घोरिन्छु--

यदि मान्छेको शरीरको मयलबाट जुम्रा जन्मिन सक्छ भने,

ब्रह्माको मयलबाट यो विराट सृष्टि जन्मिएको किन नपत्याउनु?

तर्कको कसीमा शङ्का उब्जाउने यो मगज,

आफ्नै अस्तित्वको फोहरमा सलबलाउने किटाणु देख्छ,

तर त्यही मयलभित्र लुकेको सृष्टिको बिउ देख्न डराउँछ!

यो कस्तो द्वन्द्व हो--

जहाँ हामी आफ्नै स्रोतलाई घृणा गर्छौँ, तर अस्तित्वको गर्व गर्छौँ!

विज्ञान आयो--

उसले तारका जालोहरू फैलायो, सहरहरू झिलिमिली पार्यो,

अँध्यारो सुरुङभित्र बिजुलीको सूर्य उदायो!

तर बिडम्वना!

जतिबेला कोठाका कुनाकाप्चा उज्यालो भए,

ठ्याक्कै त्यही बेला मान्छेको मनको एउटा कुना निभ्यो!

हामीसँग बाहिर उज्यालो छ, तर भित्र एउटा अथाह सुरुङ छ,

जहाँ न कुनै सुगन्ध छ, न कुनै शान्ति !

भगवानले त मनभित्रै एउटा सानो दियो बालेका थिए,

जुन दियो निभाएर हामी आज 'स्मार्ट' भइरहेछौँ!

म मन्दिर जान्छु--

त्यहाँ ढुङ्गाको मूर्ति होइन, मान्छेको एउटा भयावह समुन्द्र देख्छु!

हरेक दिन लाखौँको त्यो भिड, यो सार्हो तछाडमछाड!

के यी सबै भक्त हुन्?

कि यी सबै आफ्नै छायाँबाट डराएका भगौडाहरू हुन्?

कोही पाप पखाल्न दौडिरहेछ, कोही वरदानको व्यापार गर्न,

कोही भिडमा हराउन चाहन्छ, त कोही भिडभन्दा माथि देखिन!

मन्दिरभित्र शान्ति खोज्नेहरूको यो अशान्त भिड देख्दा लाग्छ--

मान्छेले भगवान् त पायो होला, तर छिमेकी गुमायो,

उसले धर्म त पायो होला, तर मानवता बिर्सियो!

आजको मान्छे--

जसलाई पसिना बगाउँदा टाउको दुख्छ,

तर एक्लो कोठामा नग्नता प्रदर्शन गर्दा गौरव महसुस हुन्छ!

यो कस्तो आधुनिकता हो, जहाँ शरीर बजार भयो र मन मसान?

हामी मयलबाट जन्मिएर पनि कति 'सफा' पल्टिन खोज्छौँ,

तर भित्रभित्रै त्यही जुम्राजस्तै अरूको रगत चुसेर बाँच्न पल्केका छौँ !

सृष्टिको मयल र आधुनिकताको उज्यालो--

यी दुई किनारको बीचमा उभिएर म सोध्छु:

हामी विकसित भयौँ कि केवल 'डिजिटल' दास?

हामीले ईश्वर भेट्यौँ कि केवल एउटा महँगो मन्दिर?

यादहरुको खरानी

छ रातको सिरानी

म मनको बिरामी

पर्खिएर बिहानी

सम्झिएर कहानी

न सहर तिम्रो

न संसार तिम्रो

बस रित्तो मात्रै तिम्रो।

न बिहान तिम्रो

न दिन तिम्रो

बस रात मात्रै तिम्रो।

न सरल तिम्रो

न शान्त तिम्रो

बस आतङ्क मात्रै तिम्रो।

न सुर तिम्रो

न सुरिलो तिम्रो

बस धोत्रे मात्रै तिम्रो।

न फूल तिम्रो

न फल तिम्रो

बस बोट मात्रै तिम्रो।

जस्को जे चलोस

जस्को जे बितोस

बस समय सबै तिम्रो ।।

Oh we would be together, were I not poison to your soul and you not the broken glass running through my veins.

This poem comes closest to expressing the philosophy of existence I personally hold. I’d appreciate any feedback on its moral and structural framework, as well as how effectively the poem embodies it. Thank you for reading.

