Nine Poems from The Map is Not a Territory (Copper Coin, 2025) — by Aranya Padil

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Freelance Leaf Collector
Keeper of the Keys to the Chest of Dreams
Chief Liaison to memory
who occasionally appears in public as nostalgia
Consulting Editor to the city: Spin Doctor to the left-leaning zephyr
that chronicles the passage of light on human faces
Archivist of lost experience and forgotten alleys,
single chappals and traitorous playing cards that have deserted the pack
Co-founder of a think-tank whose singular objective is
to unravel the script of the language of ripples
Financial Advisor to boredom
Chief Sweet Talker
Conductor, the BaraPullah Morning Spring Quartet
Director, School of Incarnadine Traffic Signals
Field Associate, Ennui Association, Department of Vacant Eyes
Lyricist, Publications Unit, Centre for Children’s Songs
for not more than Three Tongues
Counter of pavement tiles
Acknowledger of Wags
Ruffler of fur
Convener of the conference of squirrels and yesterdays
Rapporteur to the soliloquys of unpeopled parks
Observer, Ledger Keeper, the unfurling of detritus into incandescence

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There are so many things I’m not allowed to tell you

Richard Siken, ‘Dirty Valentine’ from Crush

I want to love you the way an animal / forgets to be angry
The screen smears my loneliness all over the night
The moon pops up like a notification, I miss a beat
What I didn’t want to tell you hides in the corner somewhere
The walls crumble unable to bear the silence, I’m sorry I am
not an architect, I’m sorry I am not the nightsky, I’m sorry I’m—
Memories tend to rot, if you don’t tend to them, I stand
outside myself, and the door opens into yesterday I need
a hole to climb out of This open field is stifling I want you to—
Hold me in your angry embrace Don’t tell me I am nothing
Without you, I want to love you the way an animal / licks its wounds
Soft as doubt that is afraid to utter its own name lest it dies
We were cartographers, rewilding borders, gods, asleep at work
When we built a tower to reach heaven, he disdained the gift of language
We waded through twilight, two fingers flicking nippled streets
We licked the air, teaching moist, unfinished lips, intuition
We understood—Beloved for the child before birth, Bihāg for the plants
But two points make a line, a third makes a map, not the territory
The right moment would have been scratched, if it weren’t for serendipity
Sometimes a daughter scavenges her father’s bones in the desert
All her life For the lost even a memory is enough, however rotten
Homes jostle for space, blinds drawn, lest dreams escape
Every waking hour lines up outside our door, screaming respite
The years flicker into poetry, dead pixels, laughter interrupted, chipped mica
Above the torrent, hope perches alone, on an overhanging branch
What I did not tell you has begun to smell It is alive enough to be old
I want to love you the way this city / holds out a patch of effervescent sea
the way you extend your hand the way a childhood glints through the flesh,
stillborn Take this nakedness, this winged silence trailing fire I want
to love you by accident / don’t tell me Take this fragment of cracked mirror
lodged in the hand’s nest don’t tear this heart from your breast, let it sit there
beside yours, don’t tell me to move, to forget. Teach me how you know
what it means where it lives how it dies when it gives why it hurts
to belong

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on the side of the highway
under the flyover
by the foliage
a chair sits frozen
in murderous scowl
caught in the stare
of a city locked
in rigor mortis
back without brunt
legs without night
carry its burden
of seeing unspeakingly
caught in the embrace
of an evening hoarse
with the aazaan ricocheting
through its cracked chest
and the rumble of hungry eyes
caught in the seat
of its own rapture
plastic impossibility,
bulging out, a burp,
a dot, a spitting image
of the person who broke it
a misspeak, an anachronism,
a minute hand
roused out of reverie
history’s finger paused
on the wrong line
between an awkward cough
brought on by smog
and a furrowed brow
creased with weariness
dusted clean of purpose
stained with mud.
three layers of mud.
on the side of the highway
under the flyover
by the foliage
a chair sits frozen
perhaps it is dreaming
the occasional glint of gold
faded into brown
on its only remaining arm
hides a vision of a hundred fireflies,
circling around it, weaving constellations
into a tiara for the absent monarch.

