Bleeding Ink: The Unwritten Grammar of Pain in Rukhaya M K’s Lost Canvas

Reviewer:  Wani Nazir

Book Name:  Lost Canvas

Author: Rukhaya M K

Publisher:     Red River

Year of Publication: 2025

Pp: 150

ISBN: 978-8197630402

Forget about all the highbrow literary jargon—Rukhaya M K’s Lost Canvas is a straight-up gut punch. There is nothing sugar-coated here. No lovesick diary scribbles, no delicate confessions. No. This is raw, it is brutally honest, and it is all about juggling two worlds, drowning in questions of “Where do I fit?” and the never-ending mess of womanhood in a place that is supposed to be free, but honestly? Feels more like a maze of unwritten rules. Her poems? Damn, they hit hard. Each one feels like a snapshot—some cracked, some so sharp they draw blood, but every single one feels real in the way a midnight breakdown does. Rukaya’s tearing open old wounds, letting the ugliness ooze out, and trying to stitch it all back together. You end up holding a piece of her soul, splintered and bleeding onto the page.

Wani Nazir

This whole “canvas” thing? It is like life has been run through a cheap washing machine—colours faded, edges frayed, everything washed out till you can barely see what is left. Even the good stuff gets steamrolled by this greyness. It is all slipping away. Check out these lines:

Life now seemed 

black and white, 

like my paintings — dead. 

Hues on the canvas 

dribbled down to gravity, 

trickling with it 

the curves of a smile

See what I mean? This isn’t just fancy talk about art. This is real life, stripped of colour and warmth. It is not just physics; it is the heaviness you feel when happiness just won't stick around. That smile? It doesn’t just vanish, it leaks out, slow and sad, like your heart has got a crack in it. The world weighs too much, and joy can’t unpack its bags here. The poems falling apart? Makes total sense. They are not just clever metaphors—they are little catastrophes that don’t shout, but settle quietly in your chest and refuse to move out.

The way she paints these scenes—kind of reminds me of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. After trauma, everything has dried up, language is dead, and you are left piecing together ruins. Rukhaya has got that vibe: even happiness feels heavy with the knowledge it won’t last. Her lines aren’t just pretty—they are the rubble of real life. The choppy syntax? That is what it feels like when you are barely holding it together, silent and stubborn.

And homesickness? For Rukhaya, it is not just about missing a place. It is bigger, messier, harder to shake. It is about never really fitting anywhere. She nails that limbo—after marriage, you are suddenly homeless in every way that matters. Old place? Gone. New place? Not really yours, either. You are always floating, never landing.

When I got married,

they told me now onwards

You belong to your hubby’s home;

and when I went there,

they always spoke of

where I came from,

Yes. You are from everywhere and nowhere. Welcome to womanhood. And it is exhausting, isn’t it? That sense of being unmoored—socially, emotionally, all of it—is like being told to build a home with no doors, no windows, just walls that keep moving. This push-pull between spaces—public/private, inherited/adopted—totally gives off Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie feel (think Americanah, with Ifemelu floating between worlds). But Rukaya doesn’t just describe it in prose—her poetry slices through the confusion like a razor. She draws a map of being lost.

And let’s talk about growing up. Periods? No celebration, just exile:

once below a time

when I found a huge stain

on my white-and-white,

and mom said: You have become big,

now onwards play

only with your cousin sisters

Congratulations, you are now a woman—translation: here are some new rules, and by the way, your childhood is over. Those “now onwards” moments? They hit like a freight train. No parties, just restrictions. Silence. Goodbye, innocence.

The pain of growing up female is baked into her bones—physical, social, mental. Sure, you could draw parallels to Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, where becoming a woman feels like suffocating under a pile of expectations. But while Plath simmers, Rukaya protests out loud—her rage is aimed squarely at society and its quiet betrayals. No flinching.

And don’t even get me started on memory. These aren’t your typical sweet flashbacks. They are shattered, refugee fragments. Think glitched-out home videos and burned-up photographs.

Your memory, 

a permanent refugee 

in what was once home

That line? It is got big Edward Said energy—exile as a state of mind, not just a place. Her memories don’t comfort; they haunt, stateless and wandering. Ghosts with nowhere to go.

Honestly, Lost Canvas isn’t just a book. It is a wound, still open, that you can’t help but poke.

Like this poem,

that becomes my own

only after I part with it on paper.

While inside me, it doesn’t exist.

One has to become

part of the diaspora,

to be called one’s own.

The poem in the book has got that wild, slippery thing going on—like, you don’t even own your words ‘til you toss them out into the world.’ Inside your head? They are ghosts. That is the diaspora vibe, right there: always orbiting, never quite landing in your own skin. It is not just about packing bags and finding new postcodes, it is about being exiled from yourself. Your body turns into someone else’s Airbnb. No wonder it stings.

Seriously, Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks? It is screaming in the background here. The split—voice, self, reflection—so loud you can’t un-hear it. Diaspora isn’t just a location thing. It is language, it is existence, it is that constant wobble under your feet. Rukhaya’s power comes from the fact that she never settles—her voice is loudest when it’s breaking.

And then, boom, the gut blow :

The real diaspora

is the one that

has lost the mother.

There is no return.

The real diaspora is not just distance, it is losing mom. Not just the lady who birthed you, but the motherland, the mother tongue, that first soft place you ever knew. You lose that? Game over, buddy. What is left to clutch when your origin either ghosts you or doesn’t even exist anymore? That emptiness? Congratulations, it is yours forever. Inheritance sucks sometimes.