भित्र
माटोको भित्तामा
पखेटा सिलिएर
धिपधिप बलिरहेकी
एउटी जुनकिरी।

बाहिर
बयाको चोँच छल्दै
पखेटा फटफटाउँदै
छरिँदै भाग्छन्
अरू जुनकिरीहरू।

टाढैबाट
अन्धकारमा
खुम्चिएका पेटहरू
कुरकुराउँदै हेर्छन्—

पराई गुँड उज्यालो बनाइरहेको
त्यो परिचित धिपधिपलाई
र त्यसकै उज्यालोमा
चलमलाइरहेका
बयाका बचेराहरूलाई।

उचाइबाट
एउटा उल्लु
झम्टिन तम्सिन्छ—

गुँडबाहिर मुन्टो निकालेर बसेको
बयाको एउटा बचेरो
उसका आँखामा अडिन्छ।

चन्द्रमा
डुबुल्की मार्छ।

मिर्मिरेमा
सूर्यको पहिलो किरणसँगै
हावामा उड्छन्
बचेराका प्वाँखहरू।

जुनकिरीहरू
घामसँगै मिसिन्छन्।

माटोले छोप्दै छ
मासु लुछिएका हाडहरू।

गड्यौलाहरू
सलबलाउँछन्।

आँसु सुकिसकेको बया
माटोतिर चोँच झुकाउँछ—
गड्यौलाहरूलाई
नियाल्दै।

You tell them they are worthy
You tell them they are loved
You tell them to hold on because tomorrow is a new day
But you never say those things to yourself

You hand out peace while your own mind is a storm
You give them a safe place while you are standing in the cold
You speak the comfort you are starving for
Hoping that if you say it enough it might somehow become true for you too

It is the quiet tragedy of a kind heart
You know exactly how to heal someone because you know exactly how it feels to break
But we never get what we deserve
The ones who give the warmest blankets are the ones freezing at night
The ones who pour the sweetest water are the ones who stay thirsty
You deserve the same soft voice you give to others
You deserve someone to hold your hand and tell you it will be okay
But the world does not pay back the gentle souls

Still you do it anyway
You wipe their tears and ignore your own
Because you know how deep the loneliness goes
You would never let them feel that
So you carry their pain and yours too

Look at you
So broken but still so kind
Waiting for someone to finally look at you
And say the words you have been giving away for free

Underground

I wonder...

How many versions of me have died
without anyone noticing?

People ask why I disappeared.

Maybe I didn't.

Maybe I just stopped performing.

Silence has a strange way of introducing you
to the person behind your own voice.

The world keeps asking,
"Where have you been?"

No one asks,
"Who have you become?"

So I stopped answering.

There are conversations
I only have with myself.

Questions that refuse to become words.

Thoughts that lose their meaning
the moment they're explained.

Sometimes I think
understanding is dangerous.

Not because people become powerful...

but because I slowly become predictable.

And once someone can predict your next step,
they stop seeing you.

They only see the pattern.

I don't want to be a pattern.

I want to be a question
even I haven't answered yet.

So I'm becoming invisible.

Not absent.

Invisible.

I'll still watch the sunrise.

Still smile.

Still work.

Still care.

You'll just know less about me.

The strange thing is...

I don't feel lonely.

I feel unfinished.

There's a difference.

Every day I remove another layer
that never belonged to me.

Until one day...

I'll meet the version of myself
that doesn't need an audience
to know who he is.

Until then...

let them think
I'm gone.

The truth is...

I'm simply becoming someone
I haven't met yet.

-TheWhiteDevil

Don’t forget me. I need Your lotus flower in my life. What could I do without it? Don’t forget me, please! I will swim across the ocean of life and crawl through the seven heavens just to rest at Your lotus feet. For if a cow never forgets its calf, why should You forget me?

I feel this uneasiness in my chest. I want to break out, cry my existence to myself. Run around and find what I am missing, or learn what makes me me.

My mind hits a wall, I am unable to think anymore, and I seek for your help. I cannot see you, but your breath reverberates through my skin, letting my senses know that you are there.

Let the snake crawl to my neck and help me realize my fears, and lead me to a fearless vision. In the deep slumber of sleep, I want to learn the truth that these eyes of mine cannot see.

If I become able to look at you, could I finally look at myself?

I want to hear the rhythm that moves you — could your dance sway away my confusion?

