किस्सा Unfolding: The Twin Verses | Mayuri Kumari
Some books about relationships concentrate on declarations of love. Mayuri Kumari’s किस्सा Unfolding: The Twin Verses pays at least as much attention to what people cannot say, what they continue to do out of obligation, and what remains after a relationship changes. In its twenty-one poems, written across Hindi and English, emotional life appears as a network of uneven responsibilities, shared memories, gestures of loyalty and the difficult work of setting boundaries. The collection is especially perceptive when it considers the person who quietly becomes indispensable to others while feeling increasingly invisible to herself. It also refuses to make every relationship painful. Friendship, mutual recognition and spiritual belonging provide forms of shelter against the book’s more troubled scenes.
“अनकहा बोझ” (The Untold Burden) gives the collection one of its clearest portraits of responsibility inherited too early. Its speaker looks back on a childhood marked by heavy expectations and emotional wounds that were not adequately acknowledged. What gives the poem force is the tension between outward capability and inward cost. A young person can learn to keep a family functioning while losing access to the ordinary freedom associated with childhood. The poem does not present endurance as uncomplicated triumph. It suggests that strength may be something a person develops because no better option is offered. The line of thought is painful precisely because social praise often celebrates resilience without asking what required it.
That tension deepens in “अधूरी छाँव” (Incomplete Shelter), a poem about missing support and the belatedness of achievement. The speaker has worked, persisted and reached a materially easier stage of life, yet does not find that these gains settle the older emotional account. The shelter implied by the title is not a luxury: it is the protection a child expects from a caring adult. When it is missing, the absence continues to shape the meaning of later accomplishments. One of the poem’s most unsettling insights is that a person may win the future and still mourn the version of the past that should have been possible. Kumari makes space for that grief rather than commanding the speaker to be grateful and move on.
In “घर की ‘ATM PIN’” (The Home’s ATM PIN), family responsibility is examined through an entirely different voice. The eldest daughter is compared to a calculator, security code and financial instrument: essential to a household’s operation, but rarely invited to count her own sorrow as a legitimate expense. These images are witty, yet the humour sharpens rather than softens the criticism. The poem sees how praise for a daughter’s reliability can mask an unequal assignment of emotional labour. Care is valuable; the trouble begins when the one who gives it is assumed to have no limits. This distinction matters because the poem is not an attack on family attachment itself. It is a request that affection include recognition of the person doing the work.
The collection makes a useful contrast between obligation and chosen loyalty in “ऑफ़िस का ताला-चाबी” (The Office Lock and Key). What begins as workplace familiarity becomes an intimate friendship sustained by trust rather than performance. The comparison with a locker requiring two keys is elegantly apt: neither friend is merely a spectator to the relationship. Each holds something the other cannot replace. The poem’s celebration of sisterhood is not sentimental excess; it emerges from small practical details such as conversations beyond office walls and memories preserved across travel and time. “सदियाँ” (Ages) extends the idea, describing a bond that remains recognisable despite reduced contact and the ordinary erosion of free time. Together these poems say that continuity need not look like constant proximity.
“आईने के दो रूप” (The Two Forms of the Mirror) asks a harder question about companionship: who stays when comfort disappears? The poem’s two mirrors are prosperity and hardship. Good times reveal one set of habits, while difficulty tests whether affection can survive fear, inconvenience and uncertainty. It is an accessible moral structure, but its usefulness lies in resisting a superficial definition of friendship based on pleasant experiences. Kumari is interested in character, not social display. Set beside “ऑफ़िस का ताला-चाबी,” the poem adds a criterion to the celebration of loyalty. A friend is not simply someone with whom one has accumulated memories; friendship acquires depth through attention during experiences that do not make attractive photographs.
Love is more elusive in “The Unsent Draft.” Instead of portraying the dramatic confession, the English-language poem concentrates on the message that never crosses the threshold into another person’s phone. The speaker’s words change shape under fear: accusation, apology, explanation and longing all compete for space. The unsent text becomes an archive of the relationship as it exists in the speaker’s imagination, not necessarily as it exists between two people. That distinction is quietly devastating. One can maintain the possibility of reconciliation by refusing the encounter that would confirm or deny it. The poem’s ending points toward self-choice without pretending that the decision is emotionally easy. A boundary may begin with an act nobody else can see.
“गरिमा का निस्तारण” (The Resolution of Dignity) approaches separation from a more formal and reflective direction. The speaker imagines leaving an intentional emptiness in the record of a relationship. Rather than demanding an account of the past, the poem considers the dignity of release, the refusal to convert pain into permanent captivity. Its vocabulary of acceptance and self-respect gives the collection a moral counterpoint to the rawness of the earlier family poems. Forgiveness, distance and dignity are not treated as identical: the speaker’s action is better described as choosing not to surrender the self to an unresolved attachment. This idea will resonate with readers who have discovered that some relationships cannot be repaired by finding one more perfect sentence.
The poems about disconnection are not confined to individual heartbreak. “खोए हुए रिश्ते, बंधी हुई आँखें” (Lost Bonds, Screen-Bound Eyes) looks at the collective habit of being present in the same room while attending to separate screens. Memory is central here: the speaker recalls a time when family entertainment could generate shared laughter and common reference points. The contrast is intentionally broad, but the emotional concern is precise. The presence of a device can be less significant than the absence of active listening. In a book repeatedly asking to be heard, this poem expands the question from individual wounds to a culture of distracted relationships. The problem is not only what remains unspoken; it is also what we no longer notice.
Kumari’s author background, supplied alongside the manuscript, describes writing as a private practice that began in adolescence and developed into a means of reflection. That context helps explain the collection’s investment in honesty, but the poems should not be reduced to a diary or treated as documentary accounts of every event they portray. Their speakers, metaphors and rhetorical choices stand on the page as poetry. The distinction permits a fuller reading. “The Architecture of Self,” for example, works not because readers know a precise biography, but because they recognise the way a person may borrow a sense of worth from another’s judgment. Literature gives private experience a form that others can inhabit without claiming it as their own.
A fair reading also acknowledges the book’s preference for declaration. Several poems make their ethical argument plainly, and at times a powerful premise is followed by lines that repeat the conclusion rather than complicate it. Readers accustomed to oblique, highly compressed verse may find the approach didactic. Yet directness is also integral to the collection’s social purpose. These poems appear determined to name burdens that are often politely ignored. They offer companionship to someone who has been praised for being strong, dismissed for needing support, or told that an unspoken hurt does not count. Their emotional vocabulary is broad enough to encompass bitterness, gratitude, laughter, devotion and resolve.
At its most affecting, किस्सा Unfolding: The Twin Verses asks readers to revise a familiar question. Instead of asking only who loves us, it asks who understands the cost of what we give, who returns when circumstances are difficult, and who allows us to remain whole. The collection has no universal formula for family, friendship or separation. Its twenty-one poems represent different states of feeling, sometimes irreconcilable and sometimes unexpectedly hopeful. That range is its strength. Mayuri Kumari’s writing reminds us that care is not proved by endurance alone, nor is independence the absence of affection. The healthiest connection may be the one in which closeness and dignity can exist together. For readers interested in the private ethics of relationships, this is the book’s enduring invitation.
AMAZON BOOK LINK https://amzn.in/d/0795eVCB