Nature shows up in these poems—not the Disney kind, all huggy and warm, but cold as hell. It doesn’t care. Growing up is the same—everybody is hacking at your branches, and even the leaves are like “nah, not today.” Growth? More like dropping deadweight. It is rough.

I shake my branches

desperately,

but only

withered leaves fall

and turn words

as they touch the ground.

You try to soil my roots,

as I try to strike roots

in another soil

That is Morrison territory—Beloved echoes all over. Trying to anchor yourself after your whole world has been nuked, making words carry way more than they should. Rukaya gets it: language is both the knife and the bandage. Writing isn’t just venting, it is staking a claim.

The lines with the newspaper on the train:

Today

he was the newspaper

on the train

as he read it loud and clear:

Ah, the Bengaluru incident...

these things happen,’

stealing a glance at the girl

sitting next to him.

This guy is reading something horrible and he says in passing “these things happen.” Then he stares at the girl. It’s creepy. The poem is not very content, but you feel the size of people who do not care. It's basic, and that is real.

Then she comes swinging for the “oppressed woman” trope with the hijab poem:

My hijab is my window,

a window to the world.

The world says it limits my freedom,

freedom limited is yours

So good. Reminds me of Arundhati Roy—no such thing as “voiceless,” only folks who get muted on purpose. Rukaya isn’t waiting for your approval to wear her hijab or call it freedom. She is not here to perform suffering for your applause. Her hijab isn’t a muzzle—it is her megaphone, just dialled to a different frequency.

There is some sly humour in the sadness too—life “uninstalling itself”? That is bleak, but also kind of cheeky. Forget counting birthdays; we are counting body bags now. Scores of deaths per minute. Then there is Sylvia Plath salute:

Dying is an art, and like everything else,

I do it exceptionally well;

Lying is an art, and like everything else,

you do it exceptionally well.

Yes, you hear Plath—how could you not? But Rukhaya is not doing karaoke. She is twisting the knife. “I do it exceptionally well” lands like a slap. Sarcasm with brass knuckles. It is not just about pain—it is about betrayal, about gender, about how language can wreck you.

And the form—forget pretty poems. She tosses lines like broken bones, trashes rhythm, lets it rot. Why tidy it up? Life is a dumpster fire, so let the poem be a hot mess. That mess is the point. You want clean, you are asking her agony to get a haircut. No.

There is this excellent riff on Twain:

 

Who prays for Satan,

as Twain said,

the sinner, who needed it the most?

Darkness, sure, but she is asking: who gets denied empathy? Who do we write off as unredeemable? It is not just flipping the bird to authority—it is calling out the reader, making you squirm with your own judgy nonsense.

She is not playing the victim. It is more like—here is how to live wrong, loudly, with scars and awkward grammar. Who is unsalvageable? The girl on the edge, the body that doesn’t fit, the voice no one wants to hear. Nothing snaps together, nothing gets sanded smooth, and that is exactly the point.

You look down upon her

saying she came

off your rib

but innumerable times

after that —

you hailed from her womb.

Wo(man) can be destroyed

but never defeated.

That is Camus with a side of riot girl. She grabs Genesis, rips it up, and makes it her own punk anthem. Not about pretty endings or tidy lessons. Just surviving, out of spite. Persistence as protest. That is what sticks.

Life kicks off by ghosting itself, honestly. One second you are ticking along, the next—boom, time ditches the calendar and starts measuring things by body count, not birthdays. Grim?

Words? They play dress-up in old memories, swanning around all mysterious, only to yank off the mask and show up here, now, in your face. Sometimes I think those memories are just waiting to trip me up.

Life starts uninstalling itself.

Time stops counting itself

by the calendar,

but by scores

of death per minute

And poetry? It’s bleeding everywhere.

Words also wore

the veil of memories,

lifting the veil

at times solely for me

revealing itself as present.

Buy one, get one free—

with the wound,

salt was complimentary

Oh, that “salt was complimentary” bit? That is classic. You order a wound, and—surprise!—the universe tosses in a fistful of salt, on the house. Life is own sick joke. Thanks, I guess.

This whole mess isn’t neat. It lurches forward, all wild-eyed and unpredictable, like a subway at midnight with the lights flickering and the doors banging open. Rukhaya isn’t painting inside the lines; she is smearing silence and chaos across the canvas, leaving “i’s” undotted and “t’s” in tatters.

Lost canvas? Forget about pretty pictures. The real art is in the scraps—the stuff nobody bothered to finish, the stains nobody could scrub out. That is where the gold is. The stuff we leave unsaid, the half-formed aches, the bits we want to hide? Yes, they all get a front-row seat. This isn’t poetry that lets you off easy. It is jagged, raw, and doesn’t give a damn about rhyming—or making you comfortable. That is what makes it real.

***

 

Reviewer's Short Bio

A Kashmir University Postgraduate Gold medalist in English Literature, Wani Nazir, from Pulwama J&K India, is an alumnus of the University of Kashmir, Srinagar. He is the author of a poetic collection, “…and the silence whispered” and “The Chill in the Bones “. Presently working as a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Education, J&K, he has been writing both prose and poetry in English, Urdu and in his mother tongue Kashmiri. He is a voracious and wild reader and a reviewer. He contributes his brain-children-his poetry and prose in Kashur Qalam, The Significant League, Muse India e-Journal, Setu-a bilingual e-journal published from Pittsburgh, USA, Langlit & Literary Herald - both UGC approved journal, the Caffe Dissensus and Learning and Creativity – a Silhouette Magazine, the Dialogue Times – a journal published from London, and has been receiving laurels for his beautiful writings.

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Setu, September 2025