Vinita Agrawal (Voices Within)

Vinita Agrawal is an award winning author of four books of poetry. Her work has been widely published and anthologised. She was editor of TheWomanInc for three years. Her poem won the Tall Grass Writers Guild Award, Chicago and the Proverse Hongkong Poetry Prize. She was also awarded the Gayatri GaMarsh Prize for literary excellence. She curates literary events for PEN Mumbai. She has assisted in curating a section of the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival 2020. She is on the advisory board of the Tagore Literary Prize. 

Mumbai 

A very dark sky but no rain 

and the burden of knowing too much.

Cramped, shadowy spaces,

living-units in short supply.

Mumbai -

where a room is a house.

A solitary nameplate 

against a solitary pigeon hole.

Men dream of wheat fields

women of fresh air and sweat-free afternoons.

They want to raise english-speaking kids here.

The sun-dolloped, Laburnum sea cushions their aches.

Local trains hoot through the suffocation, 

commuters lolling from splayed doors like tongues

for breeze, just breeze.

The Traveller Inside You

Not everyone knows what it means

that pale opal play of light 

on which a cartographer leans

as he sails away one night.

What does he hope for when clear 

that death curates the tide of life?

When biennales mark with a smear

the thin scimitar moon of strife.

Bosons of gems he finds in jars

And beauty sails against the wind 

Capella that bright golden star

lies to the lissome black night pinned.

The brave explorer does not know

what is real or what is false

What will he do, where will he go

what if the allure fades and palls?

To travel a mystic distance

is all that his blood seeks to do 

To that inner call he listens 

like the traveller inside you.

Gunjiyas

It isn't just food

this melting sweetness 

encrusted in a crisp pastry

murmuring in the mouth.

For the filling, the red-brown charoli 

dots the desiccated coconut, slivered almonds, 

khoya, powdered sugar 

and raisins (as soft as your eyes).

Delicately encased in half moons of pastry,

sealed and fried to the colour of raw silk.

The crests in the painstakingly crimped dough

that forms its decorative edges

appear to me like the peaks of our tender bond.

No, 

these aren’t Gunjiyas that you've prepared today,

this in your fourth stage

when the doctors say 

you might find it hard to breathe.

So when you offer the sweets

to me and say

‘I made you your favourite treat’,

I realise that I’m going to taste 

tangible love.

---

Voices Within-2020 :: Setu, February 2020