By Bhavya Bhardwaj
I have always belonged,
Belonged to someone before I was even my own.
We raise women from the womb in preparation of her ownership.
She is his,
before she is hers.
The clock is set,
Her time as her own is limited.
She isn’t taught to love herself,
because someone will eventually love her.
And we wonder why women are so broken.
Because we are raised to be pieces of wood
Waiting to be put together.
By – DISHA AGGARWAL
Painted By – AMRITA SHER-GIL (Group of Three Girls, 1935)
I was six when I asked my mother,
“Were you happy when you had me, as happy as
you were to have my brother ?”
Laughing she replied, “Of course darling, I was.
You both are equal for me.”
At the age of ten, I asked her, “Do you love me as much as
you love my brother?”
Calmly she replied “ Of course why wouldn’t I,
you are my blood.
When at 14, I asked my father,
“Were you cool about my birth ?”
My father said teasingly, “ Everyone wants a boy as their first child but I was the happiest to hold you in my arms.
“Oh !” I replied, a little hesitant.
I wonder why?
Was it mere teasing, or all too genuine to wish for a guy?
At 17, I asked them,
“Do you still love me, or is it just pretend?
Day in and day out, am I a burden to tend ?”
They both seemed angry,
perhaps I triggered something in them.
My father dismissed me with a, “Concentrate on your studies! ”
One afternoon I overheard the elders,
” It’s important for girls to be educated.”
I felt so content; at least someone thought the same.
But I guess it was too good to last long,
For then, she said, “It’s impossible to find a suitable groom these days,
everyone wants a working woman.”
Today I turned 19, and can’t seem to figure out,
Is education qualification for marital unification?
Do parents have any other goal than turning you into marriage material?
Why should being beautiful be my only dream?
By Bhavya
Image Source: Tumblr
I nearly lost someone I loved.
And I wanted her back. I wanted some magic to happen and bring her back to me.
But she’d never come. Ever.
But magic would happen.
She won’t go away. She isn’t going away.
I want to hold her hand and her to hold mine,
The way we did when she was sitting on the bed with me beside her.
Both of us were helpless and unable to speak.
One because of illness. The other was too afraid of choking up.
Oh, I love her so much. And she loves me back.
She didn’t want to go. I didn’t want her to go. No one wanted her to go.
Then Cancer, why did you do this to her?
Why did you do this to us?
I miss her.
She is the Sun, and a bird. Happy and free.
Like a child, innocent in her being.
Cancer, why did you do this to her?
Cancer, why did you do this to us?
Everyone adores her – her family, friends, colleagues, and society.
Cancer, why did you do this to her?
Cancer, why did you do this to us?
Dear Cancer, do you know
How she cracks silly jokes to make us laugh,
How wide she smiles in a room filled with the laughter of the people she loves?
And you snatched her smile and our laughter from us.
Cancer, why don’t you answer?
We asked the doctors, they don’t know.
Cancer, why did you do this to her?
Cancer, why did you do this to us?
Tell me, why?
I shriek at the walls.
Tell me! Tell me, why?
“Cancer is nowhere to be found. It’ll die with her.”
But, did it?
No. No, it’s not the end.
Real life tales also have happy endings.
She once spoke to me, albeit with a lot of difficulties.
Her eyes shed a thousand words. Her lips spoke five. Five magical words.
“It isn’t in my blood.”
“It isn’t in my blood” took possession of me.
Those five words weighed more than hundreds of words by hundreds of people.
She’s never going away. Her words are never going away.
And that is where I begin.
And now I am determined to make her words and this world realize
That cancer can’t kill people. Cancer makes them stronger.
Love, I know for sure you’re much better off right now.
With no pain in your brain anymore.
Wherever she is at present, she must be busy impressing the world there.
And I here, am doing the same…making life better again.
By Neelesha Dhawan
Image Source: Tumblr
As the steam from your cup
Mingles with the fog
And your sighs create
A sheet of dismay on your glasses
I know
This is the end
As your lips quiver
With the hotness
The hesitancy in your touch
Is tangible across the stall
With a slight dampness
Your gaze travels
Lingers a minute
Before dissolving again in the cup
And as your sighs create
A sheet of emptiness on your glasses
I know
You have lost your articulation
Yet again
And as the steam from your cup
Mingles with the fog
I know yet again
That you’ve lost your audacity
Yet again
And tonight
A mug of liquor
Will do the job
Of what a cup at a stall
Could not
By P. Snigdha
Illustration By Arshiya Chahal
I cannot tell you how happy, how at peace I felt today. My mind was at ease. My thoughts seemed to be lulled into a gentle sleep. It feels like I smiled, talked and laughed after ages. I am truly happy. And the best part is that nothing extraordinary happened. I didn’t meet some idol or unlock the last level of Candy Crush (as if that’ll ever happen).
I just met up with old friends. I cannot stop smiling as I write!
We had been making plans for weeks now, and they’d end up getting cancelled due to one reason or the other. But last night, one of them texted me saying, “We are going out tomorrow. That’s it.” I punched in an overexcited face and a thumbs up as my reply.
