Carnivorous Cavern

Water swirled, milled around, whispered,
roared. Eroded. Penetrating the deep cracks
of earth. As deep as roots of trees.
Water that came from far away frozen icelands
where sheet upon sheet of ice melted,
under the glare of the hot burning sweltering sun
and gases which made the earth nauseous
and turned it sick into water. An abundance of water
now filled the oceans. The first floods were in the oceans. 
The oceans overspilled their boundaries,
encroached upon land. The oceans ate up the land.
The swirling waters were persistent. They loosened
up the earth, the soil swept it into the ocean.
And the water created a cavern. Below the tree.
A cavern of roots, always buried in the earth,
suddenly exposed to air. A cavern with roots as temple pillars, 
which humans had pillaged and pilloried. The water ate up the land.
Underground roots were now exposed to air.
The tree still clung on desperately to its roots,
to life. Resisting gravity. Resisting being swept out into the ocean,
 resisting death. Its frail tenacity is combating men.

About the Poet:

Shruti Sareen, born and brought up in Varanasi, studied at Rajghat Besant School, KFI. Graduating in English from Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi, she later earned a PhD from the same university, titled “Indian Feminisms in the 21^st Century: Women’s Poetry in English” based on which two monographs from Routledge are forthcoming. Her debut poetry collection, A Witch Like You, was published by Girls on Key Poetry (Australia) in 2021. Her fictional memoir The Yellow Wall is forthcoming. She is working on a series of love-letters, Sapphic Epistles(?), as well as a collection of speculative fiction, Berserk Banshees(?). She was an invited poet at global poetry festival, hosted by Russia, Poeisia-21.  She lives and teaches in New Delhi– whenever she manages to get a job! So far, she has mainly taught in Dyal Singh College, Delhi University, and at Jamia Millia Islamia. 

The post Poems by Shruti Sareen first appeared on Prachya Review.

I woke up at 11 am and lay in bed, crying for the next two hours until I finally talked to my friend at 1 pm. There just seemed to be no meaning in living life on this planet of misery and cruelty. There seemed no point in getting out of bed. At this point, my friend and I decided that this was going too far. This seemed to be something like clinical depression, which would probably require medication as well as psychotherapy. It was early January, five whole months from early July when I had become obsessed with a particular question that had eventually sucked me into the black hole. 

The question which had obsessed me with requires a bit of explanatory background. I had been in love with a woman for ten long years (eighteen plus now and probably lifelong). She also happened to be my teacher. A daughter of divorced parents, I had come to college as a super naïve eighteen-year-old in this huge metropolitan city of Delhi and had fallen head over heels in love with the one person who seemed to understand my predicament, my problems, and who had taken it upon herself to be kind to me. Two years before this, when it had been eight years of being in love instead of ten, I had gone through the most harrowing experience of my life when I had been accused of stalking her and had disciplinary action taken against me in the college. This had followed a long sixty-four-page handwritten letter that I had left outside her house. Incidentally, this was also the time of the 16^th December 2012 gangrape in Delhi. Everyone on my Facebook newsfeed was talking about how it all began with an attitude of harassment, and rape was only the culmination of such an attitude. They wrote Facebook statuses on how sexual harassment was the root of the act of rape. I, thus, had a reaction to this incident that was probably different from everyone else’s reactions in the entire country. I thought there was no difference between the gang rapists and me. I did not know whether it behove me to go for a protest against the gangrape or not. I had ridiculous thoughts of Modi starting a WW3 and of the college, building falling down like the London Bridge in the nursery rhyme before I could frequent it the way I used to. 

