Category: In Memoriam

FOR MY SON

(Wrote this poem for Shashwata, now that his grandfather has only some time left, and one day all of us will be gone. And he will negotiate the world alone, on his own)

When the lamps here have gone low
and the rooms remember only footsteps,
know first that this is how life asks us to learn:
we leave.

Your grandfather fights a tide we cannot turn,
your grandmother’s hands are thinner than the morning.
Sooner than we like, your name will be called
by fewer voices in this house.

I am not asking you to hold our grief like a relic,
only to keep what was useful.
There will be a box of small things: a watch that stopped once,
a photograph with edges worn soft,
your maa’s terms of endearment
that you always responded to
however silly they sounded.
Let them teach you how ordinary love persists.
Let them teach you how imperfect maps still got us home.

Forgive me for the times I was clumsy,
for the maps I folded wrong or the silence I left between us.
Forgive me not because I deserve it,
but because forgiveness makes room for whatever comes after.
Carry with you what we meant more than what we failed to do.

You inherit more than land or name.
You inherit weathered patience, jokes that arrive late,
the aroma of that cold Brighton day,
the loud, ridiculous way your Manu would laugh for no reason,
the fights with your Dadai over the TV remote.
You inherit the narrow, stubborn thread of how we loved.
Wear it like a shawl
sometimes rough, sometimes soft,
it will warm you in strange rooms.

When loneliness comes (and it will, for everyone),
listen for us in small things:
football matches watched, an old song hummed,
Marvel films at 9 a.m.,
an ember-quiet laugh that rises from nowhere.
We are not instructions. We are a field you can walk through.
You will find paths we never named.

Go into the wide city and the salt of the coast,
fill your pockets with other people’s stories,
learn which silence is a door and which one is a wall.
Do not be surprised if you outgrow some of us,
that is how you become your own shape.

If ever you need proof you are not alone,
open your hands. They hold more than flesh:
they hold our stubbornness, our apology, our small joys.
Set them down in the world and watch what takes root.
We were here. We were often ordinary. We were enough.

And when the light thins again, and you stand on a street
that has forgotten our names, remember:
you will carry us like something that keeps you warm,
not like a chain.
There is a whole world waiting for you to be kind in it.
Go. Keep a little of us with you.
You are not alone.


SOMETIMES

You walk into the room
and he looks at you
as if you were passing through
a window he cannot open.

He searches your face
the way someone might listen
for a sound they once knew
but can no longer place.

You speak to him,
say your name,
offer small anchors
that slip through his grasp.

In those moments
the air feels thin.
Grief stands very still.

And you find yourself thinking,
quietly, almost ashamed,
how gentle it might be
if he could simply
be released
from this narrowing world.

A wish you never voice,
but carry,
like a stone
you cannot set down.


DAD WITH A NEWSPAPER THAT HOLDS NO MEANING FOR HIM ANYMORE

Today I found him sitting in his old chair,
the newspaper opened like a familiar doorway.
His fingers worked the edges of the pages
with the care of someone returning
to a room they once knew by heart.

He turned each sheet slowly,
eyes lingering on a headline
as if waiting for the shapes to settle,
for the world to speak to him
in a language he still remembered.

Every now and then he glanced up,
a quick, searching look, 
as though checking whether
the gesture of reading
still looked like reading.

And something in the room tightened,
not with sorrow, but with the quiet
dignity of a ritual held long after
its meaning slips away, 
a mind frayed, a habit surviving.

Outside, the day went on as usual.
Inside, he folded the paper
with the same old precision,
as if putting away a part of himself
that still insists on staying.


THE SONGS I NEVER SANG

I never sang for my father – 
his work had no space for melody,
his silence a wall I could not scale.
I thought I had time.
Time to tune the chords between us,
to hum a truth he might finally hear.
But now his eyes are clouded,
his mind adrift in a fog
that no song can reach.
He smiles at strangers
and forgets my name.
What good is a ballad
to a man who no longer knows
he once held the boy who wrote it?

And I never sang for my son – 
afraid, perhaps, 
that my notes would falter in his gaze,
or that he’d hear my father in my voice
and close his heart like I once did.
So I spoke in instructions,
in warnings,
in tired clichés.
He learned to make his own music,
wilder, braver,
full of echoes I never taught him.
Now he sings songs
I’ll never understand.
And when I try to hum along,
he only nods – 
already gone.

So I am left with the silence
between generations,
a hush that swells with all
the songs I never sang – 
too proud, too late,
too human.

And still,
the music waits.

BREATH AND SALT

I held my father’s hand,
dry as paper left too long in the sun,
and asked him how he was feeling.

The doctors have named what remains
after glioblastoma,
a word that eats its own syllables.
They say there is nothing there
that answers.