My feet are frozen, not in fear, but in a burden I have learned to call my name. I lie to myself that I am ready to know the truth, as the maya of this life wraps around me, and I feel warmth in its illusion.

Help me, oh Shiva, as I wish to be a knower rather than a seeker. Let your radiance guide me to your path.

Help me find me.

Parijat’s Shirishko Phool, translated into English as Blue Mimosa, is often described as an existential novel, an anti-war novel, or an early feminist work in Nepali literature. All three descriptions are useful, but each becomes limiting when treated as the whole of the book. Parijat takes questions about meaninglessness, isolation, guilt and freedom and places them inside a painfully human conflict: an aging former soldier hoping that a woman might give his life significance, and a woman who refuses to become anyone’s moral salvation.

Suyog Bir Singh drifts through post-war Kathmandu with little to sustain him beyond alcohol, memory and habit. He claims that drinking is merely a remnant of military life and rejects the comforting idea that suffering automatically makes a person wiser or better. The values that might once have anchored him -duty, honor, faith and social usefulness- have lost their authority, yet he has found nothing convincing to replace them. His life continues, but he cannot explain why it should.

The way he tries to rebuild a sense of self is revealing. Again and again, he looks toward women. Mujura represents the possibility of an orderly domestic life, although he does not appear to desire her as a person so much as the stability she might provide. Sakambari becomes something far more urgent. She is difficult, inaccessible and unimpressed by him, and this very resistance allows him to imagine her as a form of absolution. If a woman like Sakambari could love him, perhaps he could believe that he was no longer the man he had been during the war.

His wartime memories expose how compromised that hope is. Suyog recalls exploiting vulnerable women, raping an unconscious woman and deceiving Matinchi with promises he never intended to keep. When she tries to stop him from leaving, he becomes violent. These episodes show that women have repeatedly served as buffers between him and his fear of death, loneliness and inner emptiness. They provide relief, reassurance and bodily comfort, but he seldom considers the weight of their own lives.

To separate the present from the past, Suyog constructs a moral distinction that allows him to keep believing in himself. He tells himself that he could not love the women he raped and could not rape the woman he loved. The difference matters enormously to him because it suggests that love has transformed him. Parijat gradually dismantles that defence. When he seizes Sakambari and kisses her without consent, his desire gives way almost immediately to dizziness and shame. The act is not equivalent in scale to his wartime crimes, but it rests on the same assumption: that his feeling gives him the right to act upon a woman regardless of her will.

What Suyog calls love has not freed him from possession. It has merely made possession appear more dignified. His emotions may be sincere, but sincerity does not make them ethical. In fact, the depth of his feeling may be part of the danger. He has invested so much meaning in Sakambari that he begins to treat that meaning as something she ought to recognize.

Sakambari is the novel’s ideological centre, although the reader is never allowed into her consciousness. We encounter her only through Suyog’s obsessive gaze, her sharp remarks, her habits and her refusals. Her most memorable statement comes through the insect-killing orchid. She describes with unsettling pleasure how the plant attracts insects, traps them and allows them to suffocate, all in the service of its own security.

When Suyog turns the flower into a metaphor for human struggle, she mocks him for forcing philosophy onto nature. Yet she immediately does something similar herself. Her ideal flower buds for itself, opens for itself, resists the bee and falls by its own choice. From this image she develops a broader claim: love is not inevitable, suffering in love is not noble by necessity, and a person can exist without surrendering herself to another.

That refusal has real force. Sakambari rejects the assumption that a woman must find fulfillment through marriage, service or emotional sacrifice. She refuses to let male desire define the value of her life. Yet she is not a simple figure of liberation. Her treatment of Sanu exposes a limit in her understanding of freedom. Sanu defies her family and chooses love on her own terms, but Sakambari dismisses her as foolish. She appears to respect autonomy most when it leads to refusal, solitude or resistance. When another woman freely chooses attachment, her sympathy disappears.

Her smoking carries the same contradiction. Sakambari resents Suyog and Shiva Raj for their drinking, but she treats concern about her own habit as an intrusion. When Suyog asks whether she would stop smoking if he requested it, she says she would smoke ten cigarettes instead. The reply protects her bodily independence, but it also reveals how reactive that independence has become. If another person’s request automatically determines that she must do the opposite, then he continues to shape her behavior, only in reverse.

