Nothing is Missing
Arranged beauty, a vanishing self. Silent guns in the corner reveal an…
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From Matchbox
Matchbox – February ’26
Of Novels, Old and New
Love letters once. Father's attic held stained books, raw lives. Now, strange children's stories bloom.
February 10, 2026
In the old days,
every novel carried the same plots and characters—
you could open any page
and read it as a love letter.
In those novels, you found yourself,
paused between time and history.
Once, I walked into my father’s attic.
Novels in my language—oddly shaped, stained—
lay scattered on the floor.
There were stories—only stories—
the slow burn of my mother’s arthritic silence,
and unmarried girls eloping with thieves and thugs.
I gathered some of his favorite books into a pile
and rolled over them out of sheer joy.
The next day I found a young woman’s red shoelaces in my locker.
These days people read only graphic novels,
but I have rediscovered children’s stories—
strange, and alive.
📖
PART OF A COLLECTIONOf Novels, Old and New & 3 Other Poems
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Ashwani Kumar
Ashwani Kumar is a poet, author and academic in Mumbai. Widely published, anthologised and translated into several Indian languages, his poetry volumes include ‘My Grandfather’s Imaginary Typewriter’, ‘Banaras and the Other’ and ‘Architecture of Alphabets’. Recently, he has published “Rivers Going Home” (Red River)- a major anthology of Indian poetry. He is author of the acclaimed non-fiction ‘Community Warriors” (Anthem Press), and one of the chief editors of ‘Global Civil Society’ at London School of Economics. He is also cofounder of Indian Novels Collective, an initiative to popularise translation of classic novels of Indian languages. In leisure, he writes a book column in the Financial Express.