0.10 Expressions :
The Home and The World
Photographs by Ronald Tuhin D'Rozario
Take some time to observe these prompts and let your thoughts flow. Try to create a poem, short story or any form of written expression that your thoughts inspire. Whether it's a few lines or a few pages, there are no limits to your creativity. Share your draft with us at mysticetimagazine@gmail.com to get featured in our Expressions space.
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I captured a series of seven photographs of a pigeon searching for twigs and gathering them to build a home. I call it 'Ghare-Baire' / 'The Home and The World,' a title from Satyajit Ray's film.
Ronald Tuhin D'Rozario
create
solitude
nurture
search
journey
sanctuary
home
The pinch of household grief
/ under-expressed, over felt /
by Sanjana Mukund
Three hundred-odd books
Oddly chosen, mindlessly arranged
In gliding shelves of a rosewood case
Novels, biographies, textbooks and guides
Romance, philosophy, business, spirituality
The daughter walks past ruffling
Wispy pages
Peppered with years of dust, neglect, wistful ignorance
Grief smirks in the flutter of her parental relationship
A falling copy
1998, Bangalore airport
Scrawled into the unassuming margins
Of a soft bound Shobhaa De
She picks that which she has been dealt
While
The room next door pays witness to
Newspapers, brushes, brooms and dustpans
Cartons of collective documentation
Bills, insurance, agreements, a tissue or two
Signed, forgotten, misnomered, damp
The wife voids her emptiness
With the weight of paperwork and legal respite
She closes
The mirrored wardrobe in her marital bedroom
Yearning for a chance to reflect
A sane conversation
Grief moistens as she wipes
Unforgiving tears a millionth time
A third tissue to her rescue
Grief bites as she holds
The chambers of a heart that froze
To a husband who never came home
As lunch approaches, the dine pays heed
Rajma chawal to the accompaniment
Of freshly churned homemade, white butter
The mother laments
And pains every time she lights
The embers of gas in her familial kitchen
Grief cackles as do the flames on her stovetop
Dancing to mock
A final meal to her dear son
She could not feed
Grief, like that of a shedding snake
Peels its sedimentary layers
Only to be renewed with a vengeance
A vengeance to be carried lifelong
Until perhaps, one day
The one who holds the grief Is grieved.
September 16, 2023.
Crumbs
By Gowri N Kishore
I trace constellations
on the granight sky
of my kitchen
countertop.
A bit of peel from roasted peanuts,
a pregnant lemon seed;
A wisp of coriander,
not yet wilted,
A sliver of beaten red rice flake.
They form Prandia Majora,
a name I like
more than Late Breakfast.
The sky brow clears for a moment.
A stray sunbeam falls
across my starry points.
Fat dust motes dance attendance.
That instant is morning, noon, and night.
And I wipe out the night sky
with a faded microfiber cloth.
My house is a library of all the people I am.
By Swapnil
To Bougs, my love, my cradle and my home.
The place that birthed the Word.
There is a rom-com hiding somewhere. There are thrillers, philosophy and cheap erotica, the kind you find on trains. There are the books that are there because a boy I liked, liked them and there is the soft kind of philosophy masquerading in the science fiction.
There are books I borrow for a day, books I borrow for two months, and books that are borrowed but never returned. ‘Loaned for an indefinite time’.
There are books are desired and saved for, penny and penny collected for them, but never bought home.
And then there are the books that I come back to and discard. Paperbacks that are picked for a moment before I decide to put them back and then there are the ones that catch dust for ages and then are picked one day and stay.
​
All my selves housed in different shelves, in different forms and different states.
There are some which are out of print.
There are some which only come out in the middle of the night, and some that are made for when the dawn hits that blue.
There are a few that long to meet the coffee and a few that the coffee hopes to find.
There are some that I have now wrapped up neatly in brown paper. There looms the strange presence of the absent ones, the ones that were lent to people and never came back. Loss, truly, is the ultimate embalmer for immortality.
Some have stayed only because of the dedications. Though who am I kidding, there is nothing that could have been discarded from this library.
It’s a library of people that I am, could be, have been.
It’s a library so naked that I’d flinch on it being witnessed by someone. Each corner of my house, a chapter. Each plant, dead or alive, a sonnet I wasn’t ready to call complete.
My innards like the pages strewn across, ready to be read. The secrets all out, the cipher next to the code.
We leave traces of ourselves in the places we’ve been. I wrote epigraphs and epitaphs and maps to myself. My fortune and my horoscope. My tragedy and my comedy all rolled into one. Like Borges’ library of Babylon, all the possibilities and all my realities housed in a house. A little home putting all my selves to sleep.
For that, for containing the multitudes and varieties and possibilities of my different selves, for being the kaleidoscope of whatever I can conceive of whatever ‘I’ means.
For that my heart, my soul, my bed, I offer you your own gifts. The key to the map that rests with you.
​
A tender heart washed clean. Like a cat licking you to sleep.
I have found a home
by Aakansha Ahirwar
I have turned around many tables,
the pink ones, the whites, the blues;
and have sat on those few
that were placed in greenland always
covered with some dew.
These plastic tables would bear my weight,
the mud ones would break
and i would fall and crack like glass utensils
then nothing else I would take.
My first memory is clear
I was making tunnels in sand,
pouring water quietly when needed
from the scorching land.
I was a bud surrounded by flowers
as if pillars branching from a tree
I played with friends on gates
but I never bruised my knee.
I lost myself in colours plenty times
one shoe, two shoes. three foot-
and loved to rhyme.
I loved singing songs but never from beginning
always to join singing with a fellow being.
I lived in a small town
that started with a narrow beam
like i was born from my mother
on maybe a Thursday eve.
It was red and yellow
with glowing rivers inside
where i swam and swam
like a lamb O bright.
I live outside now
and miss the warm dome
wherein i lived for nine months
that i now reminisce- now that i've grown.
I have found a home
I have found a home
on a street that walks till me
where i can play on sand like i did with my mother
and belong there until I please.
MYSTICETI AND FRIENDS:
Ronald Tuhin D'Rozario lives in Calcutta. He writes stories, poems, and essays. You can read them at: https://linktr.ee/ronaldtuhindrozario
Sanjana is a marketing graduate based in Bangalore. She loves to read, travel and explore different forms of art.
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Swapnil, (moonlights as Crookshanks), is an architect and writer currently based in Goa. Curiosity and cats are her guiding lights and her primary area of work is spatial justice.
Gowri is a communication strategist, writer and editor. Visit her website to learn more about her work: https://gowrink.com/
Aakansha lives in Jhansi. She loves writing, reading poetry, listening to music, and painting.
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