Come when the heat of noon has still not dimmed. Come when the streets have stopped asking questions. Come when the world has left its own care to us. Come."   In anticipation lies a whole universe. In the waiting lies the shape, the sound, the colo...

People who are permanent fixtures in our lives still have that unique ability to make happiness spring upon us. It could be something big like a surprise party, or it could be something infinitesimally small like quietly following you to the mall so you could then have a quick happy moment over coffee. Loved ones know how to pull in disparate threads of our being, and weave an ordinary but extraor...

Come evening, I am breathless to come home. Nearer I get, faster the knots in my shoulders ease.  I turn my car into the driveway, a few floors below you, and start to forget what I thought I would carry as an elongated wound of the day.    I think we make too much of the world’s tribulations and deprivations, as if we are amidst the most dire times of all centuries put together, straining to find...

Can you believe the fact that there are people who go out for a full day and come back home and say there’s no story to tell, no incident to narrate, nothing magical to report. Of course, there is. It’s just that they do not wish to share. It could be disinclination, it could be the hangover of a recrimination, it could be tiredness.   After a full day of words, maybe all one seeks at the end is a...

One of my life’s ongoing struggles has been not to let myself dissipate such that little of me remains for me to enjoy myself. Even worse, as the pieces  which the world loves of me gets grabbed, and I stand helplessly as a bystander seeing the world take its fill, and I know myself as empty, not even sure if I remain with my heart intact.   Worse - we become strangers inside, trying to keep up wi...

How can we ever be prepared for the inevitabilities of loved ones? Our being mortal, our knowing of it, and our facing up to its ascendancy, are all different dynamics. We are never spared it’s agony, it’s feeling of leaving us bereft. As if the death of a loved one was a conspiracy against us, a punishment, maybe, of not paying enough attention to them, of taking them for granted, of giving prece...

Childhood is a town we have to leave. Home is a destination we have to leave and recreate again and again. Memories are the wealth we carry as reflux. And we create ourselves as our own saviours as we search strange lands. Even as we flee our abandoned bicycles in empty playgrounds, even as we carry hurt as big as childhood’s sandpit, even as we tell ourselves that leaving is the best thing to do,...

I read this incredible poem today. And I weeped at its infinitesimal beauty. Tenderness by James Crews. Here it is - .    Tenderness   You know how a half-buried stone in the yard will clear all the snow from around itself, little by little, leaving only a hollow of warmth and a cushion of moss you want to rest on, until winter finally ends? That's how tenderness works in us, some heat rising up f...

Who are we if not products of the first quarry of breath - the family? Raw, unmanaged, planned or perchance - we are babies who enter the universe with our lungs ballistic, versed in the art of annoying everybody, with our insistences and our demand for unwavering attention, but also to beguile.   Whether we are a chip of a dream or the product of a ritual or the gift of a drunken night, we are re...

Sometimes, without asking, we are gifted grace. It could be the strumming of a guitar from a neighbouring house some lazy afternoon, it could be the first sighting of a butterfly after a harsh winter, it could be a shared glance across a crowded metro coach, it could be the morning sun seeming to bend to greet you as you step into the street, of entering a lift and recognising the song seeping out...

'Aaschi' is a beautiful Bengali word. It’s used when you are leaving home - for work, for pleasantries, for whatever. You say it to the folks you are leaving behind. Instead of saying “I’m going” you say “Aaschi”, which means “I’m coming back.” And this one simple word becomes a promise to return, a pledge that the parting is temporary. In its intonation, meaning and feeling, it’s an intimacy.   I...

Some relationships are doomed. They get off to a bad start, and never hit their stride. Or find their autumn of distrust early, and see no reason to change the season. Often a passing reaction is presumed to be a permanent opinion. Sometimes it’s something shallow, but in the face - hair in the sink, slurping of soup, insensitivity with a joke. The reasons can be myriad. But the rusting which sets...

This is a repeat of one of my more popular poems, replayed here with a hope of getting a new audience, who might have missed it! Too little, I feel, is talked about heartbreak which arises from friendships which come unstuck. It’s almost as if it doesn’t require comment or commiseration if it’s not love. There’s injustice there.  When the truth is that closely wrought bonds which are non sexual of...

I have often looked at couples who are so different from each other that together they seem to move like oil and water.  And then I blink and look again, and I see a strange alchemy at work - a layering more than a blending, stitched crochet then a cocktail, a sun-entrenched day than smog. And they progressively look like a gorgeously-knitted piece of warm-wear together.   How do people who seem t...

Don’t we complicate our lives too much? With our desire for more, and then for much more, for affirmations, and then reaffirmations. For a continuous acknowledgment that not only do we matter, but - that we matter more than anybody else. It’s not enough to be together; we want words which confirm that our togetherness matters. We want cards, messages, heart-shaped emojis, birthday presents, outing...

Old age is often a sadness, not so much for the slowing and breaking down of the body’s machinery, but because how it brings invisibility to the aged. Because if there is one section of people who are ignored, as if they don’t exist, it is often the aging. As the world swirls around them, with all it’s passion, conflict, confusion, interaction, conversation, they are there, in the middle of the wh...

The irrevocability of death is a given.   Even as I can't ever reconcile to it, I sit in awe at its messy discipline. It tears worlds asunder, leaves pain in its wake, splits, often destroys,  but moves unreconciled and unrelenting. Sometimes it gives a little air, some space - not a dawn of hope, but a sunbeam - as a vestige, but then again moves across the firmament to find its west - and waste....

"I look back to see if I had left behind trails of my voice, as if that mattered more than if they had reached."   I stay in Calcutta, and wherever I walk I know I do so on hallowed ground, unseen but still fallow with the blood of revolutionaries. It’s another matter that whilst some of it was a fight for freedom, some of it was misguided, for things which revolutionaries themselves lost sight of...

Life is a pean of reaffirmations. In its hurly-burly urgencies we often forget that what anchors us is often the humdrum boring comfort of relationships which let us be what we are. We can say anything knowing our love won’t be questioned, we can take people for granted without our intentions being put into a dock, we can let silences surround us knowing them to be as potent as a conversation.   B...

A new year is just an artificial break for us to catch our breath, simmer down and look back to see the terrain we have travelled. There’s nothing good or bad - there are only things to either celebrate or to learn from. The wisest of us has done the stupidest of things - and are often better and happier for it. In thought, word or action we have all transgressed - we have sinned, plotted, cursed....

"I will learn someday that truth is a flight from penumbra to light, from the man scared to show his scars, to the child I can be to the world;             there’s innocence in truth,             it makes others reveal their wounds."   The biggest truth of lies is also the most uncomfortable - we tell lies to deflect our truths, not only from others but also ourselves . If we are sensitive to ours...