[et_pb_heading title="Colouring " _builder_version="4.27.5" _module_preset="default" title_font="||||||||" max_width="660px" module_alignment="center" title_font_size_tablet="" title_font_size_phone="22px" title_font_size_last_edited="on|desktop" global_colors_info="{}" theme_builder_area="post_content"][/et_pb_heading]I start with a clearly defined outline. a beak. or an eye. Feathers can be complicated. I seek certainty. The point drills lovingly, an end in sight. A leaf is green after all, isn’t it? the colour of light turning into dream. Stay within the contours the edges seduce you, don’t give into the lures of black borders. It’s easy to smudge. to budge. from your centre. to wade into oblivion. to trudge into the wasteland of blurred lines. and then what are we left with, but self-doubt and mayhem? An image is convenient blue straying into yellow turns green. Envy is easier tamed on paper. and the red eye of the bird of prey remains angry forever.  [et_pb_heading title="The First Revelation" _builder_version="4.27.5" _module_preset="default" title_font="||||||||" max_width="660px" module_alignment="center" title_font_size_tablet="" title_font_size_phone="22px" title_font_size_last_edited="on|desktop" global_colors_info="{}" theme_builder_area="post_content"][/et_pb_heading]Sunrise of the world A bald pate tingles with light hemmed into a carpet of sand. From the breast of mountains folded like a confusion of fingers A man crawls out of a cavern whose open mouth snarls at the pink sky of Mecca. His hands stretch towards the sky. A spider ensconced in her web smells rain The sun revolves in his eyes Before him, the colours move as music does after a silence, as conversation turns to landscape. His knees are the trunk of a tree whose roots dig deep into the earth whose branches are heavy with the fruit of what the world has not seen yet. His arms slump to the side, sodden with the noise of the thousand watt vision before him For the first time in a purple haze of startle, the meaning of wings emerges. He understands, then, that there is more than what he imagined. As he kneels there transfixed, he does not know that an entire people would become the children of that dream.  [et_pb_heading title="Invocation" _builder_version="4.27.5" _module_preset="default" title_font="||||||||" max_width="660px" module_alignment="center" title_font_size_tablet="" title_font_size_phone="22px" title_font_size_last_edited="on|desktop" global_colors_info="{}" theme_builder_area="post_content"][/et_pb_heading]

It is the Goddess who sits on the tip of our paintbrush.

—Pandit Seu, the painter’s father, leading a prayer to
the Devi in Nainsukh (Amit Dutta, 2010)

The tree on whose limbs our tradition sits
whose shade is our image making, is tired.
The muse knows its only virtue as fading
in the way that decay is beautiful.
We must make of the world, a simple thing
that deepens. We must hold the frame firm,
despite the trembling body. Even a haveli
is little more than a flickering wick
whose shadow trips on its own sharpness.
This is why we must labour in the darkness
so that it is the memory of our being here
that remains and not what we saw.

*'Invocation' was first published in the series ‘Finding Nainsukh’, commissioned by ASAP | art. (June 2022)

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At home, we used to empty the milk
out of plastic packets until the last viscous drop
Then, we let running water in
just enough to let it swirl.
A little game.
If it broke, tai would squeeze lemon,
the milk disintegrating like tectonic sheets
on a map of the world.
Paneer
Mostly it lived, and we would make tea,
or add haldi, enough to tickle the cough out
Sometimes it would become paaisa.
In the end she would rinse the packet dry,
and stick it on the tiled kitchen wall
to sell back.
every day.
I think of this ritualistic purge.
It sticks in the mind
what we do to feed ourselves—
and how it taught me to love

*‘Milk’ was first featured in On Eating (May 2022)

