I clearly remember the day I first wrote a poem, It was in August 2010, I had just moved to Pune
(India) from my hometown Nashik, for high school and further education. I found it difficult to make friends, I was young, scared, it was deep monsoon, lying drenched in loneliness in a tiny decadent room, and haunted by a tumultuous childhood, I couldn’t help but pen down some heavy feelings and release its weight onto the paper. And after that, it never stopped.

 

I find it difficult to express my feelings to those close to me, poetry is how I found that doorway to let my emotion flow like a river. I soon delved into penning down some really intense feelings I had about a girl i was infatuated with in school days; a one sided love affair that met a sad ending. And I tried to capture that story in a series of poems. I recall a classmate of mine, who read the poems, saying that he knows a publication house and I should totally publish those poems as a book. And that was it. I took the leap of faith and in early 2011, when I was 15 years old, I published my first book of poems: Transparent. Just a few hundred copies printed and sold and distributed.

 

My school in Nashik decided to make it a part of its library, I was quite proud of it. I even wrote a second part of Transparent later on, trying to finish the story with another series of poems, but that never saw the light of day. Transparent got lost in time. Every now and then I still get pictures of the book from people from a long lost past; stumbling upon my failed love story while cleaning their houses and taking out their decade long trash, and Transparent makes its way back into my life briefly in a quiet, beautiful way. They ask me what I am doing now, congratulate me to hear that I am still a poet, and then the book goes missing in the arms of time again as that conversation is over and those people go back to cleaning their trash.