 I had been idealizing, idolizing, adoring, and loving this woman for a long time now. I had the commitment of a lifetime, the kind seen in marriage. The biggest compliment you could give me was to liken me to her. Now one day, in that fateful early July, two years after the sequence of events mentioned above, I happened to realize that someone had apparently put up the picture of a cut goat’s head on Facebook, where she had commented saying that the goat “seemed to be smiling”. The discussion was about certain Right-wing people who said that eating meat was not “Indian” and, according to the discourse these days, was something “anti-national”. Now, I, as a vegetarian, could simply not understand her comment about the dead goat smiling. Did the stupid woman really think that the goat enjoyed getting killed and would smile at the idea of it? Wasn’t she trivializing death, which was, after all, death? I saw another girl writing that although she was a vegetarian, she was beginning to understand that the industry gave a lot of jobs to lower class and lower caste people who would have no place to go to otherwise, and therefore justified the practice of eating meat, especially in a country like India where most animal breeders were still small farmers. And the woman, as in my teacher, had “liked” this comment. 

That was all. That was all that happened, outwardly, at least. Inwardly, it triggered off a series of events that eventually led to clinical depression. The reader must remember that this was the woman whom I idealized. My psychotherapist told me, much later, that the way I looked at her was the way a very small child, say two years old, would look at his/her mother. It made sense to me to be told that I looked at her the way a two-year-old looked to its mother. I also knew inwardly that this was very selfish child love, it was probably not the way an adult loves another adult. According to the therapist, traumatic and stressful events can make us regress at times, and my parent’s divorce made me regress from the age of thirteen to something nearer the age of three.

 Anyway, I, as a vegetarian, simply couldn’t believe how this woman I adored could say something like this. At this point, I think I went a little mad. I had no contact with this woman. My mind started playing games with me. My mind started telling me that this woman was a cruel, unfeeling woman, that I had naively fallen in love with her and had got trapped into the net, that the kindness she had shown me earlier was only a garb. I also wondered how a passionate bird-lover like her could not understand such a thing. It was then that I really got obsessed with the issue of eating meat. I voraciously read articles on the internet, and I read J M Coetzee’s books that deal with this topic. I began to understand that this occupation gave jobs to thousands of fishermen and butchers and leather workers and silk-weavers. I began to understand that this system of being a vegetarian had been used to oppress Dalits for centuries. I understood that animals do eat animals. I read that animals die even during farming when fields are ploughed by tractors and when pesticides are spread on crops. I realized that for certain parts of the world, it was perhaps not really possible to become a vegetarian. Though emotionally, my gut instinct was still that of a vegetarian, I cerebrally and rationally tried to understand the opposite perspective. And yes, I desperately tried to tell myself that the woman I loved, adored, and idealized was not wrong. All this, however, changed when I realized that there is something called industrial farming of animals. These industrial factory farms are mostly owned by multinational corporations in the West such as McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Domino’s, and Pizza Hut, which then spread out their branches to other developing countries of the Third World. I learnt that there was something called debeaking, where beaks of chicks were cut with a hot flame by a huge machine so that they could not peck. But it was the birds’ nature to peck! I learnt that they were kept in something called “battery cages” where they had no room even to turn their neck, let alone walk. I learnt that pigs and sheep had their tails cut because they took up space. I learnt that pigs were hanged upside down from something called “production lines” in order to kill them. I learnt that there was something called “foie gras” where ducks and geese were force fed with pellets to such an extent that they became ten times their usual size, and sometimes, the ducks and geese even burst with the amount of food that were made to eat. I learnt that there was something called artificial hormones for which horses were killed so that the hormones of the horses could be injected into the bodies of the pigs. I learnt that all over the world, they killed seals for fur, and trapped horses and elephants in narrow enclosures, and a hundred other things they did for … for what? For-profit. For that God of mammon called money and wealth, which we humans worship. This might only be natural to expect from humans, who oppress even their fellow human beings in the most vicious ways. We human beings can make unions can raise our voices and protest, but these animals would never be able to communicate to these human beings what they wanted to say. 

