Poems from Across India

The river carries whispers of a thousand monsoons,
Past the mango groves where my grandmother hummed,
It remembers what we have forgotten —
The language of rain and the silence of dusk.

My pen is the only sword I carry to school,
sharper than hunger, mightier than rule.
They gave me a uniform but not a choice,
so I folded my anger into verse and voice.

हर रोटी में एक कहानी बंद है,
माँ की उँगलियों का प्यार उसमें मंद है,
जब भी भूख लगती है, याद आती है वो गोल थाली,
जिसमें था घी, प्यार और जीवन की हरियाली।

Where sunlight threads through ancient oak,
and silence teaches what textbooks forgot —
the grammar of wind, the syntax of roots,
spelling out a world in photosynthesis and shoots.

They dressed me in their hopes and called it education,
stitched in cotton and expectation.
But underneath the collar's chafe
blooms a self they never made safe.

When the first drop lands on dry earth,
the whole city holds its breath and prays —
even the dogs go quiet, even the crows retreat,
as the smell of petrichor turns the street to song.

One billion dreams turned skyward each night,
one billion candles refusing the dark.
If you counted us star by star
you'd run out of numbers before we ran out of heart.

Between the jasmine and the red hibiscus,
grandmother kept a garden that needed no words.
Her hands spoke — press, water, wait —
the only prayer that always bore fruit.

Fog erases the rooftops at 6 AM,
and for one hour, every street belongs to no one.
The milkman is a ghost with a bicycle,
and I am the only witness to this vanishing.

Eight million footsteps cross you daily,
each one carrying a hunger home —
for rice, for work, for someone's voice
calling from a lit window in the rain.

March is the cruelest month —
not for Eliot, but for us,
who sit in borrowed light
memorizing answers to questions nobody asked.

Purani haveli ke darwaze par
ek raat phir dastak di usne —
shaayad woh hai jo kabhi gaya tha,
ya main hi hun jo laut aayi.