Bhavya Tiwari is an undergraduate student at the University of Delhi, India. She is currently associated with ‘The Medley’, an online literary journal, as a content reader and curator. She’s been writing since age of fifteen and sometimes posts her work on the internet under the pen name ‘Altraberry’.
Photography by Michael R. Pitter
A Sceptic’s Musings
Sometimes I wonder if we could
(you and me and the civilisation)
Could take things as they are
Without elaborate probing,
And go to bed with ease
And sleep a dreamless sleep.
Sometimes I want people,
Just for once,
To consider this:
The pause at the juncture
Wasn’t a revelation
That winning smile
Was a twitch in haste
The favour of your friends
Wasn’t mercy
The fire at the factory
Was a tragic mistake
The union of the lovers
Wasn’t for fame
The local priest goes home
To his two children
The woman on the street
Isn’t a scam
Your neighbour’s doctrines
Aren’t against you
The speakers’ proverbs
Aren’t theirs to own
Your colleague’s goodwill
Isn’t a bribe
The cries at the funeral
Echoed back home too
The glorious days of yore
Seem glorious to old eyes
The charter of modernity
Is worn around the edges.
Which is not to say
I subscribe to naivete
Nor to closing your eyes
To be a fool to crime,
A witness to abuse
Nor a viewer to vice
But sometimes
The world is what it is
And there are no monsters in the dark
There are no jaws under the ocean
There are no thorns underneath the sheets
There are no assassins behind the door
And sometimes
A mirror is just a mirror
And not a lake.
But, while all sounds well and good,
In truth, I too am guilty of these follies.
The world has chiseled me so
That if I walk through the streets post midnight
And a wayfarer hands me a torch,
I’d say, ‘Thanks, but my eyes are used to the dark,’
And I’d reject the offering.
From the Editor:
We hope that readers receive In Parentheses as a medium through which the evolution of human thought can be appreciated, nurtured and precipitated. It will present a dynamo of artistic expression, journalism, informal analysis of our daily world, entertainment of ideas considered lofty and criticism of today’s popular culture. The featured content does not follow any specific ideology except for that of intellectual expansion of the masses.
Founded in late 2011, In Parentheses prides itself upon analysis of the current condition of intelligence in the minds of these young people, and building a hypothesis for one looming question: what comes after Post-Modernism?
The idea for this magazine stems from a simple conversation regarding the aforementioned question, which drew out the need to identify our generation’s place in literary history.
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By In Parentheses in IP Volume 7
32 pages, published 1/15/2022
in parentheses 