 I thus decided to make a difference between production and consumption. The consumption of meat was not wrong in itself. But the way it is produced made it a torturous process. So much so that I became guilty even of the eggs and milk, I was consuming as a vegetarian. I felt guilty because of this entire process of violence in which I was implicated without choice or wish. I realized that this process of production is violent everywhere, in the production of our clothes as well as our chocolates, and was not confined to animal farming alone. I was angry at being made a pawn in this circle of cruelty which I did not want to be a part of. Violence is ingrained in the production of Maruti cars, against which the workers have been fighting for years now; there is violence in the way women in clothes factories in Bangalore are treated, and perhaps nowhere does this oppression and violence show itself more strongly than in the inhumanity of manual scavenging. Violence is implicit in a hundred other things which I do not even have any knowledge about. Once, I spent the entire night imagining that I was a chick and that my beak was being cut by a hot, hot flame. How much would it hurt me the rest of my life to eat with a cut beak? I was so depressed on Christmas Day that I did not buy the cake I wanted to buy, because cake has eggs in it. By New Year’s eve I had fallen down even deeper in the pit of depression. I knew I somehow had to get out of this. On New Year’s eve, I allowed myself to buy a cake. (Being a huge lover of bakery products, it made me angry to think that my consumption, which was in itself not a violent act, was being made into a violent one.) I read that Starbucks had stopped industrial farming because of the pressure put on it by NGOs etc. I wish we could do the same with MacDonald’s, KFC, Burger King, Domino’s and Pizza Hut. 

Desperately trying to convince myself that my bird-loving teacher would never have condoned such atrocities or would have approved of them… after all, weren’t chicks, geese, pigeons and ducks birds too? I had, however, no contact with her and could not completely be certain of something I so wanted to believe. Had I been able to ask her that, I do believe that I might not have fallen into depression at all. I told myself that her bird love and my problem with industrial farming were both just different ways of connecting with nature and that even if the means were different, they both basically showed a connection or communion with nature.  These were the convoluted ways in which I desperately shirked from saying that what she did or believed in was wrong.  The difference in our ideas then was something I could not be comfortable with. If the ideas seemed to be at odds, I had to desperately find a meeting point. Then, slowly having almost convinced me that she would not have condoned it, I realized that the issue itself was haunting me.

I have had psychotherapy sessions as well as depression medication regularly for years. I was slowly able to better contain myself and work on my inner self on my own. The experience of depression is like this heavy-weight rock that is tied around your neck, which you are constantly carrying around. It is a deep black bottomless pit through which you are falling. It is like this blackhole with its magnetic, gravitational pull, which is sucking you in. The first few days after I started medication was weird. Unfortunately for me, this was exactly the time when I had my annual PhD presentation. My presentation thus was so abysmal that my supervisor even threatened to resign from the post of being my supervisor. 

Depression is a time when I think you need love, care, attention and affection over everything else.  People will advise you to exercise; people will advise you to not think negative thoughts; people will advise you on many things, as they always do. But nobody in your entire circle of friends and family will understand just how much love and attention you actually need. There is this aching need for affection that never gets filled, just as the bottomless pit never ends as you keep falling through it. Then you realize that perhaps people are not capable of giving you the kind of attention you need and that you must go to a psychotherapist to seek that. If you, however, have a good batch of students to teach and have a good rapport with them, it just might give you more attention and affection than anything else in life might. However, this is conditional, as one never knows the sort of batch one will get to teach or whether one even has a job at all in the precarious atmosphere these days.  

What made me begin getting over this depression was perhaps the experience of depression itself. I had been there, done that. I had known the helplessness of being sucked into that blackhole. I had known the mental collapse and the complete inability to do anything productive. It is then that I began to think that perhaps confusing intensity with sensitivity was not the right thing to do. Earlier, it had seemed to me as if being happy meant you were not concerned or bothered about the violence in our world. Now slowly, I began to think that getting into depression doesn’t take you anywhere either. I made a few resolutions for myself at the beginning of 2017. These are basically geared toward making me happy. So my resolutions included giving time to things I “want” to do, over and above things that I “must do”: to write, to dabble with colors, and to listen to Tracy Chapman and Assamese folk music. I decided to meet friends more often and to live with gratitude. I realized that experimenting with different kinds of beverages, like herbal teas, gave me some sort of peace and “me-time” in life. Perhaps this is because several herbal teas are known for relieving stress and promoting calmness. I have realized that your mood depends a lot on the kinds of things you eat and drink. 