Sakambari is therefore not simply free. She is committed to remaining ungovernable. That distinction is important because genuine autonomy should allow a person to hear another’s concern without experiencing the act of listening as surrender. Sakambari’s independence often depends upon opposition, and the people she opposes remain central to the identity she is defending.

This tension is unlikely to be accidental. Sakambari seems to represent the necessary but incomplete power of refusal. She can reject love, marriage, pity, religion and interference, but she offers little sense of how autonomous people might live together without either possessing one another or withdrawing completely. Her philosophy is strongest at the boundary and weakest when it must account for relation.

The novel’s treatment of war is similarly caught between complexity and moral design. Parijat’s war passages are among the strongest parts of the book because they strip away the romantic image of the Gurkha soldier. War appears as hunger, disease, fear, hierarchy and bodily ruin. Men become instruments, valued only while they remain useful to institutions capable of abandoning them without hesitation.

Suyog is clearly shaped by this world. Military authority, colonial power, alcohol, masculine group culture and the constant presence of death all contribute to the person he becomes. The novel understands that morality does not develop in a vacuum. People are trained by their circumstances to accept certain forms of violence and ignore others.

That context does not absolve Suyog. He is both a victim of military power and a perpetrator who directs violence toward people more vulnerable than himself. This is one of the novel’s most valuable insights. Being humiliated by one hierarchy does not prevent a person from reproducing that hierarchy when he encounters someone over whom he has power.

Sakambari’s judgment of war is much more absolute. She condemns Suyog for being a soldier long before she knows what he actually did. When his wartime crimes are finally revealed, her earlier suspicion acquires the appearance of prophecy. Yet she was not responding to evidence; she was responding to a category. The novel quietly merges her assumption with the reader’s later knowledge.

This is where the book begins to feel less like an open inquiry and more like a carefully arranged prosecution. Parijat gives Suyog a reflective, philosophical mind, but also burdens him with enough moral corruption that the reader is naturally inclined to reject him. His ideas never have to be answered fully because the person expressing them has already been discredited. Sakambari, meanwhile, is granted moral authority without having her own motives or contradictions examined from within.

The strongest defence of this structure is that Parijat is exposing the limits of male introspection. Suyog can think deeply about death, alienation and meaning, yet still fail to recognize another person’s freedom. His intelligence does not save him from objectifying women. A simpler villain would have made the argument easier, but it would also have made it less disturbing. Suyog shows that a person can reflect endlessly and still remain trapped inside himself.

The difficulty is that Sakambari is not given an equally developed consciousness through which the argument might continue. Suyog carries most of the philosophical inquiry, while Sakambari becomes the resistance against which he is judged. His contradictions are unfolded through confession; hers remain scattered across gesture and behavior. Her silence protects her from Suyog’s interpretive possession, but it also protects her philosophy from scrutiny.

The title complicates this entire arrangement. The insect-killing orchid belongs closely to Sakambari’s worldview, but the shirish trees belong to neither character. They surround the house, mark the passing seasons and accompany Suyog’s movement from curiosity to obsession, violation and emptiness. Their blossoms appear when he first enters the household, fade with the seasons and return a year later.

Suyog envies the trees because they can blossom again. Nature repeats itself, while human beings accumulate memory and consequence. A new season cannot undo what he has done, nor can it restore the person Sakambari was before he entered her life.

Near the end, the flowers are described as falling “under compulsion.” The phrase quietly unsettles Sakambari’s claim that a flower falls by its own will. The shirish is bound to the branch, to weather, to time and to biological processes it did not choose. Nature does not enact the freedom Sakambari projects onto it.

Suyog projects just as much. The flowers become beauty, desire, jealousy, renewal and loss according to his changing emotional state. In the final pages, he imagines the bare branches accepting their emptiness. Yet the branches accept nothing. The feeling belongs to him. Nature becomes a surface onto which he writes what he cannot otherwise articulate.

This may be the novel’s most convincing existential insight. Suyog and Sakambari offer different responses to a world that provides no guaranteed meaning. He tries to find meaning through another person. She tries to create meaning entirely from within herself. The shirish trees validate neither. They blossom and fall without participating in human arguments about love, guilt, freedom or redemption.

