PANKHURI SINHA

PANKHURI SINHA

The Huge Ironies

The huge ironies

Are persisting

Overwhelming

That you wish to be out

Out and wired

With your laptop

There is no pull

Like the pull of the café

Its magnetic

It pulls you towards itself

With a force greater than gravity

And yet

You cannot

For you suddenly

Simply cannot afford it

Suddenly

All fortunes have changed

And the café is not the only thing

Out of reach

The food courts

The sunny bench in the park

Even the bench

Outside the mall

Such is public stalking

Vigilance

Disturbance

Being left

With questions about reasons

Does not help.

Wander

Walk again

Wander

In the alleys of other people’s home

For it is another gorgeous fall day

The colors

They change each day

Deepen, darken

Leaves crunch under your feet

Leaves fall around you

Trees bare themselves

Brace for winter

A year is about to pass

Walk again

In the alleys of other people’s home

Or just sit and type

Sit here, yes, right here

Type

Imprint

Document

Tell us, they say

Of their torture

Send us evidence

Send them

The story of what’s happening

But what’s happening

You type and type

Get nowhere

The tv

Right infront

Shows all about tracking

Tracking through phone calls

Devices

Police gadgets

Apparatus

But sit and type

Of how the surveillance around you works

Type with untrimmed nails

Type before trimming them

Cutting your nails

Little things, no colors

No polish

No rings

No promises

Vacant empty fingers

With the metaphor of nail trimming

Cutting, having become very large

In the language of espionage

Some said, some felt

Nails of people

Digging occasionally in your flesh

Your own being pulled out

Are they?

Or anytime now?

All gone?

Fall leaves

Yet another fall day

Wander

Or type some more

Just taking notes

Recording

Data collection almost

Of perpetrated torture

Inflicted

Imposed

Inescapable

Permeating….

Suffocating

Torture

Or walk again

In the alleys of other people’s homes

For you lost your own

But you live here too

Renting a flat or a room

Who makes it then

A purpose out of fighting landlordism?

Intravenous Feeding

Finding again

In the new rental accommodation

That same equation

Of crime and vulnerability

Being told

Almost at the same time

Of authoritarianism

Perpetrating itself

Dishing forth culpability

Putting you

In strange garbs of misery

And might

In the language of a compulsive wife beater

Or the love of a compulsive wife beater

Inflict more misery

Alarming messages

Coming from strange sources

Finding again

In the new rented place

An overly sweetened sauce

Of things not meant to be put together

Like espionage and residence

Compromise

An overly sweetened sauce

Being fed

In an intravenous manner …..

All over again

Of someone

Controlling completely

And pleading innocence.

Calling Upon Fever

Calling upon fever

With a million gadgets of control

Wired in

Almost to your body

Or to your naked brain

With all its soft and delicate tissues

Ruffled, trespassed, electrocuted

Beautiful thoughts

Stored for the next day

All images

Pictures

Deleted almost

Sent away

Cannot be recalled

Vanished

Disappeared in far off places

The fading of human memory

The end of the game

Fever calls

Why do they do it?

The Waiting Before The Court

The waiting before the court

For that very elite force to arrive

You could hear the prison door open

It was a musical metalic sound

Like the opening of gates

Like the arrival of hope

Like the seeing of a way

Like the sighting of light

And then there were the handcuffs

But before that

The prisoner’s cell door opened

It sounded harsher

Like negotiating between compromised rights

The officer of the state

Very politely asked you

To let him know

If the handcuffs were loose or tight

But it was not his politeness

That mattered in the moment

It was in the way in which you offered

You stretched your arms

Like you had been dragged

From the wedding aisle

Like your bracelets had just now been taken off

Like your wrists looked so tender

They could be slit off by anyone

But there was something very human

Humane

In the officer’s question

It represented the first world code

Of treating its prisoner kind

And that is a very important code.

PANKHURI SINHA

PANKHURI SINHA is a bilingual writer, although she writes more in her mother tongue Hindi than in English. Her first award is for her Hindi poetry “Ek naya maun, ek naya udghosh’ for which she received the Prestigious Girija Kumar Mathur award in 1995, while studying in BA  Honours part II, in Indraprastha College, Delhi University. Her first two books are collections of stories published in 2006 and 2008, with Gyanpith, a very prestigious name in Hindi publishing. Both these collections have received the love of readers and critical acclaim. She then, went on to publish two collections of Poems in English, Prison Talkies in 2013 and Dear Suzannah in 2014, both with Xlibris, Indiana. Since then, she has published four collections of poems in Hindi, Raktim Sandhiyan, Bahas Paar ki Lambi Dhoop, Pratyancha, and most recently, Geetil Raatein. She has also received numerous prestigious awards in between---Chitra Kumar Shailesh Matiyani Samman in 2007 for her first story collection koi-bhi-din, Rajeev Gandhi Excellence Award in 2013 for outstanding achievements in writing by Seemapuri Times, First Prize for poetry by Rajasthan Patrika in 2017, Pratilipi Kavita Award and many other prestigious awards. She is a student and teacher of Modern British History, currently teaching in a government college in Bihar, India. She did her Master’s in History from SUNY Buffalo in 2007. She has an incomplete Phd from University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada, which she plans to finish in the near future. She received the Dean’s entrance fellowship at the time of her admission in the Phd programme in 2008 in the University of Calgary. Her poems have been translated in several Indian languages like Bengali, Marathi and languages abroad like Spanish, Serbian, Nepali, Turkish, Czech and Romanian. These Poems have also been published in magazines of these languages. She herself has translated Hungarian, Romanian, Serbian, Italian and Turkish poets. She also translated stories by Ramnika Gupta from Hindi to English, and the interview of reputed Indian theatre personality Ratan Thiyam by Udayan Vajpai from Hindi to English. She is also a freelance journalist and has interviewed several top politicians and writers like Shashi Tharoor, Mahesh Sharma, Mark Tully, the German dancer Anne Dietrich, Professor Critic Dr Margaret Koves, Prof Istvan Voros.