I made a rule for myself in life which bans thinking for more than two minutes. I slowly began to realize that perhaps one must control one’s thoughts instead of the thoughts controlling us. Once again, I regained the ability to be left alone in peace and happiness. I have always liked being alone, even as a small kid at the age of seven or eight. However, during the time of my depression, I lost this ability. I constantly wanted people to be around me. Now, I am once more becoming self-contained and have no real need to be around others all the time.

I began to realize that intensity and the capacity to feel emotion are not necessarily good things. Yes, we need emotion and intensity in order to be empathetic, in order to bring about change or create something. But too much intensity can block our own view of seeing something holistically from various angles. I realized that I will go crazy if I tried to live another’s life, be it my teacher’s or the world at large. I do not have any control over her life, I cannot think of ways in which the world needs to change because I have no control over the world either. I can only take whatever steps I can as an individual and leave it at that. Focussing actively on doing something also brings back to you the agency that depression has completely eroded with caustic acids while creating a black hole inside you. I had become phobic about the violence that surrounds us in our everyday lives. Once, talking to my mother at night, I burst into tears and a frenzy of emotion because of the violence which surrounds us. Guilt-ridden, I thought we should all become activists and social workers and fight it out with the perpetrators of this cruelty. Slowly, instead of being guilty of what I do not do, I felt it might just be better for me to realize that everyone is different and can contribute with their own strengths. So if what I can do is write and teach, that is what I should do and try to change the world through that, instead of being guilty of not being a social worker. Similarly, lawyers, judges, doctors, engineers and people in every sort of profession can, in their own ways, make a difference to the world if they are committed to the cause of making the world a more equal, egalitarian place. 

 The same thoughts about meat eating and my teacher have been circulating within my mind. It is important not to give these thoughts too much importance.  Sometimes I wonder about other things regarding my teacher. I totally understand the need for caste-based reservation, but sometimes I wonder why my teacher, being so intelligent and so talented, availed of reservation when she could have, in all probability, managed without. But I do not know what she or her family have suffered on account of being Dalits. As in the case of eating meat, I talk to people, try to read and to find out other perspectives on this and truly understand why we need reservation for middle-class Dalits— I intend to do my post-doctoral research on this! However, I understand these thoughts are obsessive and often emotional, and irrational, even with reasons and explanations, they may come back again and again and I have to fight them. I often make the mistake of overthinking, thinking it may lead me to answers. I have seen often, though maybe not always, that obsession precedes depression. I have talked of being obsessed with animal slaughter and the caste question. There was another period when I was obsessed with the marking system, as in how to mark and grade students in the new current education system. This fraught and frantic obsession over marking again led me to a phase of depression. It may be a symptom, not necessarily a cause. I have been on anti-depressant medication for over eight years. Every time I try to reduce or stop the medication, I have a relapse, and the depression comes back again. So I have no idea how to actually come out of this thing in life now, and even my psychiatrist has admitted defeat, asking me to look towards other means and sources. I still have therapy sessions. The chance and possibility of falling back into depression remain, and one has to be ever-watchful and vigilant. 

