A Miranda House poet

A student deals with the pandemic

This Delhi University (DU) student hasn’t been to her college yet. “I belong to the cursed 2020 batch,” says Rangoli Sharma on phone, blaming the pandemic that has forced her campus life to be substituted by online classes. In fact, she is far from Delhi, at her home in Churu, Rajasthan.

In her early 20s, Ms Sharma is a post-grad student in Miranda House, a college for women. Having spent all her life in places other than Delhi, she was looking forward to the experience of being a DU student. Especially because she always viewed its women colleges as “cradles of feminism” where “women can choose to be more of themselves than they can be at any other place; they become kind, opinionated and confident, and I always wished to be one.” With the unpredictability of the ongoing pandemic, there is a possibility of Ms Sharma ending up as a Miranda House alumnus without any personal memories of its canteen and corridors.

She wrote a poem last month, “after seeing requests for oxygens, injections, ventilators and life on social media.”

This is not a love poem

World is always suffering and people are always dying but it is only in the times of war that we are more scared and kinder for ‘people’ can be us more than ever this time as children in 6th grade we used to discuss world wars and guessed what the third one would be for many of us would say “water” little did we know it could be on the air we breathe and dying in the arms of a loved one could be a fearful act in itself

I can never understand how does one attempt to write love poems or one dreams of world peace or one thinks of building houses when there is a war going on a war no one deserved a war everyone has to be a part of so, this, is everything but a love poem for all those who are a part of this war this, is a poem of rage and helplessness of suffering and tears of shattered dreams and smiles of undone last rituals and unsaid goodbyes and no, it should not end on a note of hope for it would have lost its similes and personification till the time it comes to an end so, this poem, doesn’t completely rhyme it rather chooses to be blurry and uncertain like the times it has been written in like the person it has been written by like the world it has been written for and the only comfort it can offer you is in the fact that you are not alone.

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