He looked at me,
not through me,
not beyond,
as if sight were a habit
the body had not yet unlearned.

Then his face crumpled.
No sound.
No heaving of the chest.
Just the small, stunned collapse
of features that once held command.

I have never seen him cry.
Not when money was thin.
Not in anger, not in defeat.
His griefs were private rooms
he entered alone.

And now,
with language gone,
with memory possibly ash,
with nothing left but the measured breath
of a body performing its last duty,
water rises from somewhere.

Where does it come from
when the mind is rubble?
What seam does it find
in the rock of him?

Is there a nerve that remembers
before thought begins,
a river older than speech
that runs beneath the subconscious?

Or was it only this:
a son’s touch,
the warmth of skin,
a touch the body knew
even if the name had fled.

If this is all that remains,
breath and salt water,
perhaps it is enough.

Something in that ruined house
still answers.

BENEATH THE ROOTS, HE BREATHES

You once stood like this tree,
vast, sheltering,
a whole sky folded in your shade.
Your voice was the wind’s direction,
your laughter, the afternoon’s warmth.

Now the years have gathered around you
like roots tightening their embrace,
drawing you inward
to a silence so complete
that even light pauses before touching you.

I watch the banyan bend in the evening,
its limbs heavy with old knowing,
its leaves trembling
as if trying to recall the sound of rain.
And I think of you,
of how memory curls into itself,
how strength becomes stillness,
and how stillness begins to speak.

Sometimes a gust moves through the hanging roots,
and they sway like voices returning,
soft, uncertain, but yours.
For a breath, I see you again
in the tender motion of air and dust,
in the gold that filters through tired leaves.

Then the quiet deepens.
The earth closes its eyes.
But I know: beneath the roots,
you breathe,
slowly, endlessly,
in the dark hum of life
that will never stop remembering you.


BABUJI

(‘But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and scattered noises’ – Rainer Rilke, For the Sake of a Single Poem)

I sat there,
counting breaths that would not return,
learning too late the grammar of endings,
how a room keeps speaking
after the voice is gone.

I would have bartered every poem,
every careful line I have ever written,
for one more ordinary evening,
you in your chair,
the small, unremarkable comfort of you.

You were never my hero:
perhaps no father survives that burden.
We sparred in silences,
in words that came out wrong,
in distances we did not know how to cross.

And now I watch my son
measure me with the same uncertain gaze,
feel the old inheritance stir,
how love arrives disguised as resistance,
how closeness learns to hide.

In some other life I remember:
your hand steadying my first steps,
the improbable height of your shoulders,
the world suddenly navigable from there.
Books carried home like quiet gifts:
my first Tintin,
a flicker of another world in an English film,
your way of saying more than you could say.

In this open window of memory,
you are both near and unreachable,
a presence made of fragments,
a man I am still learning to know
by losing him.

If poems must come of this,
let them be only this much:
that I saw you,
not as hero, not as absence,
but as the unfinished sentence
I continue,
now with my son.


WHERE THE LIGHT REFUSES CONSOLATION

Not the map, no, that went earlier,
in smaller vanishings: a street misnamed,
a face I almost knew, the habit of return.
What remains is a brightness that refuses to console,
a white insistence, corridors rinsed of weather,
where even footsteps forget their owners.

I had thought the body was a country,
its rivers keeping faith with their sources,
its borders held. But here the light
remembers only surfaces. It lays its quiet hand
on everything until names fall away,
until even the simplest gesture, your turning,
becomes an unreadable script.

How carefully the instruments wait,
how the metal keeps its counsel.
A window admits a sky without story;
it does not lower itself to us.
And you, who taught me the grammar of distances,
have entered a place where language does not follow.

Is it cold where you are, or is that a word
we bring with us, like a coat we cannot remove?
Is loneliness a room, or only the echo
of our own calling when there is no reply?
I stand at the edge of what can be asked
and feel the questions thinning in my hands.

Something has been entrusted to this silence,
not knowledge, not comfort, but a steadiness
that does not depend on our keeping.
The light continues its patient labour,
writing with no ink on the open page of you,
and I, unlettered, learn to read by losing.


FOR BABUJI
(After Rilke: I have my dead and I have let them go)

I carry my dead within me,
or so I tell the hours that return unchanged.
But you lie where no hour enters,
in that sealed and patient cold,
among the others who have also finished speaking.

How strange to think of you there:
you, who moved through days as if pursued
by some stern, invisible creditor of time,
hands always occupied,
breath always given to the next necessity.

Rest was a language you mistrusted.
And now they have translated you into rest.
They have placed you carefully
into the architecture of silence,
where even your name cannot stir the air.

Is it peace, this unanswering, a kind of completion
that the living cannot comprehend?
I stand outside it, asking,
like one who presses his ear
to a locked room and calls it listening.