For example, I have again been in the throes of depression. I think it came back towards the pandemic time. The depression probably got worse because of isolation and loneliness and also because of the stress of unemployment. The stress of unemployment has also become a major source of stress in life. I must also mention co-morbidities here and how many psychosomatic illnesses are fuelled by stress. I have had chronic migraines since the age of 10. In childhood, I could still relieve these with medication, but ever since I had the first initial fall-out with my teacher, which was at the age of 18 or 19, my migraines have been absolutely incurable by anything at all. I have been taking preventative migraine meds for years now, along with the depression medication, but although these did seem to make a lot of difference initially, that seems to have been short-lived. So, coming back to the relation of stress, unemployment, depression, and migraines, I have had migraines which have gone on continuously for one or two entire months and then, have gone away half an hour after I got news of getting some measly part-time guest faculty job. My migraines, however bad they are, usually go away if something makes me extremely and intensely happy— there are only a few of such things, and they usually happen by chance, they are not within my control. Chronic migraines and clinical depression are co-morbidities that often go together. To add other stress factors in life, I now have other psychosomatic stress-related conditions such as hypothyroid and chronic perineal pain syndrome. And these are things that nobody around you understands. People just don’t get it. If you have episodic migraines, people may show concern. Ironically, when you have migraines 24*7 for months and years, people give up on you and take it for granted because they have absolutely no idea how to live with this thing. Because it’s just a headache. Though the internet tells you that migraines are the number one most debilitating neurological disease in the world. They don’t get it because we have learnt to live with it. Had I not learnt to live with it, I would have killed myself a long time ago. Or still might. 

Now all this would still be incomplete if I did not mention my autism, at least briefly. So I never knew that I had autism until we discovered this in the middle of my psychotherapy sessions, and later I went to an autism foundation and got it properly diagnosed. Of course, I cannot write everything about my autism here— I have another long piece dedicated solely to that— but perhaps it is good to mention certain things, some of which are also intertwined with my depression. Autism is a wide spectrum, and every autistic person has different traits. Some autistic traits I have had strongly throughout my life: difficulty with social skills, with includes issues with recognizing emotional boundaries, whether one’s own or other people’s, and a certain kind of attachment style which I can’t exactly describe here, among other things. I was an overly shy creature in school but that changed after coming to college. I have had trouble with motor skills as well, in the sense that I’ve been pretty bad at them. My sensual hypersensitivity is with regards to touch— not being able to wear certain kinds of sweaters, skivvies, tight jeans, and a whole array of other things, actually. So as my therapist pointed out, it is the emotional aspects of autism that have affected me more than the physical or biological ones. For example, it is the inferiority complex associated with bad motor skills or the fact that I found myself unable to dress the way my peer group in college would, actually affected me more than the actual biological facts. I have had a supermegaphobia of change since childhood, another hallmark of autism, though it is reduced now as compared to childhood years. Change of plans, sudden plans, but also, very significantly, change of place. As a child, I used to be scared of even spending the night at my grandparents’ house! Having created a home for myself in Delhi, I have had a super-mega phobia of shifting from this place for many long years, which people around me absolutely fail to understand. Although I have now brought myself up to the level that I can shift from the place if I am required to do so in search of a job, I do not think “normal” people can fathom the amount of effort that this has taken. I am also very, very phobic of differences. I want everyone to be the same. For me, difference means conflict. I understand that this may be quite impractical, but then, this is me. The phobia of change and of differences may possibly be connected. Autistic people are known to “rock” and I have realized that something I have always done since a baby age can be described as rocking, though I never thought of it as such. So there are all these “weird” things about me and I never knew that they actually have a name. I also have prosopagnosia, which is the inability to recognize faces. All my childhood, I could not watch TV or movies for this reason. Even now, I do not remember people’s faces unless I have seen them at least 200 times. I am also forever lost in my own world. Most of the people who have ever seen me know this about me because it is very apparent. I also keep talking to myself practically all the time, whether I am out on the roads or in my room or at my workplace or any place at all. Perhaps this goes hand in hand with being in my own world. One of the most significant things about autism that affects me is autistic obsessions and special interests. It does not help to say, either, that I get obsessed with people. I also get obsessed with anything I do; for example, I wrote this 3-lakh word PhD which is thrice the size of any normal PhD, I will get obsessed with the same music and listen to it on repeat for centuries, I never know when to stop when I do any activity so there is this compulsive sense of more more, resulting in a kind of hopeless perfectionism that I never reach. I may never clean my room but when I do finally clean my room or my clothes or anything at all, I am obsessed with each and every molecule and atom of dirt and dust! I similarly tend to get obsessed with people. And tend to idealise people, believing them to be, well, if not perfect, then somewhere nearer the divine, in any case. My therapist and I have been discussing how I want a perfect, idealistic world—like everything should be perfect, including the people and the relationships. So, in the sense of obsession and boundaries, whatever happened with my teacher can be a result of autism, as well as, as my therapist said, of my parent’s divorce. Now if I speak only of my own personal experience, I have always tended to be emotionally dependent on someone or the other— my mother, or my friends, or, teachers. In my case, I have a history of getting emotionally attached to how many teachers by now. So autistic people are known to have intense emotions (yes, people think autistic people have no emotions but our kind of people also exist), and yet are not good at regulating those emotions. Autistic people are known to stim to relieve themselves in overwhelming situations. Stims are usually repetitive actions, or even repetitive words. In my case, my stim is to repeat my teacher’s name over and over.  I think all these things are linked to each other, in some sense, as because I am not centred in myself, I cannot regulate my own emotions, so I end up falling over people. These are complicated issues which cannot be dealt here within the space of this piece in any kind of depth or detail, but they create a lot of issues. I am seeing this in almost all my relationships right now. But I do not find what I seek from outside, so I feel an absence of connection. Now imagine what happens when you are the most intense person you know, when you get overwhelmed practically all the time, and then you cannot regulate your own emotions! 

