Smitten

Genre: Poetry

Poems on Living and Loving

Stop.
you need to stop.
Breathe.
Breathe in today’s gifts.
Breathe.
Breathe out all the love
you have in you.

From the euphoric highs of fresh romance to the endearing bonds of commitment, from the vacuum and plenitude in survival to the unconditional love of motherhood, Smitten celebrates the many facets of love.

Exploring the mundane and the intricate in loving and living, Smitten is also about the propensity to fear and the ability to wrap that fear in unconditional love.

Split into six parts, the poems in this collection navigate through the universal yet unique emotions and realizations. And every now and then, Smitten shows how being smitten is the only way you defeat death, not of the body and the soul but that of the zest for living, when it laughs at your face.

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A childhood incident she can’t recollect…
A haunting nightmare that jolts her out of sleep…
For Zara, knowing is suffering.

Cocooned in the shell she has built around herself, life is all about bare survival until one day she gets an email from The Storyteller…

Zara is hooked by his words and hungry for more. But, to her horror, she learns he knows more about her than she thought. When her step-cousin Zachariah lands after eight years, reviving bittersweet memories, Zara must face her worst demons.​

Who is The Storyteller? What does he want from her? What is she afraid of?
And why didn’t her mother protect her from the devastating truth about herself?

The Storyteller is a poignant narrative, exploring childhood trauma and the battle of a young woman caught between PTSD and high-functioning normalcy, intertwined with a tale of love, loss, grief, betrayal, pain and survival.

​The Storyteller

Genre: Psychological Fiction, Literary Mystery, Drama

You can sleep through the world, but not through yourself.

Sandcastles

Genre: Contemporary Women's Fiction, Romance, Drama

When grief and guilt intertwine to test the heart, love and trust are only as strong as you are.

One rainy morning in July 2012, Selena Rocha wakes up to find her carefully woven, quiet life flipped over - the past she had buried a decade ago reappears as two men. She must choose between calm lies and destructive truths, to protect her twelve-year-old twins, Nayna and Ruby, from both.

Neil Shaw returns after a lifetime of fleeing from himself, to redeem what he foolishly lost to his naivety. But it demands something close to fatal, not just love and regret, from him.

Ten years behind bars, Dr. Vincent Gomez has to forgive one person now – himself. And there is only one way to do it, which is but the beginning of a bigger question.

A coming-of-age tale of three girls who entered Goa Medical College in 1997, Sandcastles subtly interlaces the sensitive and strong layers of family, friendship and love with the resurgent strength of women, affirming that forgiveness and acceptance are the ultimate forms of love.

The Puppet

Genre: Poetry

The Show Always Begins With Love

There is something the world always asks when finally an abuse victim leaves, runs away and escapes: “Why didn’t he / she do it earlier?”

Survival is a process. It happens over seconds, minutes, hours, days and months and sometimes, years. It takes the accumulation of courage against fear, one drop, one blow, one bruise at a time. It means the bottling up of tears and donning the smiling mask a million times just to stay alive. And writhing in guilt for letting oneself be hurt.

The Puppet, a series of 11 poems, ten acts with a final act, is a tribute to all who have survived and dared to stand up and to leave. It is a humble attempt to tell the ones who are suffering that it is okay to leave. It is a mild reminder to the tentative to recognize the symptoms early and cut loose as soon as possible.

Above all, it is a journey to self-realization, self-discovery and self-actualization and a bold warning against being a puppet to anyone or anything – be it a friend, a parent, a partner, the system or even materials or ideologies.

The Torrent From My Soul

Genre: Poetry

A collection of poems from the poet's younger years, The Torrent from My Soul reflects the thoughts, joys, sorrows, love, hopes and dreams of a young woman common to most of the young people but made different by the way she chose to express it - Poetry.

The Torrent from My Soul is sometimes a search for bliss. Sometimes, letting-go of heart-breaks. Sometimes, acceptance of changes. Sometimes, a quest for true love and sometimes love itself...

The Torrent from My Soul is yet sometimes not a torrent, but a stagnant pond, where when you look in, you can see the reflections of a born dreamer or when you toss a pebble, you can see the ripples that ebb. Though not essentially pessimistic, it doesn’t hide the fact that there have been intense loneliness and a quest for happiness in the poet’s life as a young adult.

Through this collection of poignant poems, the poet intends to tell the lonely ones, that they are not alone. And to the grieving, that she understands them. In every wounded word penned in the pages, there’s wistfulness. The Torrent from My Soul is a book that most people can relate to as a journey they themselves went through at some point of time in their life.

Poems of A Born Dreamer