We met at the metro station. We ran towards each other’s arms, laughing. I don’t know why I am making this sound like a lover’s reunion. It so is not. Anyway, the problem was that the three of us hadn’t decided on where to go yet. After bickering for almost ten minutes, we decided on Hauz Khas. I’d never been there before, so I was kind of apprehensive about it. But I knew that if I said something of it, we’d resume the back and forth again.
So off we went to Hauz Khas. After a few minutes of walking, we arrived at the lake. I was, and remain, absolutely mesmerized by that beautiful lake. It was as if the ripples were coated with glistening gold. The sun was warm, not too harsh on our hands or face, the only skin peeking out of heavy winter coats. The wind was in my hair – making the unruly curly mess fly everywhere. We sat by the lake for a couple of hours. Talking, laughing, talking some more. School memories were revisited, crushes recalled and generic (but well-meaning) life advice passed around.
I hadn’t realized how much I had missed these two. I hadn’t realized how much I needed to get out, spend more time under the sun and less, wallowing in self-pity.
Sigh. It’s always the littlest of things. They are the ones that make you, break you, and keep you going.
By P. Snigdha
With City of Water, Anindita Sengupta takes us on a journey spanning a lifetime of experiences – from heartbreak to despair, subtle existentialism to fervent cries for help.
Anindita Sengupta writes with a skilled pen, she articulates her deepest of thoughts with an apparent ease, resonating with the reader’s own experiences.
The collection is divided into six parts – Thirst, A Sense of Rain, Flash Flood, Drown, Still Water, and Swim.
As the names suggest, with each part we ascend into a different plane of the poet’s emotions, each a parallel universe of her understanding of reality, coming together to form the idea, the thought, of what she presents herself as – to the reader, as a human.
Her raw, unflinching descriptions of growing up in a household that held naïve ideas of modesty, speak to every one of us who has lived through the same. She writes, in Becoming a Woman:
Cover your head;
This thin translucence
Will protect you.
Pull a smile
Across the thin
Lines of your face.
The gloom in her silent acceptance of disappointment, seems to glow with a steady pulse, as if to guide you home.
Recounting a lost love in I Remember Siachen, she writes:
You wanted freedom, you said,
From both war and love.
I cried on the way back, vowed
I’d never love a soldier gain,
A man for whom death was the only tragedy
Worth mourning.
Page after page, poem after poem, I was awed by the simplicity with which her poetry tackles the most complex of emotions that come with being a person who chooses to remain unafraid, unrelenting in the face of love.
Her metaphors and similes hit you of out of nowhere – delivering the full blow of the emotions, as intended.
Thus, you feel the ‘noon heat prickle like cheap wood’ on your skin and in your eyes.
When the snails make their way up the walls, you can picture them in your head as clear as day – their crusts, their feet, et al.
After reading The Migrant’s Wife, you probably won’t be able to shake off the distinct feeling that says, “I feel like I met her just this morning!”
As the preface by Keki Daruwala aptly puts it, “Anindita Sengupta never lets a poem run away with her. Like all good poets, she is original both in her way with words and her personal angle of vision.”
Her tone in her poetry is vividly varied. On one page, she seeks “the strength to forget,” later she is overtly curious and pokes questions at none other than Medusa herself, and yet in some others, she is observant; drinking in the details that lie before her.
Anindita Sengupta‘s poetry has been published in several journals including Eclectica, Nth Position, Yellow Medicine Review, Origami Condom, Pratilipi, Cha: An Asian Journal, Kritya,and Muse India. It has also appeared in the anthologies Mosaic (Unisun, 2008), Not A Muse(Haven Books, 2009), and Poetry with Prakriti (Prakriti Foundation, 2010). She is also a freelance writer and journalist and has contributed articles to The Guardian (UK), The Hindu, Outlook Traveler and Bangalore Mirror.
Anindita Sengupta’s word choice of words, the placing and pattern of phrases, the intricately woven similes – each and every word that she pours on paper, comes splashing at your face. The reader is drenched in the downpour of her ramblings, ruminations, recollections, and so, so much more.
By Shafali
I’ve been suffering from,
an exclusive type
of writer’s block
when it comes to
writing about him.
Because he becomes
stranger and stranger
every time I sit down
to pour him on paper.
I know him but
maybe, just maybe
I don’t understand him.
I want to highlight his beauty
with subtle similes.
Describe how he’s intimidating,
exaggerating the effects
of his existence on me.
And praise him
with overrated metaphors.
But my words are
In a state of rebel,
not wanting to leave
the back of my mind.
Why? I’d never know.
I’ve given up on
finding the answer.
I won’t stress it
Because I’ve always had
unanswerable questions
hovering in my mind.
Like why didn’t Neil Armstrong
write a poem about the moon?
My friend thinks Armstrong
Didn’t understand poetry.
But I feel like,
he suffered from
an exclusive type of
writer’s block too.
Maybe, just maybe,
He knew poetry;
He just never
understood the moon.
Conscientia 