This volume is the second part of a continuing poetic journey that began with Bade Naal Sahab Mohalla and Other Poems Volume I. The first volume sought to recover the remembered world of Bade Naal Sahab Mohalla—its streets, voices, customs, and the quiet dignity of its people. The present collection returns to that familiar landscape with the same creative vision and purpose, not to repeat what has already been remembered, but to uncover lives, relationships, and moments that remained waiting to be heard.
The poems in this volume—The Language of “Ch”, Attendance—For Sahu Sir, Daddy, The Aunt of Jawahar Nagar, Banarsi Babu, A Truckload of Childhood,Paun, Chachchi, Sisterhood, and Back to Pavilion—extend the emotional geography of the mohalla. Together they reveal that memory is inexhaustible: every remembered face carries another story, every familiar lane another echo, every ordinary life another measure of grace.
Every remembered place exists twice: once in the geography of the world and again in the inward landscape of memory. The poems gathered here belong to the latter. Rooted in lived experience, they do not seek to reconstruct the past with documentary precision; rather, they recover its moral atmosphere, emotional truth, and quiet humanity.
The men, women, and children who inhabit these poems are neither historical subjects nor fictional inventions in any simple sense. They endure because memory, unlike history, preserves not only events but also affections, gestures, silences, and the quiet radiance of human presence. What survives here is less the chronology of a neighbourhood than its abiding spirit.As in the first volume, words from Hindi, Hindustani, Urdu, Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit, Punjabi, and the regional speech of central India have been retained wherever translation would diminish their cultural resonance. Language is never merely a vehicle of meaning; it is itself a repository of memory. Certain words embody ways of living, forms of relationship, and shades of feeling that no exact equivalent in another language can fully preserve. A glossary has therefore been provided, not to domesticate these expressions, but to accompany the reader in entering their world.
Although these poems arise from a particular locality, they are ultimately concerned with experiences that transcend geography: the shaping influence of childhood, the quiet authority of parents, teachers, and elders, the resilience of kinship and friendship, the fragile continuities of community, the persistence of memory, and the dignity of lives that seldom find a place in official histories.
The mohalla thus becomes more than a physical setting. It becomes a human condition—a shared space where belonging is measured not by boundaries but by remembrance, affection, and mutual care. If the first volume opened the gates to this remembered world, the present one invites the reader to wander deeper into its lanes, where familiar voices are joined by others that complete the living chorus of the neighbourhood.
Yet the journey is not complete. Memory seldom reveals itself all at once; it unfolds in successive acts of recollection. This second volume therefore stands not as a conclusion but as a continuation—another chapter in an unfolding testament to a place whose significance extends far beyond its physical boundaries. The final volume will gather the remaining voices and complete this literary remembrance, bringing the trilogy to its natural close while affirming that the deepest homes are those preserved not in stone or street, but in the enduring landscape of memory.These poems ask only that they be read with patience. Like old streets revisited after many years, they disclose themselves gradually. Their meanings reside as much in what is left unsaid as in what is spoken, inviting the reader to share in an inheritance of memory, loss, gratitude, and hope that belongs, ultimately, to us all.