Conversations about longing

It is unfashionable these days to imagine the narrative first person as that of the poet

The poem opening the book under review is titled “It is 1966” and owes a debt — as acknowledged by the poet — to Aga Shahid Ali’s “A Lost Memory of Delhi”. The narrator of Srilata’s poem, like the one on Ali’s, spies on her parents. They are on a date: “I take a taxi to the park / where they are sitting on a bench, / a foot apart from each other, / he with his face resolutely averted, / she with her eyes on the poorly tended flowers.” It is before the narrator is born, so this is