Written piece
Thread
Rajendra prasad Gupta
India
About this piece
A poem exploring how a South Asian cultural thread—woven from monsoon rain, ancestral ink, and a mother’s resilience—can stitch itself into the borderless fabric of the Commonwealth, finding unity in a quiet, shared song.
Thread
I speak a language the monsoons taught,
each syllable a bead of rain on tin.
My thread is not spun, but poured—
a dark, sweet chai poured between two cups
to cool, to blend, to share.
It is the geometry of fate,
mapped in the henna drying on a bride’s soft palm.
I carry the particular silence
of a library at siesta time,
the scent of old paper and older dust,
the weight of a grandfather’s fountain pen,
its nib still sharp with a promise
inked in a ledger of sacrifice.
Too loud, this quiet thread of mine,
too heavy for a needle’s eye.
I bring a body that learned to dance
in a corridor ten footsteps long,
turning the narrow into a sacred space,
my mother’s laughter, its riot of colours,
stitching morning to the grey of dusk.
What will I thread?
The air, which knows no border.
The light, which filters through a neem tree's sieve.
A song one woman hums for no one but herself,
strong enough to hold a continent of stories,
fine enough to sew this common cloth
without a single knot of division.