The Marks of My Hands: Twenty Poems in Hindi and English - Softcover

Luv, Kumar

9798187594573: The Marks of My Hands: Twenty Poems in Hindi and English

Softcover

ISBN 13: 9798187594573

Publisher: Independently published, 2026

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A word sits on a woman's lips, unsaid.
A man rents a room whose only view is a river that is always leaving.
A garden is tended for someone who never gets up to see it.

Twenty poems. Two languages. No originals.

These twenty poems were written in Hindi. The English poems facing them are not translations. Each Hindi poem was taken as a seed and an English poem was grown from it, so the two sometimes follow each other closely and sometimes go their separate ways. Both are printed. Neither is the original.

The collection moves from the small comedies of nearness—a sulk, a held breath, a word that never gets said—through the long silences of absence, and into the sickroom, the garden, and what comes after.

In these poems—
• A messenger refuses to carry his own message.
• A woman reads a love poem about herself and asks whether it is about someone else.
• A man is dumped by the moon.

These are love poems that do not console, and they are frequently funny, which is not the same as being kind.

The last poem argues that a love poem only begins to live once something has wrecked it.

For readers of Arun Kolatkar, Agha Shahid Ali, Kedarnath Singh, and Vinod Kumar Shukla.
For anyone who reads in both Hindi and English and would like to watch two languages disagree with each other on facing pages. For anyone who has been asked how they are coping and had nothing to say.