Tales of a Tattler

In 2020, Mumbai: the city that never sleeps, slumbered like a child. The railway halted, the bustles dissolved, and its "spirit" softened into tranquillity. An unfamiliar silence pervaded every corner and street. And behind every closed door, a different story quietly unfolded. This is one such story. A fragment of the moments, the memories, and the stillness that lingered among you and me. It is an elegy to all that was, all that could have been, and all that remains.

What is love? Ah, the age-old question. It’s difficult to define. Not because love is abstract, but because its definitions are ever-shifting. Love means different things to different people, at different times in their lives. This poem was born from my own reflections on that question. It comes from moments when I choose to set my guards aside, and experience the wholeness of love. It comes from those moments when love meant softness, patience, undemanding presence, and an ever-giving kind. It comes from a place of offering — of holding, without needing to hold on. Then, the moments passed. I returned to the definition I have always held: that love, no matter how generous, cannot exist without the self. And each time, I came back steadier, clearer, and more certain of what it means to give without diminishing. So, as I offer this poem, may it find its meaning in you. And may you find your current definition of love — whatever that may be — within it. Because no matter how it e...

They say, time and tide wait for none — yet a clock does, and so can a person. What happens when both pause? This story invites you into a moment of stillness to reflect on our relationship with time, the weight of productivity, the illusion of motion, and the quiet spaces between apathy and meaning.

I found the spark for this piece in one of the frames from The Parting of Ways by Sukanya Ghosh, displayed in the white aisle of Cymroza Art Gallery. Cigarette — a digital collage built from archival photographs, placed opposite a vintage wooden cupboard, stood out in its silence. It captured how time had not only tarnished the photos and the cigarette held by the faceless figure within the frame, but also the memories. Is not the present like that too? Here now, gone the next moment. Yet it leaves behind traces that stain us forever. Not in the vibrance of tomorrow, but in the quiet greyness of a faded yesterday. This poem is a return to the whispers that linger.

  Some bonds outlive time, even if distance and changes of life blur their edges. This story was written to honour the girl I might have been had I grown under my uncle's constant affection. It is a tribute: to those who held us before we learned to hold ourselves, to those in whose laughter we now see a reflection of who we once were, and to the selves we have grown into.    What follows is a soft acknowledgment of what was, what could have been, and what lives on — across generations, through names, and in love that knows how to grow and how to give.

We rarely notice the silent companions of our daily lives, those that stand by us, not in grand gestures, but in the most quiet and necessary ways. This poem is an ode to one such companion: my handkerchief. In this experimental work, I try to honour its silent services, and its soft presence of that makes moments of distress a little less heavy.