Siyahi Stories · 3 poems · Home & Away

A Postcard That Never Got Sent

You leave a place carrying a promise about it. You arrive somewhere else and immediately need a new vocabulary just to complain properly.

Three poems · one unfinished letter · from the Siyahi archive

There's a particular kind of writing that only gets produced by distance — the letter you compose in your head at 2 a.m. in a country that isn't yours yet, addressed to a home that has already started to feel like someone else's memory. It's half complaint, half apology, half homesickness dressed as observation. Three poems from Siyahi read, in sequence, like exactly that unsent letter: a promise made before leaving, a diagnosis of what's wrong back home, and a bewildered dispatch from somewhere stranger.

IBefore you leave, you're handed a debt you didn't ask for

Every departure carries an unspoken condition attached to it: don't forget where you came from, and don't you dare use distance as an excuse to stop caring about it. This poem states that condition outright, twice, in two languages, as if once wasn't going to be convincing enough.

— you'll have to make a name for yourself; a face alone tells nobody who you are. Keep those who can't stand your success at arm's length. Stay close to basic humanity — you don't learn kindness by befriending funerals. Stay loyal to your homeland; the lives of soldiers aren't spent casually. And some of the work is simply yours to do — the government you want isn't always the government you get. Read “Naam Bada Karna” in the book →

This is the poem you'd write, or be told, before ever getting on a plane — equal parts ambition and obligation, framed as if the two were the same instruction. Go be somebody. Also: don't forget you belong to somewhere. Both halves of that sentence are about to get complicated.

IIBecause the somewhere you belong to has its own quiet rot

Before the story even leaves the ground, it pauses to name exactly what made leaving thinkable in the first place — a two-line diagnosis of a society trading its actual values for market ones.

— prices in the market keep climbing while values in society keep falling. Watching the same daily spectacle of chaos becomes its own kind of fire. Everyone's skin carries the same colours, everyone's blood the same red — and still, the country keeps getting carved along whatever lines divide it best. Read “Wyaparatil Bhav” in the book →

Four lines, and they do the work an entire op-ed usually needs. This is the quiet second half of the debt from the first poem — you're told to stay loyal to a home, and in the very next breath, the poem admits that home is not behaving in a way that makes loyalty easy. Both things are true at once. The book doesn't resolve that tension. It just lets it sit there, the way it actually sits in a person's chest.

IIISo you go. And the new place turns out to be its own kind of absurd

What follows is the longest, funniest, most bewildered poem in the whole collection — written entirely in Marathi, as a running list of everything about a new country that simply refuses to make sense. It reads like someone drafting a real letter home, one observation at a time, growing more incredulous with each stanza.

— live alone, work enough for ten people, and still find no rest — not even God seems entirely pleased here. Every machine imaginable is at hand, yet peace is scarce — what kind of America is this? Towering buildings, unseasonal snow and rain, more land than people — what kind of America is this? As many people as opinions, dogs treated better than most humans, autumn arriving without a single sari's colour in sight, animals eaten that back home would never be, cups and saucers a mystery to some — what kind of America is this? People arrive here from every corner of the world to work, some burn out, others earn generously; the land is stunning on days off, society is disciplined, and dreams here seem to have no ceiling at all — really, what kind of America is this? Coming here teaches you about the whole world while making you forget yourself a little; in learning to stand alone, a different person is quietly built. Locals seem to laze about while visitors hustle hardest — I'll sign off now, write back and let me know — what kind of America is this? Read “Amerika Ashi Kashi?” in the book →

Look at how the poem actually ends: nikaltoy ata, kalva patrane — I'm signing off now, write back and let me know. After four stanzas of genuine bewilderment, admiration, and homesickness tangled together, the poem reveals what it was all along — a letter. Not a metaphorical one. An actual, addressed, waiting-for-a-reply letter, the kind every person far from home eventually starts composing in their head and rarely gets around to finishing.