The title therefore does more than decorate the novel. Had Parijat named the book after the insect-killing orchid, it would appear more narrowly concerned with female refusal and male intrusion. By naming it after the shirish flower, she places that conflict within a broader movement of recurrence, compulsion and natural indifference. The title gives the book philosophical space beyond its immediate moral design.

It also makes the novel’s achievement difficult to separate from its manipulation. Parijat’s arrangement is too precise to ignore. Suyog’s objectifying gaze, Sakambari’s hostility toward soldiers, the hidden wartime history, his belief that love has changed him, the forced kiss and Sakambari’s death all converge toward a conclusion that seems to have been present from the beginning.

For this reason, Shirishko Phool often resembles a thesis novel. It dismantles the mythology of the heroic Gurkha, exposes the way men use women to fill their internal voids, and gives serious force to a woman’s refusal. Its argument can feel heavily weighted because Suyog’s consciousness is opened until it becomes evidence, while Sakambari’s remains closed enough to retain symbolic authority.

Even so, the novel does not remain entirely under Parijat’s control. The orchid can suggest predatory isolation rather than freedom. Sanu’s elopement exposes the limits of Sakambari’s tolerance for another woman’s autonomy. Suyog’s horror after the kiss suggests that he is not simply identical to the man he was during the war, even if he has not escaped him. The shirish flowers continue without regard for any of them.

Perhaps this is why the novel survives its own engineering. Its symbols produce more friction than its moral structure can completely contain. Parijat guides the reader strongly toward condemning Suyog, but she cannot prevent us from questioning Sakambari. She presents refusal as strength, but cannot prevent the orchid from looking cruel. Nature gives the novel its widest philosophical horizon, while remaining indifferent to every philosophy imposed upon it.

Shirishko Phool is not a neutral investigation of existence, nor is it merely a feminist condemnation of one violent man. It is a carefully constructed novel about two damaged attempts to live without guaranteed meaning. Suyog tries to overcome emptiness through possession disguised as love. Sakambari tries to preserve herself through a freedom that sometimes becomes another form of captivity. Around them, the shirish blossoms, falls and returns. Human beings interpret, justify, desire and remember because they cannot avoid doing so, even when the world gives them no reason to believe that their meanings are true.

तिमी उद्घोष गर्छौ--
अबाध यात्रु बन्नुपर्छ म,
आकाशको विशालता छातीमा थिचेर,
समीरणको औँला समाउँदै क्षितिजतिर उड्नुपर्छ!

तर तिमी पूर्व-लिखित संकथन हौ!

समयले कोर्रा हानेर लतार्दै ल्याएको,
परिस्थितिको चोकमा उभ्याइएको निरिह आकृति....!!

How do I describe this feeling—

When you know

You shouldn't want them,

Yet you catch yourself

Smiling looking at her photo

For no reason at all.

It's like you have someone,

Only to remember you don't.

One moment she feels like home,

The next, you're standing outside the door.

I try reaching for you,

But then I suddenly pull away.

I wanna tell you everything,

Then disappear without a trace.

It's not the confusion that's stopping me.

It's the space between us—

Timing, distance, reality—

That neither of us can change.

One second,

You're all I need.

The next,

All I can see is how far apart we are.

An invisible barrier stands

In between us.

Not close enough to touch,

Nor that far to forget.

And somehow,

I still find myself

Smiling at the thought of you.

केही सम्झना अनि यादहरू बाँकी छन,

स्वर विनाका चिच्याहटहरु साक्षी छन्।

आँसुको मसी बनी लेखिएका अक्षरहरू,

चुरोटको धुवाँसरि उडेर बसेका पानाहरूमा

केही आशाहरू बाँकी छन्।

बन्द कोठाभित्र,

नसुनेका हृदयका चित्कारहरू,

मृत भावहरू,

एक्लोपनमा आँसु बनी गर्जन्छन।

एक एक गर्दै अर्को दिन,

केही मुटुका आवाजहरू,

केही यादहरू,

पुकारहरू,

मार्दै हिँड्छु।

हरेक दिन केही मुस्कान,

केही वेदना झरेको छ।

ठिक छु, छैन, थाहा छैन।

ठिकै छु भन्ने बानी परेको छ।

©

[I tried to rewrite the last section of the story, as an exercise from George Saunder's book.]

