Thanda Chand / ठंडा चाँद (Hindi, Paperback, Shailesh Thakkar)

"But you don't come in the evening. Nor in the dark peace of the night/ And I'm sitting here. Just for your return" This book is a collection of poems focusing on a variety of themes, such as love, loss, promise, expectation, agony—and many others which animate our life. While these are universal experiences, it might seem that we are all different, unbridgeable people. Thand Chand narrates the story of these themes illustrated by rites of passage which are, for one reason or another, tainted by shame or rewarded with humiliation—what we see and feel shape how we might expect to be loved or cared for, how we build bonds dotted with uncertainty. There are no guides, no itineraries, no instruction manuals to tell us how we must make or break these relationships except for our delicate involvements with pain, pleasure, joy, betrayal, or several of these at once. When the reader reads the poems in the collection, no matter where they come from, or to which spaces they belong, they would see in these poems that just as we are individuals, we are beings with a legitimate space in the universal.