[et_pb_heading title="Freedom" _builder_version="4.27.5" _module_preset="default" title_font="||||||||" max_width="660px" module_alignment="center" title_font_size_tablet="" title_font_size_phone="22px" title_font_size_last_edited="on|desktop" global_colors_info="{}" theme_builder_area="post_content"][/et_pb_heading]I dream of a world where fingers learn to form a fist before forgetting, where the soft heart of innocence hasn’t calcified into cynicism, where every tryst with the divine isn’t flaming with the impatience of fear. where light is truth, and darkness is drenched in the glorious sin of curiosity and desire. where eyes dance to the laughter of leaves. where the sickle is blanched by the sun and the kiss of gravel and mud. where distance is measured in dream, and time, in silences. where the soaring cry of students is an anthem, and the grass of wild plains sashay in defiant plumage. where memory is roasted in the kindling of palms, and future is the sound of children at play. I open my eyes and see farmers, students, artists, children, women, the unfinished, untouchable and unworthy all surging in rebellion.  [et_pb_heading title="Not yes" _builder_version="4.27.5" _module_preset="default" title_font="||||||||" max_width="660px" module_alignment="center" title_font_size_tablet="" title_font_size_phone="22px" title_font_size_last_edited="on|desktop" global_colors_info="{}" theme_builder_area="post_content"][/et_pb_heading]

Abujhmādh, January ’21
for Prakash
Shall we go to the forest?
hao
Will we find dātun there?
hao
Do you know the name of this shrub?
hao
Are its fruits dangerous?
hao
Are its fruits safe?
hao
Sulfi?
hao
Maakur?
hao
This night is young. The fire is good.
hao
The full moon is a week away
hao
Uniform or flag? stick or stone?
hao
Did they burn villages?
hao
Did you know what it meant when they first came?
hao
Will you be there when it ends?
hao

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‘The music of Aranya’s debut collection of poems, The Map is Not the Territory, is a polyglot music. It is composed from a gamut of sources, ranging across English, Hindi, Tulu, Kannada, Marathi and Bambaiya, carrying the thrum of multilingual and multiethnic metropolitan India. It embraces the cacophony of the street and the elegance of the dhrupad concert, the measured ethos of the library and the crackling zaniness of youth subcultures. Assured in their tonality, Aranya’s poems are magically alive to colour, texture, taste and timbre. Alert to natural catastrophe and political violence, they are unafraid to confront and question the tyranny of institutions and hierarchies. And even while these poems demonstrate a passionately detailed engagement with the things, persons, sensations and atmospheres that enrich the life of the senses, they resonate with a yearning for those larger and mysterious dimensions of experience that lie beyond the weave of words and images.’

— Ranjit Hoskote

‘These poems, which come from the cusp of flight and possession, light and “fungal haze”, found lists and an earthworm’s life, are indeed a map, a map of delightful waywardness.’

— Sumana Roy

‘To describe The Map is Not the Territory in a few lines is to lose the point. Just as one does not separate a deer from a forest or the music from a tanpura, I find myself incapable of summoning just a few words of praise, quoting only a line or two, or choosing a specific phrase to sum up my impression of Aranya’s debut poetry collection. To do so would mean isolating something that is, by its very nature, surprisingly fluid, consciously disobedient and impossibly plural. From a kamblipoochi eating a leaf to the gargoyles outside Victoria Terminus, from a mallige-seller to a tuk tuk driver, from Bilaskhani Todi to a Leonard Cohen song, from a grandmother grinding love into curry to a didi roasting revolution in her tava, the world of Aranya’s poems absorbs everything—it both touches and is, in turn, touched by multiple, lingering presences. It is both staggeringly singular and deeply choral.

‘Whatever your reason may be to pick up The Map is Not the Territory, I am certain that you will be profoundly moved by its vast simultaneities, and enraptured by its teeming multitudes.’

— Kunjana Parashar

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Poetly

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Copper Coin

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