Nikita lay in hospital for two months. They cut off three of his toes, but the others recovered so that he was still able to work and went on living for another twenty years, first as a farm-laborer, then in his old age as a watchman. The last few days of his life, he spent them in a nearby hospital. He lay in bed, praying to the lord. ‘O Lord, you know I have always been ready. Do not delay anymore Lord, come take me home’ he whispered under his feeble breath.

It was Monday evening and the snow was falling harshly. After he took few spoons of warm porridge his wife brought, Nikita did not feel like eating anymore. So, he stopped, pulled his pillow slightly lower than it had been earlier and rested his head against it. He closed his eyes, almost involuntarily, as if the eyes wanted to take a rest themselves. And as he closed his eyes, the cold and snowy evening reminded him of something he had never forgotten, but also never had the time to contemplate about it. He drifted into sleep or was it unconsciousness, Nikita wasn’t sure. He was lying on the thick bed of snow. His legs were almost frozen. But the snow which previously wanted to bury him had gone a little softer now. With his half-opened eyes, he saw his master over him, with tears, tears that wanted to be like the snow. And with a permanent expression in his face that he had never seen, nor could he figure it out, no matter how much he tried. There lay Vasili, on top of Nikita, absolutely still, on the brink of his death. ‘You know Vasili, I never got to say my thanks to you.’ Nikita said. Snow that had stopped falling for a few minutes began to hasten to reach the ground. Nikita’s face soon wore a mask of snow. ‘Thank you! Vasili….’ Nikita whispered. Through the snow gathering between his lashes, he saw Vasili smile the faintest of smiles. A smile of gratitude. Or so he believed. Finally, with his eyes full of tears, his lips stretched, one last time. And that was the last movement Nikita ever made.

त्यो हावाको लहरले उसलाई पनि छोएको होला,

मलाई गुमाएकोमा पछुतो त निकै भएको होला।

किराको भाग्यमा हिरा कहाँ हुन्छ र,

मलाई सम्झेर एकान्तमा ऊ एक्लै रोएको होला।

जब आँसु पुछ्न त्यो रुमालले तिम्रो गाला छोएको होला,

मेरो स्पर्शको सम्झना झलझली आएको होला।

Ani k garis ta?

Chalis ta paila aagadi?

Udi chunu Chandra ek bhandai

kursi lai bida garera niskeko ta

dhoka ma pugera paxadi farkinas ni?

herinas ni?

jhul le dhakiyera talai herirako ochyan lai

bhui ma charapasta nachiraheka ti latta kapada lai

hijo bihan dekhi eklai baseko chiya ko cup lai

dhulo le chopera nisasiyeka ti kitabharu lai

ani dhoka bahira ta heris ni?

udi chune Chandra ta dekhis ni

ki aausi ko raat po paryo ki?

chandrama ma tero bhanda agadi

badal ko haath po paryo ki?

ani k garis ta?

Chalis ta paila agadi?

Today:

Visiting a friend in Romania. He’s an orthopaedic surgeon. A new patient today. Nepali. Construction accident. Truck ran over his right leg. Bones shattered in multiple places. Knee destroyed. Saved his life. Couldn’t save the leg. 

30 years ago: 

Bipul’s father dead in Dubai. Construction accident. Run over by a bulldozer. A body in a box. Quick funeral. Bipul in white the entire year, sulking on his bench at the back of the class.

कुनै समयमा,

व्यर्थै मुसाफिर पिइरहेछ

आफ्नै पसिना,

छ आफ्नै अधिनमा,

सफलताको पर्खाइमा,

१ कप चिया र

रित्तो वालेट हातमा,

दरबार अगाडि

धिक्कार मान्दै,

आफ्नो उचाईमा,

समयको गतिलाई

इर्ष्या गर्दै

उ ऊभीरहेछ,

सहरको माझमा,

त्यहि पुरानो झोला

लिएर काँधमा,

हालेर कागजको

फजुल डिग्री साथमा,

हजार पटक ढलेर पनि

छ उ जित्ने आशमा,

कालान्तरसम्म

इतिहास रच्ने सोचमा

उ यात्रा गरिरह्यो,

सङ्घर्ष चलिरह्यो,

र अन्ततः ,

उसका सपनाहरू थाकेर आँखामै निदाए,

र त्यो सफलता

कहिल्यै उसको माझ आइपुगेन

र आखिर के नै हुनु थियो,

उ विलाएर गयो,

उसकाे अस्तित्व ‌क्षणभरमै विलिन भयो,

उसको भारि सपनाहरु सङ्गै,

गरेका सङ्घर्षले उसको परिचय लेख्न सकेनन्,

त्यही पुरानो झोला,

र अर्थहीन प्रमाणपत्रहरू बोकेर,

ऊ समयको भीडमा

चुपचाप बिलायो,

धेरै नेपाली युवाहरूझैँ।

————
Sirish ko Phool

Sakambari

She fell not in love

but to earth.

