Editor’s Note
I think we can all agree that no poet exists in a vacuum. Nothing we write can be called ahistorical. There can be no contemporaneity without the past. In Abhijeet Singh’s work, I was struck by the awareness of this ‘historical sense’ as Eliot describes in his essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’.
For instance, in ‘Fatihaa’, the speaker visits, or revisits in memory, the Tomb of Begum Akhtar in Lucknow. What I found curious in the descriptions of the tomb and its surroundings is the nature of the ‘I’ voice. This is no solitary ‘I’. Like all the couplets of the poem, it is coupled. The speaker invokes and links Agha Shahid Ali to this ‘I’ and contemplates ‘I can imagine Agha dusting this marble with his hands. / I’m doing the same.’ It is in this act of repetition that a connection is forged, that history is acknowledged – a history the speaker now places himself in. It was at this moment in the poem that I discovered the connection between Shahid and Begum Akhtar, another coupling, another story within a story. I will let you discover the rest yourself.
—Kunjana Parashar
The Bombay Literary Magazine
in memory of the Tomb of Begum Akhtar, Pasandbagh
Like punctuation in Time. You can see at the end
of this lane, narrower than it is to forget
heartbreak, her resting place.
Next to her mother’s grave. The marble parchin kari,
yellowed, with echoes of what used to be a mango
orchard, this place
also, her home. Restored by her listeners.
“Not even a plaque” it is said
was here when they first found it.
Now, it has a green, radium board in the vicinity,
which says बेगम अख़्तर की मज़ार but nobody
in the area can tell who she is.
Except the Harsingar tree. The guardian
of scented memory. The disciple. The tenant.
Every morning, Parijat flowers touch her feet.
Bowing like a thumri. Every petal becomes a taan.
You can rub the flowers with your palms,
listen to the perfume of gone.
Listen to the immaculate silence, the work
even the quiet has to keep up
to do what Begum did. The winter sun
dances between the threadbare arabesques,
the fading curlicues, and the uneven lotuses
making the tympanums.
I can imagine Agha dusting this marble with his hands.
I’m doing the same. Winds, too.
I’m sitting here with my copy of
CALL ME ISHMAEL TONIGHT, reading these lines
One day the streets all over the world will be empty;
from every tomb I’ll learn all we imagine of light.
I carry along marks of my truth
miraculous spells of dry truth
we made a castle of sighs
against that greater tide, truth
language called us in to underline the semiotics
us, the deprived citizens of Semi-Truth
I preferred a queer reading of death
in the direct light of bi-truth
meanings spread across the town like news
courtesy of a failed spy, Truth
Moses, that bastard of the first order
climbs again the made-up, Mount Sinai Truth
have I been here before, Ms. Anarchy
I who? I, truth
“I’ll miss you” I whispered to Lucknow
the most vulgar words of Amichai truth
the suicide note read aloud after a poet’s death
I TRIED TO SIMPLIFY TRUTH
to Kazim Ali
Take me whole, sky–open and sea–wide, grass–felt.
Draw me an impossible portrait
of that other necessary world, when you take me whole.
That spiralling staircase to newer ceilings,
that honey–spread, crushed–rose death of moon,
that star, next to your eye, that blue nude
standing cross, lying blind. In the land of whisperers
and spies, take me for a friend.
Do not meet me in the streets and make enemies, you.
If need be, to betray and kill, take me.
Teach me ways, dear poet, teach me to perfect my edges.
My cries for help are without form,
and the sea has left me to die. Let me not harness the sight
and wilderness the breath. Take me tonight,
take me unprepared. When the world sleeps, I wound my rib
with the ache of a memory. I get a salary
to turn my body into an architecture. This wealth has taken me;
Take me broke and bring me down to nothing.
Author | Abhijeet Singh
Abhijeet is a multilingual poet, translator, essayist, and playwright working across English, Hindi, Urdu, and Gujarati, with engagements in Bhojpuri, Bengali, and French. Their poetry wrestles with language—its weight, its failures, and its slippery histories—while engaging with historiography, pop culture, and the contradictions of daily life.
With a postgraduate degree in Translation Literature and Films from the University of Lucknow and an ongoing MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from Manchester Metropolitan University, Abhijeet’s work has been shaped by contemporary voices across India and beyond. They have translated poetry and fiction, including the works of Rashid Jahan, John Ashbery, Sara Shagufta, June Jordan, Mir Taqi Mir, Audre Lorde, Vinod Kumar Shukla, Anne Carson, Devi Prasad Mishra, Mary Ruefle, Shrikant Verma, Wislawa Szymborska, and Majaz Lakhnavi, to name a few of their favourites.
Abhijeet is a co-founder of Decolonial Dogs, a collective dismantling creative hierarchies through communal storytelling. Their work has been featured in The Third Space (Renard Press, UK) and Propel. They were awarded the 2024 Nayi Awazein Samman (Nayi Dhara) for emerging voices in modern Hindi poetry and shortlisted for the 2025 TOTO Awards and 2025 Jane Martin Poetry Prize (University of Cambridge).
They currently live between Lucknow and Manchester, writing about cities that haunt them and the languages that shape them.
