Poetry: Vidya Hariharan

Vidya Hariharan

Late Nights and Early Mornings

Late nights are busy nights, 

Others sleep or toss and turn,

It makes no difference,

As long as they are far away,

And their ghosts do not interfere with mine.

Reading, thinking, imagining 

Is easier and fuller in the night.

Squares, rectangles and pinpricks of light 

From other restless rooms

Keep me company sometimes,

At other moments, exist in the periphery.

This city doesn’t sleep, truly.

This city cannot rest, completely. 

This city writhes within me-

An entity compelling me to stay up,

And keep watch, its spirit palpable.

So, early mornings are strangers to me.

***

Tomato Chutney

Ripe, red tomatoes, rinsed and chopped, 

Lay on the board, ready for the wok,

Sugar, chili powder, cumin and salt,

Ranged in a row on the granite top.

The gas turned on, ready for the pan, 

Steam from the water rose up and ran

In rivulets on the glasses perched on her nose,

gently she scraped the tomatoes

into the pan and added the spices, 

letting them simmer and cook 

till the bubbles rose up, and she screamed,

“Dinner’s ready!” Her children came 

One by one; ate silent, with head bowed

They failed to see the chutney red

Smeared to one side of their Ma’s forehead.

***

Contemplations of a Death Row Inmate

fresh laundered shirt

her perfume 

on my skin

lingering 

ghost of her touch

beneath my collar

fleeting

a memory 

complicated knot

of the tie she tied

laughing

shaking her head

gently

resting on my 

sternum

whimsy playing

on my lips

as I enter

Death row.

***

Bio: Dr Vidya Hariharan is an enthusiastic traveller, coffee guzzler and manic reader. The poetry gene jumped two generations as her great grandfather P.S. Rama Iyer was a Malayalam language poet and author. She lives and works as a lecturer in Mumbai, India. Some of her prose and poems can be found on Poem Hunter, Café Dissensus, Setu, Muse India’s Your Space, Glomag, Borderless, Mayari Literature, Poetry Super Highway, Poems India, Contemporary Haiku Online, Pan Haiku Review and Under the Basho. Her poems “Beauty” and “Open Heart Surgery” have been selected as Editor’s Pick for July and September 2024 respectively. She also won the Editor’s Choice Award for her haiku from Under the Basho in 2024.

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Setu, July 2025