Somewhere Far Away, I Want to Breathe My Last

"To that God whom I made and then forgot, in those moments in which I did not even pray."

So begins this collection—with a dedication poised between faith and forgetting.

A man leans out of a window, looking for a cloud. He would like it to rain. He longs for somewhere clean enough to breathe, somewhere the earth might receive him gently when his breathing is done. Even his wish to go far away is threaded with the sorrow of leaving.

That longing moves through Saumitra Saxena's Kahin Door Jaakar… Dam Todne Ka Mann Hota Hai: the wish for a little room in the world—to live, to love, to grieve, and, at last, to rest.

Sixty-one poems unfold in the uncertain order of memory. A great-grandmother's wooden box opens, and the vermilion of 1929 holds a moment of her marriage, still waiting to be touched. A mother serves two morsels of rice with hot dal at noon; for a little while, her assurance is enough. In a trunk, two wedding sarees still preen among the ones that were not chosen. Things put away have not finished living.

Yet the door of this remembered home remains open to the world. Even the fragrance of freshly cut grass carries a slight sense of bereavement. A girl's laughter, recalled after her violent death, shakes soil from her hair—the soil that nourished the grain now sold as bread in the poet's distant city. What seems far away returns through the most ordinary things. Faith meets doubt. Wonder meets grief. Neither has the last word.

Harish Bhimani—the voice of "Main Samay Hoon" in Mahabharat—narrates all sixty-one poems, accompanied by an original flute score. The collection is dedicated to him, too, in gratitude for giving these poems his timeless voice.

Saumitra Saxena's first collection, Mitra, won the Bhartiya Jnanpith Navlekhan Award.

Narrated by Harish Bhimani

Music: Baljinder Singh Ballu Flute and Kamlesh Kandara

Sixty-one poems · Two hours and twelve minutes · In Hindi