One thing has led to another, has spiralled into darkness quite literally, in the sense that the amount of huge rejection that I have faced, especially after the charges of stalking and disciplinary action mentioned in the earlier part of this piece, have only intensified the need for acceptance, belonging, and kindness. But this is again a spiralling cycle, because when I fall over people, after a certain amount of time, at some point or the other, they cannot take it any more. So the cycle becomes self-perpetuating. I don’t think I can end this piece with any real solutions to any of these issues, because I don’t think I have any. I do have ideas of trying out my hand at different activities such as art and crafts which perhaps help to stabilise one within oneself, but then I have this yearning for connection and meaning and intimacy which I cannot find, so then it is also at that point of alone-ness that I get suicidal— what I the meaning on life on earth if you cannot find intimate connection with other humans around you? Something I do find meaning in is in connecting with people like Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, Tracy Chapman, Alice Walker… the list is long and there are several others. So my current project is to read their letters, diaries, watch films – theirs, and also other figures connected to queerness and mental health— and then write letters to them. I am, currently, writing letters to anyone on the planet that I want to write to. So I feel I can connect with them way more than with people around me, though it doesn’t exactly help to know that they are either dead or otherwise unaware of my existence. Beyond that, the search for answers and solutions still continues. 

Finally, as I conclude this piece, I would like to thank Prof GJV Prasad and Prof Simi Malhotra, for more or less similar things: kindness, acceptance, and the lack of judgement. Prof Prasad for being the exceptional human being that he is—for his kindness and forbearance with incessant, random and not so random text messages that I send him, showing him perhaps the innermost layers of myself as well as my never-ending insecurity. I have raved and ranted at him, — at a time when I have been suicidal, he has been the only person that I have spoken to. For his forgiveness and for not choosing “sides” even though he is a friend of my teacher’s (and a member of my PhD advisory committee) — something that a lot of people are unable to do. And finally, for what I call his “dispassionate compassion” and sense of humour which again show me how it is possible to be a deeply sensitive individual and yet to simultaneously keep a distance from that intensity which consumes me. Prof Simi Malhotra for simply being the kindest and patient-est person on the planet, who has basically borne with me and my incessant messages and my crying and my insecurities and my tantrums… despite all her very substantial professional and personal concerns, some of which I happen to know of, and not only that, but also despite all my past history which she knows about, but has never judged. I have had autistic meltdowns in front of her. Autistic meltdowns are something like a mixture of crying and screaming when you’ve lost all control over yourself. Such people are rare, as my own experience with people has shown me. People mostly reject, block, and judge you for far, far smaller things. It was not necessary for her to do any of this at all in her official role as my PhD examiner and my employment-supervisor. But then, as I said, the cycle is self-perpetuating so even she has had too much of it by now. So it continues. I can perhaps best sum up everything with this: I am the most insecure person on the planet after all my rejections. I assume blockings and rejections all the time. There is a very real term in autism called Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria. I know that she is mad at me. She has asked me not to message her. I still message her sometimes. Currently, her WhatsApp account neither has a picture nor shows her “last seen”. Even in this situation, I have come to realize that she will not block me. This security in this situation for as insecure a person as me, who constantly imagines all sorts of things, is absolutely astounding, and I never thought that this could happen to me ever. So currently, I feel a curious mixture of rejection and acceptance that I never knew I could feel in life.  