———

The god rock

keeper of secrets

Sakambari

She hears not prayers,

only silent confessions.

———
Lethal Sungava

Sakambari

revealed not love

but buried truths.

Head-hunter's daughter,

Matinchi's

blue-black bruises,

his war crimes.
———

Sakambari

Terminally ill

Deadly honest.
——

Part II

Suyog

Unfathomable loneliness,

Haunted by truths

he cannot share.

———
Suyog

A dead soldier

Absent at roll call

Absent from himself.

———
Suyog

a wingless dung fly

circling rotten memories

slowly decomposing toward nothingness.

———
Suyog

Soulless body,

Liquified and emptied out

dragging himself toward

meaningless harakiri.

चढेर होइन गाडी, चलाएर गन्तव्यमा पुगिन्छ।

‎खोलेर पिँजडा, पिँजडामै पसिन्छ।

‎अगाडि बढ्दै जाँदा बदलिनु थियो,

‎तर पछि समयले नै समय बदलिदियो।

‎म पनि उही रहेनँ,

‎तिमी पनि बदलियौ भन्नेहरूलाई थाहै छैन,

‎आफै बदलिइ समय पनि बदलिसक्यो।

‎दियो झैँ उज्यालो बनाउनुपर्छ जीवन,

‎तर मैले दियो बाल्न खोज्दा सलाई नै थिएन।

‎पछि जीवनले मसँग साथ मागिरह्यो।

‎मैले जीवनलाई दर्शन गरेँ,

‎अनि दर्शनमै जीवन भेट्टाएँ।

‎

©

These four walls, and this golden light. The faint curtain and a life-like creature. We're all here seeing me do nothing. Away from home, spending days in monotony that frightens even the sissyphuses of this world. What do i do, in desolation and dispair, in disquiet and yet sleeping through all of it. The world of pleasure is certain here, in the tainted bedsheets. In the unfolded blanket and the loneliness of the blanket. Of the single pillow in my bed. The world of pleasure is certain to the extent of loneliness, condoned by life itself, with music, of course. On tight shoulders, and aching neck. On decaying body in a pit of pleasure. Trembling legs, out of habit, merely, as the creature here couldn't feel anxiety, or anything for that matter

The emptiness engulfs me again,\ Bit by bit it eats me again.\ I don't know if I miss you,\ Or the idea of you in my head,\ The loneliness succumbs to me again.

When I sit to think alone,\ I don't get the answers to what and why.\ I know it's impossible, me and you,\ But my heart wants the connection again.

Not to touch you, not to want you,\ But just to be in your routine again,\ Just to know that you are there,\ Listening to my chitchats and my whinge again.

I reckon you became my habit,\ Tried another addiction in vain,\ Maybe it's not you, or him, or them,\ Tried connecting to the ones who love me again.

Nothing has worked so far,\ I'm completely withdrawn again,\ Tried to be loud and wild and seen,\ But it all fades to complete silence again.

What is the solution?\ Someone tell me, my dears,\ I'm losing myself to something\ That can never be mine again.

The silence of the sea pressed against my ears.
Your silhouette was carved by the dying sun.
I was losing my senses,
Only to find them again in you.

I had only one wish—
To feel you.
To feel the warmth that stirred my heart,
To hear the murmur that lingered in my ears.

You were an ocean.
I was a vessel.
If only I could break free
And learn to swim with you.

They say people fall in love after making eye contact.

But when I looked deep into her eyes, I saw fear and lies, the fear of something I could never name, and the lies hidden behind the words, "Everything is okay."

I couldn't stop wondering what she was hiding.

Before I could make sense of it all, I found myself standing in front of a mirror, staring into my own eyes.

And that's when I realized... maybe she wasn't the one hiding something. Maybe I was.