Sameer Gudhate Presents the Book Review of Tumhari Aarshi by Vineet Kumar Mishra

I finished Tumhari Aarshi late in the evening, phone face down on the bed, the room lit by a single tube light that had begun to hum faintly. I remember my shoulders were slightly raised, as if I had been bracing myself without knowing why. When I closed the book, I didn’t move at once. Not because something had struck me dramatically—but because something had quietly refused to leave.

There was a pause.

The kind that doesn’t ask for attention.

This book did not arrive loudly. It didn’t announce itself as poetry, or grief, or love. It arrived like a presence that sits beside you without asking permission—close enough to be felt, distant enough to not explain itself. At first, I resisted that closeness. I kept waiting for the poems to do something: declare, resolve, intensify. Instead, they lingered. They stayed half a step behind my expectations.

That unsettled me.

What Tumhari Aarshi awakened in me was not romance, but recognition. A recognition of how often we confuse intensity with truth, and noise with depth. These poems move differently. They don’t chase emotion; they wait for it. And in that waiting, they allow memory to surface—not as nostalgia, but as residue. Something that remains even after you’ve stopped looking for it.

While reading, I became aware of my breathing. It slowed. Not deliberately. The lines seemed to ask less of me, and in doing so, took more. Love here is not an event; it is a condition. It doesn’t peak. It persists. Sometimes painfully. Sometimes quietly. Often without justification.

The book behaves like a river that does not shimmer in the sun but still changes the land around it. You don’t watch it for beauty. You notice it later—in the altered soil, the softened edges. The poems do not explain separation or longing. They inhabit them. Silence is not used as a device; it is trusted as language.

There were moments when I felt the poems brushing against memories I hadn’t named in years—conversations that ended without conclusion, affections that dissolved without conflict. Not heartbreaks. Just departures. The kind that don’t announce themselves as endings until much later. The book did not reopen those memories forcefully. It let them sit. Which somehow felt more honest.

At one point, I realized I was no longer reading forward. I was rereading backward, not to understand better, but to feel differently. That’s when I noticed something important: this book does not want agreement. It wants companionship. It doesn’t try to convince you that love lasts or that loss redeems. It simply stays with the fact that something once mattered—and that this fact cannot be undone.

There is a maturity in this restraint. Not the maturity of answers, but of acceptance. The poems neither accuse nor console. They observe. They let contradictions remain intact. Love fades. Memory doesn’t. But even that is not stated as wisdom—just as something lived through, quietly.

Still, there was resistance in me. A few poems felt almost too inward, as if they turned away just when I leaned closer. I couldn’t always enter them fully. Some spaces stayed sealed. I didn’t push. I let that distance remain. Perhaps the book was reminding me that intimacy does not mean access. Some doors are meant to be felt, not opened.

What stayed with me most was not a line, but a sensation: that of holding something fragile without the urge to protect or preserve it. Letting it exist as it is. Temporary. Unresolved. Real.

Even now, when I think I’ve left the book behind, it returns—not as text, but as atmosphere. Like a room you once lived in, where the furniture is gone, yet the air still remembers you.

I don’t feel finished with Tumhari Aarshi.

I only feel slightly rearranged.

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