किस्सा Unfolding: The Twin Verses | Mayuri Kumari
It is easy to imagine poetry belonging to gardens, rainstorms and distant moons. Mayuri Kumari’s किस्सा Unfolding: The Twin Verses brings it into the office cubicle, the phone’s Drafts folder, the bank account and the toll lane. The collection’s twenty-one Hindi and English poems propose that the vocabulary of our hurried age is not the enemy of feeling. In the right hands, practical objects can show how modern people distribute affection, suppress anxiety and keep moving when they would rather stop. What distinguishes this book is the effort to make recognizable twenty-first-century circumstances carry emotional meaning without stripping them of their everyday texture. Kumari’s city-facing, work-aware imagery suggests that modern life may be fragmented, but the emotional truths underneath it are not.
Consider “ऑफ़िस का ताला-चाबी” (The Office Lock and Key). It begins with the unremarkable beginnings of a friendship in a workplace, then enlarges that bond through comparisons with a bank locker and the logic of two keys. Corporate language, which often reduces relationships to networking or mutual benefit, is quietly overturned. The poem insists that genuine friendship is not an investment measured by returns. Excel formulas and backups appear not as jokes for their own sake, but as ways to describe reliability: a bond that keeps its meaning after the working day ends. There is particular tenderness in the poem’s attention to women’s friendship and its refusal to demand constant loud affirmation. Quietness, in this account, can be a mode of loyalty rather than absence.
“घर की ‘ATM PIN’” (The Home’s ATM PIN) pushes the method in a sharper direction. Its subject is the eldest daughter, imagined through figures of calculation, access and authentication. The four-digit PIN is something essential that the household expects to remember; the OTP becomes a comparison for usefulness that is quickly consumed and forgotten. The financial conceit allows the poem to diagnose a familiar imbalance: one person’s care may be treated as an inexhaustible service while her own emotional needs remain off the books. Images of simple and compound interest convey how sacrifice compounds benefits for others. These metaphors are playful in construction, yet the implications are far from light. The poem asks who bears the hidden costs of an apparently functioning home.
Modern work does not only consume time. It changes the language in which people think about their value. “निद्रा का हिसाब” (The Sleep Ledger) imagines sleep as an account subject to demands, interruptions and unpaid mental obligations. Rather than describing insomnia in abstract terms, it frames rest as another bureaucratic contract to be fulfilled. The speaker’s exhausted mind continues to tally tomorrow’s requirements even after the body wishes to stop. That experience will be familiar to anyone who has learned to call constant availability professionalism. The poem’s achievement is to show how economic thinking infiltrates even the hours that should resist measurement. Sleep, like affection, is no longer allowed simply to exist; it must first justify itself.
The image changes again in “जीवन की ‘फास्ट टैग’ लेन” (The FASTag Lane of Life). The toll system supplies a model for moving past repetitive obstacles. In the poem, inner trust resembles a maintained balance and spiritual acceptance removes a delay that previously seemed unavoidable. It would be a mistake to read the metaphor as a promise that faith magically abolishes difficulty. Rather, the imaginative force lies in distinguishing a problem from the anxious rituals performed around it. The gate opens because something has changed in how the speaker approaches the passage. Here the technological image leads unexpectedly toward surrender, humility and an easier relationship with uncertainty. Few everyday objects seem less spiritual than a highway toll tag; that contrast gives the poem its originality.
Digital communication receives its most concentrated treatment in “The Unsent Draft.” The poem takes an everyday action—typing and deleting a message—and makes it a portrait of emotional stalemate. The issue is not that technology prevents truth. On the contrary, the phone allows a person to formulate words with remarkable precision, to revise an apology, or to rehearse an accusation. The difficulty lies in the risk of being answered. A saved draft becomes both a record of honesty and a device for postponing its consequences. Kumari observes the paradox of mediated intimacy: we can craft the perfect message and still remain unable to begin the conversation. The withheld text acquires a strange permanence because it never has to meet the other person’s response.
The question widens in “खोए हुए रिश्ते, बंधी हुई आँखें” (Lost Bonds, Screen-Bound Eyes). The poem remembers an earlier household sociality in which watching television could gather people together. Its present-day contrast is striking: countless pictures may be stored, yet loneliness may remain; everyone carries a window to the world, yet shared attention dwindles. This is not a technical analysis of social media, nor does the poem suggest that all earlier family life was ideal. It is a lyric complaint about distracted intimacy. The deeper point concerns the difference between recording an experience and inhabiting it. The device in the hand is not the only problem; the diminished capacity to attend to one another is the real loss.
Kumari also recognises that a technological metaphor need not become an anti-technology sermon. “जीवन का गोलमाल” (Life’s Chaos) uses financial language and popular-film references to depict the absurd economy of effort, debt, delayed dreams and survival. Its humour is social, sometimes deliberately broad. That tone makes a difference in a collection where several poems bear heavy private emotions. One can laugh at the forms, calculations and promises governing adult life while acknowledging their exhausting reality. “अपना टाइम, अपना क़िस्सा” (My Time, My Story) similarly borrows the rhythm of informal encouragement, complete with the logic of deleting an old message, to turn toward self-possession. Both poems suggest that contemporary speech can be agile enough to register pain and answer it.
The collection’s bilingual design strengthens this cultural portrait. Hindi allows Kumari to move into the idioms of households, friendship, encouragement and devotional tradition without translating every emotional resonance into a neutral international register. English offers other tonal possibilities, notably in the reflective concentration of “The Architecture of Self” and the everyday immediacy of “The Unsent Draft.” This is not a book in which every Hindi poem is simply an English poem repeated in different words. Instead, the languages occupy the same imaginative territory from distinct angles. The “Twin Verses” idea is most convincing when read as a conversation across voices and experiences. A reader who understands both languages can hear the friction and ease of their coexistence.
There are moments when the central metaphors become so explicit that the reader has little room to reach an independent conclusion. Some financial comparisons are piled upon one another, and some poems conclude by spelling out their lesson. Readers who favour compressed, allusive poetry may wish for more silence around an image. Yet these qualities also arise from a deliberate commitment to accessibility. Kumari wants the connection between familiar machinery and private emotion to be felt immediately, not solved as an intellectual puzzle. The best comparisons work because they illuminate a social truth: an office friendship can be more durable than a job; a family’s unpaid care has a cost; constant connectivity is not the same as closeness.
What ultimately makes किस्सा Unfolding: The Twin Verses timely is not the presence of FASTag, OTPs or Excel sheets in its vocabulary. Those objects will change; some may eventually disappear. The enduring interest is what the poet sees through them. New systems reorganise our daily routines, but they do not abolish the human longing to be appreciated, heard, secure or free. Kumari understands that a person may speak in the language of spreadsheets all day and still experience love, exhaustion and hope without any convenient formula. Her collection reaches for readers who live inside modern systems yet want a language for what those systems cannot calculate. That is a compelling reason to spend time with these verses, and perhaps to look differently at the objects waiting on the nearest desk.AMAZON BOOK LINK https://amzn.in/d/0795eVCB