I remember your face
in that last, narrow crossing,
how it seemed already to belong elsewhere,
as if it had withdrawn its light
just beyond our reach.

And I, who had so many days
to ask you simple things,
arrived too late,
with the simplest of all:
were you happy?

The question circles now,
a bird without landing,
over the fields of what cannot answer,
its shadow passing again and again
over the same unyielding ground.

At home, the cups are set out as always.
The evening arranges itself
with habitual care:
the news murmurs its small urgencies,
plates meet, laughter rehearses its part.

We move within these gestures
as though they were sufficient shelter,
as though the air were not altered.
But there is a space
that does not close.

A shape the size of your absence
pressing against each room,
entering even our voices
with its quiet resistance.
We say: life continues.

We say: he would have wanted this.
And yet something in us
stands aside from these sentences,
watching them pass
like strangers who resemble us.

If there is a country now
that has taken you in,
may it be gentler than the one
you laboured through.
May it release your hands

from their long obedience,
and teach them the patience
of simply being.
And if, in that far composure,
there is any memory of us,

let it not trouble your rest
that we remain unfinished,
still learning how to live
around the silence
where you once spoke.


DUSK DOES NOT ARRIVE 

Dusk does not arrive.
It gathers.

First in the corners of windows,
where light loosens its grip
like an old man releasing a handrail.
Then in the silence between utensils,
at the chair that no longer holds your shape,
in the unclaimed cup cooling beside the sink.

Daytime is merciful.
It keeps accounts,
asks for errands, receipts, phone calls,
gives the body small instructions
so the heart may postpone its knowledge.

But evening,
evening remembers.

It leans against the doorway with your absence
folded carefully in its arms.
The hour you once settled your work aside
now arrives alone.
Even the walls seem to wait
for the cough, the footstep,
the ordinary clearing of a throat
that once stitched the house together.

You have been gone only ten days, Babuji,
and already dusk has learned your name.

The sky bruises slowly each night,
as though grief itself were a colour
too large to reveal all at once.
Birds cross overhead in unfinished sentences.
The first star appears
with the hesitation of bad news.

I did not know
how much of love lived in routine:
the sound of a newspaper turning,
tea poured into two cups,
the question asked from another room
with no need for reply.

Now every evening widens around what is missing.

And what terrifies me most
is not these ten days,
but the lifetime gathering behind them,
an endless procession of dusks
carrying your absence forward,
year after year,
like men bearing a river on their shoulders.

How am I to cross them all?

Tonight the house darkens gently.
Somewhere, someone is calling their father to dinner.
Somewhere, a door opens without sorrow.

Here, the lamps come on one by one
like small acts of resistance.

And I sit inside their trembling circles of light,
learning that grief is not the storm,
it is the evening after,
when the world continues softly,
almost tenderly,
without the one it was built around.


DAD SPEAKS FROM THE COLD ROOM

Do not think of me as abandoned here
among the numbered wrists,
the sheets drawn up with that indifferent care
the living reserve for the newly silent.
The cold is only another weather now.
I have known harsher climates than this.

Around me lie those
who also arrived emptied of names,
their mouths still carrying
the last shape of astonishment.
At night – if one can still call it night
where no darkness changes –
we seem almost companionable,
as workers waiting before dawn
for some shift no one explains.

Do not grieve the room itself.
I have stood in narrower places.
There were years that closed like iron gates,
months worn thin by the arithmetic of want,
humiliations swallowed like medicine,
and finally that slow erasure
inside the kingdom of the brain,
where even the simplest word
became a distant relative.

Yet listen:
when the final breath came,
you were all there.

Not as witnesses gathered
for a grand departure –
death refuses such theatre –
but simply as the ones
whose faces had worn paths into me
through decades of looking.
Your hands moved about the bed
with that helpless tenderness
which, at the end, outlives language itself.

And though suffering is not balanced
like an account book,
though one moment cannot repay a lifetime,
still there was something completed there.
Not redeemed –
the world is not so easily persuaded –
but gathered.
A man may live under great weight
and yet leave the earth
without loneliness.
Do not ask for more exact justice than this.

Now students will open
what illness sealed shut.
They will search the dim corridors
where the tumour flowered in secret,
their young hands learning
how fragile the lamps of the body are.
Let them learn.
I have already carried this flesh
as far as it could go.

And you,
do not build for me
too bright a kingdom of memory.
Remember instead
the ordinary persistence of things:
how morning kept returning
even to our most difficult rooms,
how we continued,
awkwardly, faithfully,
to laugh and cry with one another,
to wait at doors,
to call each other home.

I am not far from that.
The dead do not travel far.
We remain pressed lightly
into the lives that formed us,
like breath left briefly
on a winter pane.