The poem explores home as a space of memory, dreaming, and becoming, where childhood, loss, and imagination merge through images of houses, bodies, and music.
Through dreamlike imagery, music, and domestic details, the text rebuilds home as a living, breathing force that binds people, sleep, sound, and subconscious life together.
Aakriti Kuntal is an Indian poet, writer, and visual artist whose work appears in literary journals.
Outlook Anniversary Issue: A Dot In Soot
In ‘The Dot in Soot,’ Aakriti Kuntal turns the home into a space of memory, dreaming, and becoming.
Summary
Bluebells sway,
their arched mouths
Tracing like fins
the perimeter of the fist.
The forgotten house
lurks in the creeping hedge
Of eyelashes—a plump memory.
Guava trees host the limbs
Of children as they scour
the bones of the trees and lick
The crepe fruits. Each room
hugs another, mimicking
The embrace of a child and
father. Creepers entwine
Into robust visions—the pigtails
of a small child. Home is
Where thoughts take root. Grow
into the naked soil and emerge
As bulbs. Home is where dreaming
mouths overlap in sonorous circles.
Sleep tying them into unity. Home
is where the letters of intimacy
Swiftly knit into one another. Home
is where one first faces oneself,
Becomes oneself—the mirror to a
conclave nature. Home is where life’s
Nascent blood first purred.
Home glistens with memory,
Now the black pimple
of ashes and debris.
A splinter in the mouth. Like a dream. A forgotten dream. She tries to pluck it. Cauliflowers of pus. The cogs unwind. Howl’s Moving Castle. A dream is in motion. It’s no longer a hospital bed. The wispy sheets don’t envelope the cyan haze of the body. The body is unfettered. The debris has grown into a face. A face with a clown nose. Laughter runs through the intestines like an eel in motion. Colour arises behind the eyelids.
Everything that had fallen apart starts to stir. The memory of the house. A living, breathing engine that stitched all its members together. The kettle that blew off steam against the pastel curtains. The cat that purred beside the pile of books. Crayon thoughts are now reconstructing in the choking mind. Gathering and gathering as if to smell a hibiscus once more. As if to touch brother’s wool hair once more in sleep. As if to cut through the damages and bandages and mould like clay around sister’s face. Her jaw fitting perfectly into the C jelly of the palm. Embedded perfectly. A dream within a dream.
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Ghar ki Vaani
Entire alleys. Caps and huts. Doors and knuckles. Stretched skin and bricks. The mind burns with threaded tunes. Each house has its own music, each hour its own rhythm. Max Richter’s sleep as the mushroom skirt of night unveils itself. Blue siphoned from the sky’s navel. Each mind connected like dots. Snoring, sleeping, purring, and joined as the collective subconscious floats like bubbles in the eyes of the abode. Constellations in a cup of liquid. The house penetrates the rhythms of sleep. Ruichi Sakamoto’s dream as the afternoon light melts in each corner. The house—measured breaths, an incantation in the mouth of an infant. Chopin’s etudes as the stove’s holy blue flames keep hunger at bay. Satie’s twilight mirth that stitches all religions, all minds, all hands together in a moment of caramel delight.
Aakriti Kuntal is a poet, writer, and visual artist from India whose work has been published in various literary journals. When she is not daydreaming, she is immersed in classical music and taking afternoon strolls.
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This article appeared as ‘A Dot In Soot' in Outlook’s 30th anniversary double issue ‘Party is Elsewhere’ dated January 21st, 2025, which explores the subject of imagined spaces as tools of resistance and politics.
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