Kindness is something that I have come to respect a lot in people. Kindness is a common factor among all the teachers I have fallen over in my life! The usual words might be “fallen for” or “fallen in love with”, but I think “fallen over” is also quite apt in this situation. There are, of course, other people whom I need to thank, again people who have shown kindness and acceptance instead of rejection, or even certain instances of kindness, but then I have mentioned the names of the two people whose heads I have eaten to the maximum extent. I write too honestly— perhaps this is my autistic trait of honesty and my inability to lie. I don’t think neurotypicals would have done it. Perhaps someone will kill me for it someday. But then, I’ll risk it. I don’t mind dying, I guess. I end with two poems. 

To Sir With Love 

(for Prof. GJV Prasad) 


Because you had the kindness of a tree
And patience enough for eternity 
To care so much for a random student 
When family friends and all thought it imprudent 
When all else had turned away 
Irritated, frustrated, at the end of the day
Look, we have our own life too
We can’t all be therapists for you! 
Knowing the history of Autistic obsession 
Too scared for themselves to show compassion 
You suffered my tantrums, read umpteen texts
Always patient, always calm, to deal with the next 
You suspended judgement beyond belief 
My grieving heart found immense relief
You always took my hopes and fears into account 
Before giving any advice, just the right amount 
Unlike others, you did not expect 
me to change my innards at your behest 
Your suggestions were always tailored for me
Not forcing me to become what I cannot be
You helped from airports and distant lands
To stabilise my feet in shifting sands
You’ve heard me panic and seen me cry
All those times when I was scared to die
You’ve seen my worst and made me calm
When a single line from you was a balm
Your goodness flows on like a river
All my love and gratitude forever. 

Kindness-- a Blood Group 

(for Prof Simi Malhotra) 


For a fairy: is she a sylph or a nymph,
Whose name is synonymous with love.
With the generosity of heart which forgives
my tantrums. Which does not harden itself, 
or thicken the boundary wall of its auricles
and ventricles. With patience that deals
with my insecurities, abundant as rain flowers, 
without quickening blood flow, or rising temper. 
With a very rare blood group in which
kindness cells abound. With a heart which has ears, 
and lends them to the baggage of my traumas. 
But mostly with a heart that circulates pure love 
This poem comes in lieu of a much-craved for hug.

About the Author

Shruti Sareen, born and brought up in Varanasi, studied at Rajghat Besant School, KFI. Graduating in English from Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi, she later earned a PhD from the same university, titled “Indian Feminisms in the 21st Century: Women’s Poetry in English” which is now forthcoming from Routledge (UK) as two monographs in 2023.Her debut poetry Collection, A Witch Like You, was published by Girls on Key Poetry (Australia) in April 2021. She is currently seeking publishers for her novel,The Yellow Wall, and is working around an epistolary manuscript around lives of queer artists, on themes of queerness and mental health. She was an invited poet at global poetry festival, hosted by Russia, Poeisia 21.  She has taught in Dyal Singh College, University of Delhi, and at Jamia Millia Islamia, another university in New Delhi. She may be reached at shrutanne.ipcollege@gmail.com.

The post Spiralling into Darkness by Shruti Sareen first appeared on Prachya Review.